Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (2 page)

Acknowledgments

In writing any work of scholarship, one incurs a large number of debts. For vigorously debating the themes of this book with me, I would like especially to thank Peter Campbell, Aurelian Craiutu, David Bell, Jeremy Popkin, Ouzi Elyada, Harvey Chisick, Steven Lukes, Nadia Urbinati, David Bates, Pasquale Pasquino, Bill Doyle, Helena Rosenblatt, Bill Sewell, and Keith Michael Baker. For unflagging and invaluable help with the bibliography, finding eighteenth-century texts, obtaining the illustrations, and checking details, my thanks are due especially to Maria Tuya, Terrie Bramley, and Sarah Rich. I was hugely helped at the last stage also by my copy editor at Princeton University Press, Cathy Slovensky. In addition, a special debt of gratitude is owed by me to the library staff at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and to the Institute itself for being supportive in every respect and in every way an optimal place to reflect on historical research and debate, and to think and write to the best of one’s ability.

Finally, for immense and unstinting assistance throughout with editing, checking, and helping to finalize the text (as well as putting up uncomplainingly with my endless talk about the Revolution and its personalities in recent years), it is a particular pleasure to add that I owe a very great deal, more than I can possibly say, to my wife, Annette Munt.

Revolutionary Ideas

Prologue

On November 18, 1792, more than one hundred British, Americans, and Irish in Paris gathered at White’s Hotel, also known as the British Club, to celebrate the achievements of the French Revolution. While in general British opinion, encouraged by the London government and most clergy, remained intensely hostile to the Revolution, much of the intellectual and literary elite of Britain, the United States, and Ireland was immensely, even ecstatically, enthusiastic about those achievements and determined to align with the Revolution. Although the later renowned feminist Mary Wollstonecraft only arrived at White’s shortly afterward—and Coleridge, during the 1790s, another fervent supporter of the new revolutionary ideology, was absent—those attending formed an impressive group. Present were Tom Paine, author of the
Rights of Man
(1791); the American radical and poet Joel Barlow; several other poets, including Helen Maria Williams, Robert Merry, and possibly Wordsworth;
¹
the Unitarian minister and democrat David Williams, author of the
Letters on Political Liberty
(1782); a former member of Parliament for Colchester, Sir Robert Smyth; the Scots colonel John Oswald; the American colonel Eleazar Oswald; and the Irish lord Edward Fitzgerald. It was a sharp reminder that, leaving aside Gibbon and Edmund Burke, distinguished and politically aware British, American, and Irish intellectuals, poets, and authors, like their German and Dutch counterparts at that time, mostly endorsed and applauded the Revolution.

The president of the British Club in Paris at the time was John Hurford Stone (1763–1818), a former London coal merchant originally from Somerset, and a friend of such leading British democratic reformers as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price (both great enthusiasts for the French Revolution). Hurford Stone had settled in Paris where he owned a chemical works and a printing press with which he produced materialist and antitheological texts, including those of Paine and Barlow. He was a close ally of both Paine and Barlow, the latter a Yale graduate, some editions of whose vast American epic,
The Vision
of Columbus
, were published on Stone’s press in Paris. Paine and Barlow believed the American Revolution had not gone far enough and that far more was needed if democracy and emancipation were to be genuinely achieved in the United States. Both men, like Stone and the others, were not only directly involved in French Revolution politics but at that stage hoped that the United States and Britain, as well as Continental Europe—indeed, the entire world—would learn and borrow much from the French Revolution.
²

The high point of the daylong banquet on 18 November 1792, to which delegations from several other nations were also invited, was sixteen toasts: the first, to the French Republic embodying the Rights of Man (here the trumpets of the German band played the famous revolutionary tune “Ça Ira”); the second, to the armies of France (“may the example of her citizen soldiers be followed by all enslaved nations until all tyranny and all tyrants are destroyed”; the German band played the recently composed “Marseillaise,” soon to be proclaimed the Republic’s official national anthem); the third, to the achievements of the French National Convention; and the fourth, to the coming constitutional Convention of Britain and Ireland. Here came a hint of the club’s subversive intent, as it agreed not just that Ireland had been unjustly “enslaved” by England but that Britain too needed a democratic revolution akin to that in France.

The fifth toast was raised to the perpetual union of the peoples of Britain, France, America, and the Netherlands: “may these soon bring other emancipated nations into their democratic alliance”; the sixth, to the prompt abolition in Britain of “all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions.” This toast was proposed by Sir Robert Smyth (1744–1802), former MP for Colchester, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763–98), a dashing Irish noble and friend of Paine who held the rank of major in the British army and later became a principal plotter in the United Irishmen Conspiracy of 1796–98. Fitzgerald’s and Smyth’s total repudiation of aristocracy was greeted with outrage in England when reported in the papers soon afterward, leading to the former being cashiered from the British army and the latter being firmly ostracized.
³
On the eve of the Irish uprising of 1798 (which was vigorously suppressed amid terrible slaughter), Fitzgerald was killed in a fray with British officers who broke into his Dublin lodgings to arrest him.

The seventh toast was “To the ladies of Britain and Ireland” and especially those distinguished by their writings supporting the French Revolution, notably Charlotte Smith, authoress of
Desmond
(1792),
⁴
a recently published pro-Revolution novel, and Helen Maria Williams. Half Scottish and half Welsh, Williams was Hurford Stone’s lover and with him presided over the Paris British Club, in effect a salon where British and American radicals like Paine, Barlow, and Eleazar Oswald conferred and met with members of the Brissot circle, their French allies, who then constituted the republican leadership of the Revolution. In Paris since July 1790, Williams had become internationally known for her volumes of poems and essays,
Letters from France
(1790). These made her, after Paine, possibly the single most important writer in English supporting the Revolution. For this she was virulently denounced in Britain as an unashamed agitator and democrat who also violated conventional female propriety.

Like the French feminist Olympe de Gouges, Helen Maria Williams (1762–1827) was strongly committed to democracy and black emancipation, as well as women’s rights. Like Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other outstanding feminists of the Revolution such as Etta Palm d’Aelders—and indeed nearly all the principled, high-minded, and aware writers, intellectuals, and commentators in France, Germany, Holland, and Britain—she was passionately opposed to Robespierre and his herald, Marat. Like Paine, Barlow, Hurford Stone, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, she viewed Robespierre not as the culmination but as the undoing and ruin of the Revolution. This attitude landed her (as well as Paine and Palm) in prison during the Terror, and led to Olympe de Gouges, the most outspoken of those demanding woman’s liberation (and denouncing Robespierre as a scoundrel), being guillotined. This seventh toast constituted an inherent part of the feminist movement established by these remarkable women. So did the eighth toast: “to the women of France,” especially those bearing arms to defend liberty’s cause, such as Mademoiselles Anselme and Fernig, female officers in the entourage of the commander of the revolutionary army in Belgium who later attempted to form a female army contingent called the “Fernig corps.” Few men at the time took the idea of women’s army units seriously, but John Oswald, Scots officer, editor, and apostle for vegetarianism, strongly advocated the use of women’s contingents and made other innovative suggestions as to precisely how to form the world’s first democratic army.