Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre Read online

  Revolutionary Ideas

  Revolutionary Ideas

  AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION FROM THE RIGHTS OF MAN TO ROBESPIERRE

  Jonathan Israel

  Princeton University Press

  Oxford & Princeton

  Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  Frontispiece: The unity and indivisibility of the Republic, 1793. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  Jacket illustration: Allegorical emblem of Republic Fasces topped by Cap of Liberty and ribbands with legend, “Liberty, Fraternity, Egality, or Death.” French Revolution 1789, contemporary popular colored print. Courtesy Image Asset Management Ltd. / Superstock.

  All Rights Reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Israel, Jonathan.

  Revolutionary ideas : an intellectual history of the French Revolution from the Rights of Man to Robespierre / Jonathan Israel.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-15172-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Causes. 2. France—History—Revolution, 1789-1799—Historiography. 3. France—Intellectual life—18th century. 4. Revolutionaries—France—History—18th century. I. Title.

  DC147.8.I87 2014

  944.04—dc23

  2013018208

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Garamond Pro and Pastonchi

  Printed on acid-free paper ∞

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  List of Figures vii

  Acknowledgments ix

  Prologue 1

  CHAPTER 1 Introduction 6

  CHAPTER 2 Revolution of the Press (1788–90) 30

  CHAPTER 3 From Estates-General to National Assembly (April–June 1789) 53

  CHAPTER 4 The Rights of Man: Summer and Autumn 1789 72

  CHAPTER 5 Democratizing the Revolution 103

  CHAPTER 6 Deadlock (November 1790–July 1791) 141

  CHAPTER 7 War with the Church (1788–92) 180

  CHAPTER 8 The Feuillant Revolution (July 1791–April 1792) 204

  CHAPTER 9 The “General Revolution” Begins (1791–92) 231

  CHAPTER 10 The Revolutionary Summer of 1792 246

  CHAPTER 11 Republicans Divided (September 1792–March 1793) 278

  CHAPTER 12 The “General Revolution” from Valmy to the Fall of Mainz (1792–93) 316

  CHAPTER 13 The World’s First Democratic Constitution (1793) 345

  CHAPTER 14 Education: Securing the Revolution 374

  CHAPTER 15 Black Emancipation 396

  CHAPTER 16 Robespierre’s Putsch (June 1793) 420

  CHAPTER 17 The Summer of 1793: Overturning the Revolution’s Core Values 450

  CHAPTER 18 De-Christianization (1793–94) 479

  CHAPTER 19 “The Terror” (September 1793–March 1794) 503

  CHAPTER 20 The Terror’s Last Months (March–July 1794) 545

  CHAPTER 21 Thermidor 574

  CHAPTER 22 Post-Thermidor (1795–97) 593

  CHAPTER 23 The “General Revolution” (1795–1800): Holland, Italy, and the Levant 635

  CHAPTER 24 The Failed Revolution (1797–99) 670

  CHAPTER 25 Conclusion: The Revolution as the Outcome of the Radical Enlightenment 695

  Cast of Main Participants 709

  Notes 733

  Bibliography 803

  Index 833

  Figures

  FRONTISPIECE The unity and indivisibility of the Republic, 1793 ii

  FIGURE 1 The Tennis Court Oath, Versailles, 20th June 1789 56

  FIGURE 2 The Storming of the Bastille, Paris, 14 July 1789 64

  FIGURE 3 (a) Bust of Mirabeau, (b) Sieyès, (c) Brissot, (d) Condorcet 80

  FIGURE 4 The transfer of Voltaire’s remains to the Panthéon 172

  FIGURE 5 (a) Robespierre, (b) Pétion, (c) Danton, (d) Marat 218

  FIGURE 6 Attack on the Tuileries, 10th August 1792 259

  FIGURE 7 Journées de Septembre, massacre des prisonniers de l’Abbaye, nuit du 2 au 3 Septembre 1792 271

  FIGURE 8 Execution of Louis XVI 311

  FIGURE 9 The “Exposition” in the Place des Piques of the corpse of Michel Lepeletier 390

  FIGURE 10 Jean-Baptiste Belley 412

  FIGURE 11 The Triumph of Marat, 24 April 1793 433

  FIGURE 12 The Arrest of Charlotte Corday, Paris, 14 July 1793 474

  FIGURE 13 The Contrast, 1793; Which is Best? 476

  FIGURE 14 (a) Gouges, (b) Roland, (c) Williams, (d) Corday 516

  FIGURE 15 The siege and bombardment of Lyon 526

  FIGURE 16 Camille Desmoulins 542

  FIGURE 17 “The Triumph of the Montagne” 560

  FIGURE 18 (a) Volney, (b) Daunou 619

  FIGURE 19 Champions of the “General Revolution”: (a) Forster, (b) Paine 639

  FIGURE 20 The unity and indivisibility of the Republic 693

  FIGURE 21 Allegory of the Revolution 700

  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.

  Toasted next were the heralds and champions of the Rights of Man, who, via their writings, formed the Revolution’s avant-garde, formulating and propagating its essential principles. These were listed as “Condorcet, Brissot, Sieyès, Carra, Kersaint, Louvet, Gorsas, Audouin, etc….”5 Condorcet, among the principal revolutionary leaders, was also one of the most radical philosophes and, like Sieyès and Brissot, a vigorous exponent of human rights, republican constitutional theory, black emancipation, women’s rights, and educational reform. The authentic Revolution, this ninth toast proclaimed, the revolution based on democracy and human rights, was principally the work of this mix of philosophes and radical-minded newspaper editors. To leaders of the British Club, the true revolution, that precious to all humanity, stood in stark contrast to the populist authoritarianism of Marat and Robespierre embodied in the Jacobin faction known as the Montagne, which (except for John Oswald) they rejected unreservedly. For opposing the Montagne, Brissot, Gorsas, Kersaint, and Carra, among the Revolution’s preeminent journalists and orators, were all guillotined during the Terror, while Condorcet was proscribed and hounded to death. Louvet, among the Montagne’s fiercest detractors, only narrowly survived.

  The tenth toast was to the French revolutionary generals, the eleventh to the local democratic clubs active throughout France, and also in Belgium, Britain, the French-occupied Rhineland, and Ireland, and the twelfth, proposed by Hurford Stone (also imprisoned during the Terror), was to Tom Paine and “his novel method of making good books known to the public” via royal prohibitions and prosecution of authors, an allusion to the British government’s fierce suppression of Paine’s writings, especially his internationally famous The Rights of Man (1791). Toast thirteen was to all other “Patriots of England” who by their speeches and writings spread the principles of the French and “the General Revolution”—Priestley, Price, Sheridan, Barlow, Thomas Cooper (leader of the radical reform society of Manchester), Tooke, and Mackintosh. Number fourteen eagerly anticipated the “dissolution of the German empire” and its replacement with democratic republics that would enable Germany’s inhabitants to live in freedom. Toast fifteen,
on a more humorous note, expressed the wish that the republican tunes of the Légion Germanique might soon become the favorite marching music of the British army.

  Finally, on an unreservedly serious note, number sixteen was to la paix universelle (perpetual peace).6 Although most outside observers, then as now, deemed the idea of perpetual peace among peoples a hopelessly utopian mirage, sheer nonsense, this concept had become a central theme of radical thought since the 1770s. Diderot, Raynal, d’Holbach, Cerisier, Paine, and others—and lately, with special emphasis, also Volney in his Les Ruines (1791)—argued that if the majority of people ever ceased to be the prey of ruling elites and vested interests; if government was no longer controlled by kings, aristocrats, or narrow oligarchies but genuinely pursued the interest of society as a whole; if all nations became representative democracies; if (non-Rousseauist) volonté générale became actual and universal, then there would be no more wars. It was an appealing argument.7

  CHAPTER 1

  Introduction

  French Society in 1789

  Historians working on the French Revolution have a problem. All of our attempts to find an explanation in terms of social groups or classes, or particular segments of society becoming powerfully activated, have fallen short. As one expert aptly expressed it: “the truth is we have no agreed general theory of why the French Revolution came about and what it was—and no prospect of one.”1 This gaping, causal void is certainly not due to lack of investigation into the Revolution’s background and origins. If class conflict in the Marxist sense has been jettisoned, other ways of attributing the Revolution to social change have been explored with unrelenting rigor. Of course, every historian agrees society was slowly changing and that along with the steady expansion of trade and the cities, and the apparatus of the state and armed forces, more (and more professional) lawyers, engineers, administrators, officers, medical staff, architects, and naval personnel were increasingly infusing and diversifying the existing order.2 Yet, no major, new socioeconomic pressures of a kind apt to cause sudden, dramatic change have been identified. The result, even some keen revisionists admit, is a “somewhat painful void.”3