Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (91 page)

Some Bordelais openly admitted preferring to surrender to the British than to the Montagne. Committed by treaties to crush every manifestation of republicanism and democracy, aristocratic Britain waged unrelenting war on the Republic. Wherever the British appeared, as afterward in Toulon and Corsica, republicanism and democracy were outlawed and royalty reinstated. On 27 August, the British fleet, carrying many émigrés, seized Toulon in collusion with local elements. Toulon’s populace duly acclaimed Louis XVII France’s rightful monarch and reverted to the old order. As hunger gripped Bordeaux, the artisans and small shopkeepers of the city’s National Club increasingly rallied behind the Montagne. Finally, on 17 September, huge sansculotte crowds gathered and assailed Bordeaux’s city hall, overthrowing the Brissotin municipality. On 28 September, Héraut de Sechelles, speaking for the Comité de Salut Public, informed the Convention that all resistance had now ended in Bordeaux.
⁹⁶

The twenty-five Bordeaux sections opposing the Montagne, their population disarmed, had been reunited with the four supporting the “true Jacobins.” The
commission populaire
was suppressed, the Commune fully purged. More than three hundred local leading Brissotins, the Convention heard, were already behind bars. The Jacobins being the only club still permitted, all the rest including the crypto-royalist Club of the Young Men, had been suppressed.
⁹⁷
A forced subvention would be levied on the rich to indemnify wounded sansculotte victims. On 27 September, public obsequies for Marat were held with dozens of musicians converging from surrounding churches on Bordeaux’s magnificent church of Saint-Dominique, where a requiem mass was performed and a rousing oration (sent from Paris) read to the multitude. The people’s virtue was infinitely extolled, the “Marseillaise” sung, and the manifestos and edicts of the Brissotin
commission populaire
burned.
⁹⁸
Prostitutes and ladies too elegantly dressed began to be harassed in the streets.

Figure 13.
The Contrast, 1793; Which is Best?
Contrasting “British” loyalty, religion, and morality with “French” atheism, perjury, and rebellion. Print made by Thomas Rowlandson, 1792. © The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

As it emerged that the Montagne would triumph, it became equally manifest that repression would intensify. Those likeliest to be targeted were in the first place intellectuals, journalists, and
hommes de lettres
. Aristocrats and priests followed and, after them, at a lower level of persecution, bakers, grocers, and prostitutes. Much as affluence and finery were now suspect, so “education above the ordinary level” came to be
viewed as redolent of aristocratic attitudes and disdain for the artisan. The kind of virtue that honors humanity, proclaimed the new regime, was that of the ordinary person whose principles are presented “with the simplicity appropriate to them, and without adornment.”
⁹⁹
For Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, it was never a priority to target aristocrats as such. But during the summer of 1793, elimination of nobles from public service and the military became a recurrent demand of those surrounding Hébert.
¹⁰⁰
Calls to eliminate nobles from civil and military posts, already heard in July before Toulon surrendered, were heightened by allegations that Toulon’s artisan sections yielded to the British after being
brissotisé
by aristocratic naval captains.
¹⁰¹
The cry went up: “Remove all nobles, proscribe this impious race.” Had not Marat urged the liquidation of “all the
coquins
”? Spurred on by Hébert, now among the club’s most active speakers, the campaign fired up much of the Jacobin rank and file. On 26 November, the Jacobins authorized a general scrutiny of their own membership to eradicate ex-nobles (and Jacobin priests like Coupé resisting de-Christianization), the commission entrusted with conducting this purge headed by Hébert and Robespierre.

Montagnard Rousseauiste anti-intellectualism surged so strongly it sometimes approached total repudiation of reading, learning, and higher instruction. At one point, the Convention found it necessary to remind the Comité de l’Instruction Publique that newspapers were still needed, and that certain section bosses were carrying anti-intellectualism too far, construing Rousseau to mean that the people “should be ignorant in order to be happy,” even urging them to burn books. Chaumette, chief procurator of the Paris Commune since August 1792 and, from 31 October, president of the Commune, emerged as a key figure in the ideological push of late 1793 to inculcate into the citizenry love for, and practice of, the virtues. An uncompromising pursuer of Brissotins, royalists, and modérés, and a fervent de-Christianizer, as well as persecutor of prostitutes, he shared Rousseau’s view that woman’s place is in the home. Persuaded the Revolution had encouraged excessive individual freedom, Chaumette agreed with Robespierre that virtue is less a matter of reason than something society imposes uncompromisingly. Enforcing the “ordinary,” he explained, requires continual efforts to unmask feigned ordinariness. He had a method for spotting “men to whom certificates of
civisme
should be refused.”
¹⁰²
“Suspicious” individuals were identified by small signs. Besides those associating with known former nobles and priests, it was essential to guard
against harder-to-spot dubious types adjusting their language and behavior to circumstances, often spreading bad news with a faked show of displeasure. Reprehensible types were especially given away, he stressed, by their opposing the common view: anyone criticizing the common opinion in popular assemblies was automatically suspect.
¹⁰³
Every town received instructions as to how to ferret out such “suspects.” The société populaire of Louhans in the department of Saône-et-Loire, in an address to the Convention of early September, pledged to wage unremitting war on “l’égoisme, le modérantisme et le fédéralisme,” code words for democratic republicans. Not enough “foes of the people” were being captured and executed. Chalon-sur-Saône’s sansculottes were continually alert, the Convention was assured, to detect modérantisme and knew how to spot the Revolution’s concealed enemies. They wanted a roving revolutionary militia in their area, headed by a popular tribune, to help liquidate “all the vampires and serpents in human form.”
¹⁰⁴

If no political party in the modern sense, the Brissotins represented more than a mere faction pursuing power or personal goals. Montagnard rhetoric has often led modern historians to suppose they really adhered to modérantisme or fédéralisme. They have sometimes been styled “the Revolution’s right wing,” the “party of the businessmen and merchants.”
¹⁰⁵
But if more tolerant of different views than their Montagnard opponents, and defenders of economic and personal freedom, they were not liberals or moderates. Rather, they were the first to envisage tackling economic inequality and attempting to create a fairer society by constitutional, legal, and nonviolent means, especially tax and inheritance laws combined with financial assistance for society’s weakest. The Revolution’s first republicans, they were also far more genuine republicans and democrats than the Montagne, and the real framers of both versions of the Declaration of Rights of 1789 and 1793. They were, in fact, the founders of the modern human rights tradition, black emancipation, women’s rights, and modern representative democracy, though some Montagards, it must be remembered, like Desmoulins, Romme, and Cloots, were sincere democratic republicans too. Prime defenders of the Revolution’s core values, Brissotins and Dantonists formed the essential link connecting the Revolution to the Enlightenment in both its eighteenth-century and modern contemporary sense, especially Enlightenment in its radical, secular, democratic form, and thus the first organized champions of democratic, rights-based, secular modernity.

CHAPTER 18

De-Christianization

(1793–94)

Reducing and marginalizing religious authority and the public role of religion and religious values was always central to the outlook and writings of the radical philosophes. Equally, curtailing religious authority was in every way central to the Revolution of Mirabeau, Sieyès, Barnave, Condorcet, and Brissot. But was a gradual process of diminishing and degrading ecclesiastical sway in politics, education, culture, daily life, and the economy without stoking civil strife a feasible goal? By the time the Republic was proclaimed in September 1792, relations between church and state in France had hugely deteriorated since 1789. Even so, as yet there were no physical attacks on churches, active persecution of clergy, or organized destruction of images and cult objects, nothing resembling a drive to expunge every reminder of traditional worship and extirpate from sight Christian piety and the routines of daily life.

Following the pope’s public repudiation of the Rights of Man and the Revolution, many French priests who had earlier sworn their loyalty to the Constitution of 1791 formally retracted. Retractions, frequent during the winter of 1791–92, began seriously to alarm the revolutionary leadership. The trend added to the ideological and political strife plaguing France by reinforcing and emboldening the refractory clergy and émigrés, and further embittering the quarrel between the two warring halves of the French Church.
¹
By denouncing the constitutional clergy as “rebels” and “schismatics,” and disposing many people in towns and villages throughout France against them, the ultraroyalist press and refractory priests both widened the ecclesiastical rift and aggravated the Revolution’s and the country’s inherent instability. Ultraroyalist opinion, buoyed by Catholic insurgency in the west and parts of the south, Alsace, and Belgium, clashed directly and relentlessly with Feuillant
constitutional monarchism, and the constitutional Church scarcely less than with democratic republicanism and populist authoritarian Jacobinism.

By mid-1791, the Legislative Assembly was dangerously trapped between freedom of conscience and cult on one side and containing the growing anger, divisiveness, and ferocity of religious conflict, as well as the stern admonitions of religious authority opposing the Revolution, on the other.
²
Growing antagonism between legislature and religious tradition fomented a battle of loyalties from which there was no easy exit. More and more deputies, including not just veteran anticlericals but also zealous constitutional priests like Fauchet, Grégoire, and the austere egalitarian disciple of Mably, Jacques-Marie Coupé, demanded ever tougher measures against opposition-minded, obstreperous refractory clergy, while yet professing to safeguard the Revolution’s ceaselessly avowed commitments to toleration, religious liberty, and freedom of expression. In June 1791, the unbending Coupé personally supervised closure of the Catholic seminary at Noyon because it remained a hotbed of refractory obstructionism.
³
This campaign of intensifying pressure against obdurate réfractoires provoked loud complaints of “fanaticism” and hypocrisy from the French royalist-Catholic press. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Raynal, admonished
L’Ami du Roi
in October 1791, had called the Church “fanatical” and intolerant, a persecutor of religious and nonreligious minorities. Yet, now the minority being persecuted was the refractory clergy itself, those the “party of philosophy” called “fanatics.” Since turning their own doctrine into “a kind of religion,” and conquering France, the philosophes and their disciples had themselves become France’s
persécuteurs.
“What a paradox!”
⁴
Much of France was indeed appalled and outraged. Yet, for all the refractory clergy’s loud protests over the alleged “persecution,” real persecution and oppression were yet to begin.