Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (99 page)

Racine and Corneille, observed the newly established and for the moment extremely cautious thrice-monthly journal
La Décade philosophique
, were still considered “great dramatists” but were also officially faulted for promoting gallantry, royalty, and nobility in excessively “beautiful verse.” Voltaire had avoided “these great defects,” putting la philosophie onstage and teaching audiences to scorn credulity and
fanaticism. But where, until 1793, the revolutionary theater accommodated divergent styles, points of view, and frivolity, now everyone had to defer to Rousseau’s strictures.
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Playwrights must promote virtue, principally offering tragedies representing tyranny overthrown by popular heroes, themes supposedly best presented draped in classical styles and themes.
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The “tout populaire” remained the sole criterion in theory, but increasingly the regime alone spoke for “the people’s collective and indivisible will.” During the Laya affair, early in 1793, the Montagne had found that censuring the theater by authority from above in a revolutionary context creates a constant friction between audience preference and political direction by the leadership. Control over the theaters tightened inexorably but continued, if more subtly now, to clash with the public. On 23 November, when Gilbert Romme urged the Convention to direct the Comité d’Instruction Publique more closely to vet plays proposed for staging, choosing those “most worthy for performance,” another deputy, Antoine-Christophe Merlin de Thionville (1762–1833), objected that it was “the people,” surely, who had made the Revolution and “who should judge what was staged.” Was Merlin, retorted Romme, then willing to see plays like Laya’s
Amis des Lois
and
Pamela
performed simply because audiences desired to see them? Of course not, hastily retracted Merlin.
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After the premiere of
La Veuve du républicain
(Widow of the republican) at the Paris Théâtre of the Rue Favart, the next day, various citizens recommended it for “all the theatres of the Republic.” This prompted the Convention to ask the Comité d’Instruction Publique to investigate whether it was actually “suitable.”
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On 21 November 1793, Robespierre himself assured the Jacobins he had no sympathy for the theater’s leading ladies, “princesses” lately fallen foul of Pache’s and Hébert’s cleanup of the Paris theaters. He backed the drive to stop actresses from representing anything frivolous or erotically suggestive.
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From autumn 1793, the entire French theater world became geared to instilling the values of Montagnard virtue, revolving around work and family, including woman’s awareness of her subordinate place.
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All the Paris theater troupes, the Comité de Salut Public ruled, must consult and together draw up the capital’s repertoire of plays, with final decisions endorsed by the Commune.
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The gradual shift to mandatory prior submission of scripts for censorship was not completed by the Comité d’Instruction Publique until mid-March 1794. After that, so uniformly did the theater present only officially sanctioned values, affirmed one commentator with apparent pride
in June 1794, that “could Rousseau return and watch our revolutionary plays,” exalting only virtue, filial piety, and hard labor, he “would not have complained of the immorality of our theatres” as he did of those in his time. Pre-1789 playwrights had been “vains, vils esclaves des grands,” corrupting audiences by converting the stage into theater “en boudoir.” All that was now replaced with unyielding Spartan austerity, Cato, Brutus, and “heroic deaths of martyrs of liberty” setting the tone. Under the Montagne, even the austerest matron could bring unmarried daughters to the theater without the least apprehension.
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Jacobin ideology and culture under Robespierre was an obsessive Rousseauiste moral puritanism steeped in authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and xenophobia. Repudiating free expression and basic human rights and democracy, Robespierristes replaced core revolutionary values with an unrelenting emphasis on the need to purify and equalize the people’s
moeurs
(morals and customs). Everyone remaining in public life had to bend to this. Lanthenas, a publicist earlier prominent in the campaign for unrestricted press freedom, democracy, and equality in education, having narrowly escaped imprisonment in June, publicly reversed his own former plea for unrestricted liberty of expression of 1791 in his
Bases fondmentales de l’instruction publique
(1793). Society would be “perpetually unhappy,” he now contended, if it did not establish effective means for protecting citizens “from libels and calumny.” Imposing virtue thorough discipline and policing morals matters more than freedom of expression. Under the new dispensation, the Convention must have the power to suppress writings and censure everyone in any way compromising true republican attitudes or proper morals.
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Thus, while the stage came increasingly under what
La Décade philosophique
called “active surveillance,” supposedly emanating from below, from the people, in reality, control emanated from above but sometimes rather inconsistently. In a group tyranny operated by a precarious coalition, occasional disarray among the censoring agents was inevitable. A comic opera written by Léonard Bourdon ridiculing Catholic rites, entitled
Le Tombeau des Imposteurs et l’ inauguration du temple de la vérité
, about to be performed in Paris, was banned by executive order signed by Robespierre personally on 22 December, along with other productions apt to encourage abuse of the “theatre in favor of the Revolution’s enemies,” despite both Hébertistes and Commune wanting it performed. Ideologically Hébertiste in tone, Robespierre banned it chiefly owing to the opera’s fiercely irreligious content but also its unfortunate title,
Le
Tombeau des Imposteurs
, which could readily be construed by “the malicious” as alluding to himself and the Montagne.
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In October 1793, David, principal organizer of the new regime in the arts, completed his famous painting of “the murdered Marat” on his deathbed, commissioned by the Convention in whose assembly hall the painting was to hang alongside his painting of the assassinated Lepeletier. This is the most memorable of the republican paintings painted during the Terror (today in Brussels); David first displayed it in his rooms at the Palais National (i.e., the Louvre). Even before 1789, David and other artists had been lodged in the palace together with the royal art collection. Subsequently, David seems to have lent it to his section assembly, the Museum, to feature it in a “fête patriotique” venerating Marat that all the Paris sections planned to participate in on 25 October.
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In the autumn of 1793, everywhere in revolutionary France, “patriotic” festivities commemorated France’s supposedly greatest man amid great pomp and rousing music, with elaborate flower arrangements and garlands surrounding the numerous busts of Marat. Splendid festivities were also held honoring the murdered Lepeletier, Lazowski, and Marie-Joseph Chalier, the “Marat of Lyon,” likewise now venerated in Paris “with the greatest pomp.” All sections participated in a grand cortege on 20 December that wound its way from the Place de la Bastille to the Convention, with contingents from the sociétés populaires singing hymns, glorifying the “great” Chalier, including (with consummate unconscious irony) the line “Jurons de purger la terre de la liberté de tous les scélerats” (Let us swear to purge the land of liberty of all its rascals).
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To eliminate aristocratic elitism from the fine arts and bring public artistic expression more firmly under “popular control,” the Convention replaced the suppressed Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture with the Commune Générale des Arts, based on equality and patriotism. Any artist could belong provided he passed scrutiny designed to sift “all the old aristocratic
levain
” from the nation’s art community. Under elaborate rules established in November 1793, the new steering body, the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, presided with a firm hand over painting, sculpture, and architecture, educating the public and administering the nation’s prize competitions. Organized as an assembly of equals, the Société convened from February 1794 in the Louvre where, since the first anniversary of the 10 August insurrection, the former royal art collection was now open as a public museum, displaying paintings from the past (often religious paintings) but excluding works by living artists.
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The Société’s meetings, held three times every ten days, were open to the public. Reports of its meetings and prize contests appeared in its
Journal de la Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts séante au Louvre
, edited by the classicizing architect Athanse Détournelle. Fixing the themes and judging exhibits, the Société’s decisions were reached by a grand jury of fifty exercising general oversight over the nation’s art and connoisseurship, a body of artists and critics, presided over by Barère, that included discriminating “art lovers” from the Comité d’Instruction Publique such as Hébert, Ronsin, and Pache.

Art for the people meant new themes publicly projected in ideological terms, scrupulously replacing aristocratic, erotic, and overly decorative topics with sober, classicizing, revolutionary earnestness. Besides shaping young careers and choosing themes for artistic endeavor, the new procedures aimed at replacing the personal influence and patronage typical of the ancien régime with a new collective artistic culture. Large commissions became public events. Works submitted for national prizes, after five days of public display in the Louvre, were assigned to small, specialized juries, drawn from the fifty, that delivered their verdicts at public gatherings, and awarded the prizes. The first grand theme chosen for the annual painting competition was the corpse of Caesar’s assassin, Brutus, carried back to Rome after his death in combat. No entry was judged good enough for first prize, but a pupil of David’s, Hariette, received the
prix d’encouragement
or second prize. David, a leading protagonist of the Republic’s cult of Brutus, ensured that both the art scene and the great public parades he was entrusted with organizing regularly featured Roman republican themes, insignia, emblems, and medallions. The first annual architecture prize, awarded for designing a barracks for six hundred cavalry troopers, was conferred on the architect Protin. After the société’s first collective annual prize-giving ceremony, held on 10 February 1794, the prizewinners, carrying their designs, appeared together with the grand jury before the Convention to loud acclaim.
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Among the artists disciplined during the Terror for focusing on amorous instead of republican topics was Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845). He was denounced before the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts in April 1794, shortly before the Société announced a painting competition to commemorate the triumph of Marat, which had taken place exactly a year before. Boilly entered the competition, it appears, as a way of making amends with the regime. The result was his painting
The Triumph of Marat
(
figure 11
), today in Lille, one of the best-known pictures painted in France during the Terror. Painting was expected to
present an imposing backdrop to the revolutionary public sphere. But in this regard sculpture carried still greater prestige. The most grandiose planned undertaking in the world of art projected during these months was extensively debated but never materialized. The Convention had decided, in August 1793, to erect four major triumphal public statues in bronze and marble representing key revolutionary themes at strategic points in the capital.

The four projected monuments were
Nature Regenerated
, symbolizing Rousseau’s doctrines, intended to stand on the Bastille’s ruins; an Arc de Triomphe, commemorating 6 October 1789, for the Boulevard des Italiens; the figure of La Liberté to replace the smashed equestrian statue of Louis XV inaugurated in 1763, demolished by the mob on 11 August 1792 to stand near the guillotine on the Place de la Révolution; and a vast monument impressively commemorating the crushing of fédéralisme. Repeatedly delayed until finally halted by Thermidor, the competition for the commissions for the triumphal statues was scheduled to last three months, with an extra
décade
for artists dwelling outside Paris, but only commenced on 30 April 1794. Models were to be exhibited in the Convention hall and then displayed in the Hall of Laocoön for judgment by the
jury des arts
. Besides the four prizewinners, three sculptors coming highest below them were also expected to be publicly honored and subsequently chosen by the Société’s committee for lesser commissions for public monuments.
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The Terror in the Provinces

In Paris, until late in the Terror nearly all executions took place in the Place de la Révolution where the king was guillotined. Only Bailly’s execution on 12 November occurred on the Champ de Mars, the site of the massacre he had perpetrated. During the Terror’s last weeks, by contrast, much of the slaughter shifted to Paris’s East End. As the Terror intensified, it also extended its grip over several (but not most) provincial centers. “Representative of the people” Joseph Lebon (1765–95), a pathological ex-Oratorian and former constitutional parish priest who renounced the priesthood after the 1792 August revolution, presided at Arras. First mayor and then Convention deputy for the town, he was a particular friend of Robespierre.
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Filling the prisons with traitors, Lebon erected his guillotine in the main square, opposite the town theater, a spot plainly visible from the Robespierre family house. A fanatical
de-Christianizer, he had a total of 298 men and ninety-three women guillotined in Arras, besides others executed in Lille and neighboring towns.
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At Marseille, the dreaded Tribunal Révolutionnaire, headed by Fréron and the notoriously corrupt officer Paul-François Barras (1755–1829), tried 975 suspects between August 1793 and April 1794, convicting 500 traitors, of whom 289 were executed.
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The landowner and former lawyer Marie-Joseph Lequinio, fresh from vandalizing the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, presided at Rochefort. Lequinio’s local Terror dispatched naval officers and officials, besides dozens of Vendéean rebels and priests, and a Brissotin Convention deputy for Lower Charente, Gustave Duchazeu, guillotined for publishing writings against the “unity and indivisibility of the Republic.”
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It was “the rich class,” reported Lequinio, that furnished all the royalists, modérantistes, and the fédéralistes imprisoned at Rochefort, and the sansculottes alone on whom the regime could count to fight “counterrevolutionary” influence, albeit the people needed to be continually “enlightened regarding their true interests” by Jacobins like himself.
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