Counter-revolution, too, took flight. Henceforth, revolutionary creeds were to be balanced by their opposite numbers. Burke’s
Reflections
(1790) in the English-speaking world and Goethe’s in the German world were to have lasting influence. The theocentric
Considérations
(1796) of De Maistre, who saw the Revolution as the wrath of God, were to have a long progeny, stretching through the generations to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. All of them would share Burke’s instinctive reaction against ‘the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow’.
The concept of human rights, if not invented by the French revolutionaries, was certainly given its strongest modern impetus. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen carried forward constructs contained in England’s Bill of Rights of 1689 and the fundamental declarations surrounding the independence of the USA. Battered and bruised, it survived as a lasting monument to the early idealism of the Revolution. Passed on 26 August 1789, ‘in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being’, it consisted of a Preamble, in the style of its American predecessor, and of seventeen Articles listing Mankind’s ‘natural, inalienable and sacred rights’:
I. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can only be founded on public utility.
II. The purpose of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of men. These rights are liberty, property, and safety from, and resistance to, oppression.
III. The principle of all sovereignty resides in the nation. No body of men, and no individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly therefrom.
IV. Liberty consists in the ability to do anything which does not harm others.
V. The Law can only forbid actions which are injurious to society…
VI. The Law is the expression of the General Will… It should be the same for all, whether to protect or to punish.
VII. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained except in those instances which are determined by law.
VIII. The Law should only establish punishments which are strictly necessary. No person should be punished by retrospective legislation.
IX. Every man [is] presumed innocent till found guilty…
X. No person should be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones, so long as their manifestation does not threaten public order.
XI. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of men’s most precious rights. Every citizen, therefore, can write, speak, and publish freely, saving only the need to account for abuses defined by law.
XII. A public force is required to guarantee the [above] rights. It is instituted for the benefit of all, not for the use of those to whom it is entrusted.
XIII. Public taxation is indispensable for the upkeep of the forces and the administration. It should be divided among all citizens without distinction, according to their abilities.
XIV. Citizens… have the right to approve the purposes, levels, and extent of taxation.
XV. Society has the right to hold every public servant to account.
XVI. Any society in which rights are not guaranteed nor powers separated does not have a constitution.
XVII. Property being a sacred and inviolable right, no person can be deprived of it, except by public necessity, legal process, and just compensation.
33
Social convention held that the ‘Rights of Man’ automatically subsumed the rights of women. But several bold souls, including Cordorcet, disagreed, arguing that women had simply been neglected. In due course the original Declaration was joined by new ideas, notably about human rights in the social and economic sphere. Article XXI of the revised Declaration of June 1793 stated:
Public assistance is a sacred obligation
[dette]
. Society owes subsistence to unfortunate citizens, whether in finding work for them, or in assuring the means of survival of those incapable of working.
34
Slavery was outlawed in 1794. Religious toleration was guaranteed,
[FEMME]
Naturally, the French version of human rights was greatly circumscribed by the dictatorial practices both of the Republic and of the Empire. After 1815 it continued to struggle against a strong, centralized, bureaucratic state. But its influence across Europe was far greater than the Anglo-Saxon version partly because French culture in general was more influential at this time and also because French soldiers had carried it all over the Continent in their knapsacks. Not for the first time did the agents of repression scatter the seeds of another liberation.
Geographical variations in the patterns of revolution are often missed. Paris, though dominant, was not France. In Toulon, which was occupied by an Anglo-Spanish naval force in 1793, the port and the city were the scene of bitter fighting between royalists and republicans. At Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Lyons also, extended civil wars were fought, with the Red Terror of the Jacobins being
matched by the ‘White Terror’ of 1794–5. In many areas royalist sentiment would probably have commanded majority support if only it could have been effectively organized. In the event the revolutionaries carried the day, partly through their superior and centralized military capacity and partly through the outbreak of war, which effectively tied the defence of the Revolution to the defence of France. Nowhere is this coincidence of patriotic and revolutionary fervour more evident than in the
Chant de Guerre de l’Armée du Rhin
(1792), the ‘Battle-Song of the Army of the Rhine’ alias
La Marseillaise
, which was destined, eighty years later, to become the national anthem of the French Republic,
[STRASSBURG]
The concept of the modern state, in the sense of a centralized administration applying common laws uniformly to all citizens over the whole territory, received an enormous boost. Its elements had been growing for centuries, and not only in France. But ferocious levelling by the Jacobins and the energetic dictatorship of the Empire made greater inroads into French particularism in twenty years than absolute government had done in so many decades. What is more, by sweeping aside the entire museum of antiquated state structures in Europe, from the Holy Roman Empire to the Republic of Venice, the revolutionary armies cleared much of the ground for the administrative reforms of the nineteenth century. Again, nationalism was not created whole by the French Revolution (see Chapter X); but both the ideology of the nation and the consciousness of nationality were immensely strengthened in all those countries where the old order was overturned.
Militarism—the belief that military force is a valid and effective instrument of policy—inevitably gained ground. Eighteenth-century warfare possessed rather limited objectives; and the greatest of its practitioners won more territory through diplomacy than on the battlefield. The French revolutionary armies, in contrast, came together after 1792 at a juncture when mass conscript armies, a war economy, and the enthusiasm of a nation in arms, could deliver results on a completely different scale. Although their eventual defeat may also have demonstrated the limitations of militarism, their seemingly invincible progress for almost a quarter of a century showed how much war could accomplish. This was the legacy of Lazare Carnot (1753–1823), the military engineer and administrator who was hailed the ‘organizer of victory’ under the Committees of Public Safety, the Directory, the Empire, and above all, Bonaparte. ‘War is a violent condition,’ wrote Carnot; ‘one should make it
à l’outrance
or go home.’
Revolutionary War, 1792–1815
The prospect that revolution would provoke first civil and then international war was present from the start. Despite the formal renunciation of wars of conquest by France’s Constituent Assembly in May 1790, there was not a monarch who could listen in comfort to the cries of ‘Mort aux Tyrans’, ‘Death to the Tyrants’, which echoed ever more loudly from the streets of Paris. Equally, there was not a revolutionary who slept easily amidst the hostile plots of the
émigrés
and the
monarchists. The wilful flaunting of authority created a general climate of unease. In 1791 the Pope openly condemned the Revolution. The challenge was taken up on the one hand by the Girondin J.-P. Brissot, who called for a people’s crusade against ‘the despots’, and on the other by the Emperor Leopold, Marie Antoinette’s brother, who, after meeting the Prussian and Saxon monarchs at Pillnitz, called for a league of princes ‘to restore the honour of his Most Christian Majesty’.
FEMME
O
LYMPE DE GOUGES
(1748–93). a butcher’s daughter from Montauban, came to Paris as a young widow. Born Marie Gauzes, she refused to accept her married name, and invented her pen-name when she aspired to a literary career. She was writing plays and political pamphlets from the earliest days of the Revolution. Incensed by the exclusion of women from the Constitutional Assembly, she published
Les Droits de la Femme et du Citoyen
(1791) as a counterblast to the Rights of Man:
I. Woman is born free, and remains equal to man in rights …
II. The aim of all political associations is to preserve the natural and inalien able rights of Woman and Man. These are: liberty, ownership, safety, and resistance to oppression.
III. The principle of sovereignty resides in essence in the Nation, which is nothing other than the conjunction of Woman and Man.
IV. … The exercise of Woman’s natural rights has no limit other than the tyranny of Man’s opposing them.
V. The laws of nature and reason forbid all actions harmful to society …
VI. The law must be the expression of the General Will; all citizens, female and male, should concur in its formation. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, must be equally eligible for all honours, positions, and posts … with no distinction other than those of their virtues and talents.
VII. … Women obey the rigours of the law as men do.
VIII. No one may be punished except by virtue of a law which was promulgated prior to the crime, and which is applicable to women.
IX. Any woman found guilty will be dealt with in the full rigour of the law.
X. No one should be persecuted for fundamental opinions. Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.
XI. … Any citizen may freely say ‘I am the mother of your child’ without any barbarous prejudice forcing her to hide the truth.
XII. The guarantee of women’s rights entails absolute service …
XIII. The contributions of Woman and Man to the upkeep of public services are equal.
XIV. Female and male citizens have the same right to ascertain the need for taxes.
XV. All women, united by their contributions with all men, have the right to demand an account of their administration from all public officials.
XVI. Any society in which rights are not guaranteed, and powers not separated, has no constitution.
XVII. Property is shared or divided equally by both sexes …
1
This text, the founding charter of feminism, remained little more than a curiosity. After publicly daring to oppose Robespierre’s Terror, its author met the guillotine.
Anne-Josèphe Thérouingue de Méricourt (1758—1817), ‘the Amazon of Liberty’, came to Paris from Liège to advocate a more militant brand of feminism. She held that women should fight for the Revolution, to which end she organized a ferocious legion of female militia. ‘Needles and spindles’, she wrote in
Les Françaises devenues libres
(1791), ‘are not the only weapons which we know how to handle.’
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) came to Paris from London, where in her
Vindication of the Rights of Man
(1791) she had attacked Burke’s
Reflections
. Her
Vindication of the Rights of Women
(1792) enlarged on the rationalist position of Olympe de Gouges. She was married to the political writer William Godwin, and died giving birth to a daughter who grew up to be the wife of the poet Shelley.
The views of these radical feminist pioneers evoked little sympathy in leading revolutionary circles. Rousseau, who had set the tone, proposed a gender role combining the self-denying heroism of Roman matrons with a femininity that would encourage men to be more manly. The likes of de Gouges, Thérouangue de Méricourt, Mme Roland, Charlotte Corday, or Cécile Renaud no more impressed Robespierre than the March of the Women to Versailles had impressed the King. In June 1793, women were expressly excluded from citizenship.
2
The rulers of Russia, Austria, Sweden, Prussia, Saxony, and Spain were all in favour of active intervention. Their plans were strongly encouraged by Catherine the Great, who expressed the view that ‘the affairs of France were the concern of all crowned heads’. Their ringleader, Gustavus III, masterminded the ill-starred flight to Varennes. He was already receiving subsidies from Russia when he was assassinated at a masked ball in Stockholm on 16 March 1792. Yet their greatest obstacle lay in the ambiguous position of Louis XVI, whose public pronouncements contradicted his secret correspondence, and who was simultaneously opposing and co-operating with the Revolution. In the event, the divided counsels of Louis’s would-be rescuers caused sufficient delay for the revolutionaries to take the initiative into their own hands. In April 1792, with the King’s acquiescence, they declared war on Austria and Prussia,
[STRASSBURG]
The descent into war must be traced to one of the most dire decisions of Louis XVI’s
politique du pire
. In the spring of 1792 it so happened that the court party and the extreme radicals were both bending the King’s ear in favour of war. The Queen wanted war so that the Revolution could be defeated by her brother’s international
rescue force. The radicals wanted war so that the Brissotin faction might exploit a military triumph. So Louis took them at their word, spurning the advice both of his more moderate Girondin ministers and of the Jacobins. On 20 April 1792 ill-prepared French troops were ordered to cross the frontier and to invade the Austrian Netherlands. The results of Louis’s gamble were not as any of its promoters had hoped. There was no immediate military confrontation. The Queen’s rescue force was slow to materialize. The Brissot faction did not gain any lasting advantage, being overtaken during the summer by the Jacobins. Europe gradually lost all hope of a peaceful settlement. The King himself lost all credibility, his deposition was in progress before the first major battle took place at Valmy in September.