Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (4 page)

How and why Calonne’s abortive reform program, designed to remodel the ancien régime monarchy on the basis of new taxes, including a universal land tax, while fully accommodating the existing elites, turned into a broad-based campaign to emasculate the Crown, suppress all the country’s pre-1789 institutions and obliterate nobility, clergy, and the noblesse de robe (judicial aristocracy), has never been adequately explained, and cannot be in terms of financial factors or the wider economic context. About this there is a remarkable consensus. Even those stressing the financial crisis most concur that in itself the king’s financial predicament does little to dispel what some historians, in evident frustration, have called the “mystery” of the Revolution’s origins and subsequent course.
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“Why did an apparently traditional fiscal crisis engender the massive transformation of an entire social order?”
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Today scholars abandoning economic interest—class, class struggle, and economically defined social groups—as the key to unraveling the Revolution often seek a more sociocultural form of explanation, basing their interpretation on changes in cultural context, identifying elaborate networks and changing patterns of human relationships, and especially examining “fields of discourse,” along with their attached ceremonies and symbols. This intense preoccupation with “discourse” has proved extremely valuable in providing background, and assumes several forms. One useful approach invokes “an enlarged and renovated public sphere of sociability and debate” that created a wider arena of action for “professionals.”
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This line of investigation builds on what we know of the expansion of elites in pre-1789 France and locates the Revolution’s chief motor in a mix of lawyers, medical men, and other professionals closely tied through their occupations to the urban market and other social groups. There was, undeniably, a strikingly high proportion of lawyers, more than three hundred in the National Assembly in 1789 and subsequently.

But however helpful such research is, it does no more than enrich the background: there is little sign lawyers played a particularly significant role in forging the democratic Revolution prior to Robespierre’s takeover. Rather, as one would perhaps expect, lawyers and other professionals mostly preferred to stick to existing norms and were conspicuously absent among the orators, publicists, editors, and political
leaders dominating the committees and shaping revolutionary legislation before 1793. If focusing on “professionals” tells us little about the main actors in the Revolution, even more unhelpful is focusing on the attitudes of entrepreneurs and men of business. In the capital, as in the great ports—Bordeaux, Nantes, Marseilles, and Saint-Malo—merchants and bankers mostly avoided involvement with the Revolution, remaining as politically neutral as possible. Thus, a wide variety of different social groups subscribed to pro-Revolution newspapers from 1789, but the subscription lists show that the proportion of their regular readership consisting of businessmen was strikingly low compared to other groups, virtually negligible.
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Admittedly, for historians subscribing to a brand of “revisionism,” popular in the 1980s and 1990s, our apparent inability to find a “major cause” scarcely matters. Perhaps great new developments in history do not have “big” causes. Some argue that the English Revolution of the seventeenth century demonstrates that great changes can follow from relatively small and insignificant causes. Arguably, the true interpretation of the French Revolution is precisely that there is no overarching, grand interpretation, a suggestion that strongly appeals to some philosophers as well as historians.
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But the French Revolution was a rupture with the past so complete and dramatic, the scale of the departure from ancien régime society, culture, and politics so total and far-reaching, the transformation so foundational for subsequent Western and eventually also non-Western developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that arguing there was no major social structural cause—only a tableau of, in themselves, relatively minor ones—is not just unconvincing, it is not even remotely plausible.

The reconstitution of the legal, religious, educational, cultural, and political foundations of French society, along with the general emancipation of all minorities and the abolition of slavery, were interlinked, simultaneous, and comprehensive. The Revolution denied the validity of ideas, customs, institutions, or laws inherited from the past absolutely and totally. Furthermore, this undeviating repudiation and discrediting of all previously accepted values, moral codes, laws, and practices transpired with astounding speed between 1788 and 1793, despite being opposed or uncomprehendingly regarded by most of the population and even most of the National Assembly. Indeed, the transformation occured despite a lack of popular support for many key changes, such as giving equal rights to Protestants, civil divorce, suppressing the old regional high courts or parlements, emancipation of the Jews, ending
the slave trade, and abolishing the old provinces—Brittany, Normandy, Provence, Alsace, and Languedoc—with their separate identities and privileges.

A reexamination of the actual leadership of the Revolution seems called for as a way to build on the emerging sociocultural approach, and, especially, more effectively integrate social history with intellectual history. This present study attempts to establish new empirical findings by quarrying the main primary sources, above all, the amazingly detailed record of the debates in the successive French national assemblies that spoke for the Revolution, the corpus known as the
Archives Parlementaires
. Consulted together with other key records of decisions and debates, such as the discussions in the Paris city government and records of the meetings of the Jacobin Club, much of it verbatim, the debates in the legislature provide a solid basis for reconsideration. Additional light emerges from the extraordinarily rich contemporary newspaper coverage for the years down to 1793, and then again from 1795 to 1800. All this material takes on a new significance once the socioeconomic assumptions that steered research for so long are set aside, and the sociocultural approach is combined with the lessons of intellectual history.

The Revolution’s preoccupation with laying down fundamental new guidelines not only helps define its significance but also delimits its beginning and end. The Revolution was above all a process of emancipation, democratization, and fundamental renewal on the basis of human rights—ruthlessly interrupted in 1793–94 and progressively aborted in 1799–1804. The epoch-making egalitarian, libertarian, and democratic ideals of 1789 were rendered moribund, at least in terms of immediately forseeable possibilities, politics, and international relations, when the Life Consulate, embodied in the Constitution of the Year X, assigned unlimited dictatorial powers to Napoleon on 3 August 1802. This finally terminated the tumultuous search for fundamental new criteria and categories that had previously gripped France for fourteen years. Breaking with the Revolution, Napoleon first imposed a qualified amnesty allowing émigré nobles living outside France to return and, in April 1802, a comprehensive amnesty, permitting all but members of the royal family and the most committed counterrevolutionaries to reintegrate.

Freedom of the press and expression, even if sorely dented between 1789 and 1799 at times, was not finally suppressed until 1799–1800. Until 1799, press freedom always remained an intensely live issue and
immediate possibility, and much of the time it was a reality. The universal principle of equality embraced in competing ways by all ruling factions between 1789 and 1799 was only finally discarded as the basis of citizenship and men’s rights with the new Constitution of 1799. This also discarded the Declaration of the Rights of Man
,
which in successive formulations had been fundamental to the Revolution throughout the momentous years from 1789 to 1799. Linked to this, black slavery, abolished by the Revolution in principle in 1794, was reintroduced by Napoleon in 1802. The Napoleonic regime fell back on a quasi-hierarchical vision of society, fostering a new ruling elite comprised of a mix of recently elevated notables and rehabilitated old nobles. Likewise, from 1802, most revolutionary innovations in marriage and family law were canceled. Under the new civil code of 1804, woman’s legal subordination to her husband within marriage and subordination to paternal authority before marriage were reaffirmed. The 1804 code replaced the Revolution’s incipient gender equality with an openly discriminatory double standard for processing adultery suits, applications for divorce, and property rights.
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However, the circumstances driving these setbacks to basic human rights—the postrevolutionary regime’s unrelenting authoritarianism, Napoleon’s overweening personal authority, and rejection of the legislature’s supremacy over the executive and the judicial arm—all commenced with the new Constitution of 1799. Effectively, this marked the end of the Revolution.

That the Revolution ended with Napoleon’s rise to dictatorial power is also reflected by developments in religion. Before 1788, church and state in France, as everywhere in Europe, were closely intertwined. During the Revolution this pattern was fundamentally transformed in stages. Stripped of all political and legislative authority, the Church also suffered expropriation of its lands and revenues by the state. A comprehensive religious toleration prevailed (except under the Terror during 1793–94) and Catholicism was no longer the authorized, public church. The state as such, and in intention also public education, became essentially secular. However, this bitter struggle between revolution and religious authority ceased after 1800, and at Easter 1802 Napoleon, as First Consul, formally ended the rift between France and the papacy by restoring the old episcopate and recognizing its power to appoint and control the lower clergy and exercise an unhindered spiritual authority over French Catholics and much of primary education.

Contemporary Interpretations

Thus, both the “new social interpretation” and the sociocultural approach enrich our understanding of the Revolution’s social background without identifying any single dramatic factor that can be highlighted. A basket of gradual and relatively minor economic, social, and cultural factors, such as those identified by the new socioeconomic and sociocultural methods, certainly provides valuable background but cannot explain why French society, politics, and institutions came to be transformed suddenly and dramatically in every way, why all precedent and tradition were systematically uprooted. Far more exceptional and specific factors
must
be adduced to account for the overthrow of this vast edifice of conservative thought, practice, and ancien régime institutions. Between 1788 and 1820, the most common explanation of the French Revolution both in France and outside was, overwhelmingly, that it originated in “philosophy.” Contemporaries recognized that discontent and social frustration fueled the unrest once the body politic was plunged into turmoil and instability, helping make the Revolution possible, but also clearly understood that social tensions by no means determined its character, course, and outcome. The people’s exasperation merely helped
l’esprit philosophique
, as Jacques Necker (1732–1804), Louis XVI’s chief minister in 1789, called it, to assume command of the discontent and convert it to its own purposes. This was the general view, so commonplace in fact that its cultural implications urgently need to be explored. The question is: Was this assumption prevailing throughout the revolutionary era actually correct?
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Not only did radically new concepts “capture” the unrest, but from the summer of 1788, l’esprit philosophique, held Necker, daily extended its conquests, exploiting old grievances and causing “all the insurrections against received ideas and commonly accepted truths.” The institutions and laws that had previously been accepted by practically everyone came to be challenged, scorned, and overthrown, not by the people or France’s elites but by an unrepresentative fringe. During the decades preceding the Revolution, explained Necker—who despite exalting “virtue” and wanting to help mold a happier and better society had also earlier attacked l’esprit philosophique in his book
De l’importance des opinions religieuses
(1788)—l’esprit philosophique first corrupted all sense of duty by assailing religion and then broke all constraints by wrongly reworking the principles of morality and politics, substituting an exaggerated notion of liberty for the wisdom of limits
and fomenting the confusion spread by the idea of “equality” in place of the traditional hierarchical conception of society headed by aristocracy, which obliterated the “prudentes gradations” composing the social order.
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Admittedly, strikingly few philosophes or enlighteners figured in the Estates-General of 1789. Most committed “Enlightenment” candidates in the 1789 elections were unable to get elected. Condorcet, soon among the foremost architects of the Revolution, failed to be elected as a deputy.
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Sieyès only just scraped in. The Royal Academy astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–93)
was
elected, but his election was highly exceptional, he explained, since “a great disfavor [prevailed] in the electoral assembly for the men of letters and
académiciens
.” Though more esprit philosophique would have helped the Estates, in Bailly’s opinion, most of the college of electors, being merchants and lawyers, displayed a marked antipathy to philosophes. (Condorcet was almost as suspicious of the lawyers and merchants as he was of the nobility.) At Lyon, too, records one of the Revolution’s great personalities, Mme. Roland, the “commercially minded” showed great aversion to philosophy and those ardent for the Revolution. Only about ten members out of the twelve hundred Estates-General deputies of 1789 could be described, like Mirabeau and Sieyès, as philosophes in the Enlightenment sense. But this acute paucity of intellectuals in the Estates of 1789 makes it all the more extraordinary and astounding that precisely this group, both inside and outside the Estates, could so swiftly come to dominate the revolutionary leadership in the National Assembly and its guiding committees, as well as (initially) the Paris municipality and practically all of the influential pro-Revolution papers.
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