Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (5 page)

“Before it was made into law,” affirmed Pierre-Louis Roederer (1754–1835), a prominent revolutionary leader from Lorraine, the “Revolution was made in men’s minds and habits.”
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How and why? Because the great revolutionary principles and enactments—abolition of aristocracy and eventually the use of all aristocratic titles, equality before the law, democracy, press freedom, equality of all cults and their separation from the state, the Rights of Man (1789), civil divorce (1792), the suppression of monarchy (1792), and the abolition of slavery (1794)—were all manifestly saturated in Enlightenment language, debates, and philosophical categories. A “revolution of ideas” was necessary before there could be a revolution of fact, agreed Dominique Joseph Garat (1749–1833), a revolutionary leader from the south-west, and did actually occur from the 1740s down to 1789. It paved
the way for the “revolution of events” and was its motor and shaping force.
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Like virtually all major participants, Camille Desmoulins (1760–94), son of a Picard local official and one of Danton’s closest advisers, held that “the people” certainly played a large part but needed to be led, identifying “ce siècle de lumières” (this century of Enlightenment)—the “most beautiful monument that philosophy and patriotism had bequeathed to humanity”—as the Revolution’s true inspiration. “Philosophy,” he believed, was the chief agent of the Revolution.
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In the years immediately before the Revolution, discerning observers stressed, the general intellectual context was dramatically transformed by a torrent of new philosophy. Often the particular revolutionary ideas disseminated on the eve of 1788 seemed too familiar and too obvious to require detailed explanation. “Today with Rousseau, Price, Helvétius ‘entre les mains de tout le monde’ [in everyone’s hands],”commented Brissot in 1786, there was no longer any need to explain to readers the main themes of their writings.
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Of course, the vast majority had not read any philosophes and were hardly equipped to do so. But most people participating in the great mass movements of the Revolution were less the agent of revolution, suggested Desmoulins, than the Revolution’s prime obstacle. In his seminal pamphlet
La France libre
(1789), he claims that the nobility and clergy held their dominant position in pre-1789 French ancien régime society not because they had forcibly conquered this right and appropriated their privileges but because the ancien régime social order had long endured with the “consent” of the vast majority.
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He and the rest of the democratic revolutionary leadership of 1788–89, like the radical philosophes earlier, considered this broad, popular acquiescence a gigantic edifice of ignorance and superstition, an obstruction to be cleared away as fast as possible. Opponents of the Revolution, and nearly all merchants, lawyers, and other professionals, abhorred Desmoulins’s irreverent republican standpoint. Yet, strikingly, whatever their views, nearly everyone agreed that
la philosophie
was the principal factor undermining the foundations of French society and the legitimacy of its moral code and religion, and shaping the new order. The people had been on the right path before, held those opposing the Revolution, but in their simplicity were now disastrously misled by a handful of republican militants like Desmoulins, inspired by la philosophie.

Virtually all highly educated observers identified the Revolution’s chief cause as
cette grande révolution morale
(this great moral revolution),
as it was called by Pierre-Louis Ginguené (1748–1816), an ardent Rousseauist republican imprisoned during the Terror.
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Father Claude Fauchet (1744–93), among those most eager to combine revolutionary ideology with Catholicism (until guillotined in 1793), considered France in the 1780s to be split between two vast cultural forces—solid tradition and religion on one side (the France of the great majority) and la philosophie on the other. In his view, France in 1789 really comprised two nations: those bending to ecclesiastical authority and the confessional and those inspired by the
Encyclopédie
. One side admired political economy and Rousseau’s
Social Contract
, the other monarchy, bishops, and consecrated authority. This both caused and shaped the Revolution. Fauchet did his best to rise above this division, rebuking both sides. A sincere Catholic of a most unusual kind, he believed that religion teaches men the deepest truths. It was divine Providence that brought the French people to the threshold of liberty in 1788. But Christians must accept, he added, that Christianity does not demonstrate the correct way to organize society and politics in accordance with liberty, equality, and truth. Providence prepared the ground but “philosophy was the actual instrument of Providence in bringing about this marvel” that “filled our minds with ideas of liberty, inflamed hearts and enlivened courage.”
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Among the best-known antiphilosophes, the ex-Jesuit Luxembourgois, François-Xavier de Feller (1735–1802), dubbed this world conspiracy, as he saw it, “l’empire du philosophisme.”
Philosophisme
, he explained, was a mighty construct begun in the 1740s by a group of extraordinary writers who managed to impress sections of all classes with their wit and sarcasm, devising a whole new language and way of thinking, and by cunning dexterity and obscure use of terms made their ruinous ideas seem “sublime” to many. The “conspiracy” commenced with Diderot, who turned the
Encyclopédie
into an engine of subversion and impiety. All the chief conspirators were, like Diderot and d’Alembert, atheistic “parasites” who lounged in cafés, insinuating, flattering, and mocking their way to domination of the salons and academies, and who eventually conquered positions of great power. Among their chief weapons, suggested Feller, was their appeal to women, especially young, pretty women susceptible to fine phrases, elegant turns of speech, witticisms, and subtle and less-than-subtle erotic suggestion.
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But the claim that philosophisme as such caused the Revolution remains too vague to serve as a useful explanatory tool. The philosophie that most writers, including the Counter-Enlightenment antiphilosophes,
considered the Revolution’s prime cause embraced virtually the entire Enlightenment. But ascribing the Revolution to an undifferentiated
philosophie moderne
undermined their case by being too sweeping and too general. They failed to focus on the particular current embodying the main revolutionary tendency. This was pointed out by various contemporary observers, often political and Enlightenment moderates like the young revolutionary leader Antoine-Pierre-Joseph-Marie Barnave (1761–93) and the celebrated legal reformer Jean-Étienne Portalis (1745–1807). L’esprit philosophique was the Revolution’s principal cause, agreed Barnave and Portalis, but it was not Enlightenment philosophy generally, only a certain kind of philosophy, that was responsible. The real agent was the radical current that rejected Locke and Montesquieu, which was promoted by Denis Diderot (1713–84), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–71), and Paul-Henri-Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–89).
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Portalis, like the journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan (1749–1800), believed thoroughgoing legal and penal reform in Europe could have been accomplished by the moderate Enlightenment, by kings and courts, without any revolution and without adopting the radical systems Mallet dubbed
la philosophie de Paris,
which they all deemed the root of the Revolution.
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Exactly this same insistence on the need to distinguish between moderate and materialist-revolutionary philosophy recurs in another well-known late eighteenth-century writer, Jean-François de La Harpe (1739–1803). La Harpe first ardently supported and then later, after the Terror, equally fervently repudiated the Revolution. What exactly is the philosophy that caused the Revolution, asked La Harpe in 1797? A Parisian-born foundling of unknown parentage and recognized philosophe in his own right, La Harpe’s perspective is of particular relevance here. Applauded by Portalis among others for disavowing the Revolution and the philosophy that caused it,
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La Harpe, originally a disciple of Voltaire, had known several leading philosophes personally. His principal work rejecting philosophique and Revolution principles, the two-volume
Philosophie du Dix-Huitième Siècle
, was mostly composed in 1797 while the Revolution was still in full swing. Voltaire, he argued, was the first to emancipate the human mind and render philosophique reason popular with readers. But Voltaire was marginal in terms of the philosophy that caused the Revolution. It is in his long chapter on Diderot that La Harpe chiefly develops his critique of the
secte philosophique
. Here he sought to uncover the intellectual and psychological
causes of what he, like the apologists he had once combated, now considered a revolutionary catastrophe.

Primarily responsible, argued La Harpe, were those propagating the doctrines of Diderot, including in one crucial respect Rousseau. For despite the great quarrel that shattered their former friendship, from 1757, the two great thinkers nurtured one particularly subversive political doctrine that Rousseau derived from Diderot, namely, that all the ills and crimes of the world arise not from innate defects of human nature (which both saw as fundamentally good) but from the “radical viciousness” Diderot was the first to see in all existing institutions, systems of government, morality, and society. This was a truly monstrous tenet, held La Harpe after 1794, an absurdity, destroying “all social order among all nations.” It stemmed not just from the implacable aversion to all existing authority common to Diderot and Rousseau but also from their fervent conviction that their insights supplied a basis for giving the world an entirely new set of moral rules and laws. There is a direct line, contended La Harpe, connecting Diderot to the Revolution’s most socially uncompromising initiatives, including the conspiracy of Babeuf and his followers, crushed by the Directory in 1797.
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These two fundamentally opposing tendencies within the Enlightenment, one accepting and the other rejecting the prevailing social and political order, must be the essential starting-point for any valid account of the Revolution. The revolutionary philosophical tendency, acknowledged political leaders belonging to the
parti de philosophie
like Mirabeau, Sieyès, Brissot, Condorcet, Volney, Ginguené, Roederer, and Desmoulins, had absorbed the contributions of many different writers—d’Argenson, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Mably, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvétius, d’Holbach, and Raynal. Brissot also deeply admired the subversive roles of Bayle and Boulanger. Revolutionary leaders construing the Revolution as they did often commented on the various contributions. Thus, Voltaire mattered chiefly for his peerless literary skill and relentless ridiculing of old, established prejudices, for the rest being a friend of kings and aristocrats. Brissot was especially caustic about Voltaire, whom he rightly judged no friend of the people.
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Montesquieu seasoned the collective philosophical recipe with “salt and energy,” commented Roederer; but this great man, being “unfortunate enough” to be a nobleman and
parlementaire
himself, also fell into
des erreurs
regarding social status and “corporations.”
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Rousseau taught readers to think about “les droits des hommes” (the rights of man). A key role in
the 1770s and 1780s was afterward widely and correctly ascribed to the subversive group referred to collectively as Raynal, who, unlike the others, directly attacked social oppression and tyranny “armé d’une plume de fer” (armed with a fiery pen).
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Many also warmly praised Mably’s contribution.

Most of the Enlightenment in France and Europe generally was moderate and therefore, in La Harpe’s opinion in 1797, good. Only a fringe was sweepingly subversive religiously and politically. Whereas Fontenelle, Montesquieu, Buffon, d’Alembert, and Condillac were true philosophers deservedly exonerated of responsibility for the great catastrophe that engulfed France and Europe, those responsible were the “false philosophers and
sophistes
,” the worst, in his opinion, being Diderot, Raynal, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Helvétius. These were the Revolution’s true “artisans,” the “first and most powerful movers of the frightful
bouleversement.
”
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To Helvétius, whose materialism had, in his view, attracted attention for all the wrong reasons, he dedicated a separate refutation. La Harpe, like Portalis, saw la philosophie moderne as a complex, cumulative corpus of ideas and attitudes reaching back many decades, gradually distilling within itself all the
extravagances
of which the human mind is capable: “By a necessary consequence, the revolution that [subversive philosophy] has caused in our century nurtured all the crimes and ills to which the human species is susceptible.”
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Whereas the Revolution’s supporters conceived la philosophie moderne as the path to universal emancipation and happiness, after 1794 La Harpe located the secte philosophique’s revolutionary potential in its having evolved under oppression into an effective bandwagon for attracting all the vain, grudging, and resentful spirits opposing the existing order. Radical Enlightenment, he recognized, was not just the intellectual cauldron of the Revolution but, equally, its principal social and cultural factor, for it was primarily this package of interlinked concepts that channeled, organized, armed, and mobilized the great mass of endemic, long-standing, popular disgruntlement, frustration, resentment, and ambition.
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