Jacobinism from Outside

Rapport, M. (2015) Jacobinism from outside. In: Andress, D. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the French Revolution. Series: Oxford handbooks. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 503-520. ISBN 9780199639748. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/122611/ Deposited on: 17 August 2016 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 1 Jacobinism from Outside In 1796, as a war-weary British government sought peace talks with the French Republic, Edmund Burke railed against treating with the ‘regicides’. The European conflict, he argued, was in fact a civil war, ‘between the partizans of the antient, civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of ambitious and fanatical atheists which means to change them all.’ The Jacobinism, he insisted, was a ‘sect aiming at universal empire’.1 Burke was not alone: John Robison, a Scottish natural philosopher, and the former Jesuit, Augustin de Barruel, both published works in 1797 arguing that the revolution was an international conspiracy of freemasons and freethinkers. For Barruel, Jacobinism was nothing less than Freemasonry finally revealing its ultimate, dark purpose. Cranky though such claims now appear, in the late 1790s for Europeans bending before the roar of revolution and war, they offered an all- embracing explanation for the crisis.2 Yet Barruel, Burke and Robison used the term ‘Jacobin’ very loosely, reinforcing a conservative tendency to define any dissent as dangerous. Almost always inaccurate, such a use of the label probably seemed more plausible because ‘Jacobinism’ rapidly changed in France itself, as the Revolution rattled forward on its breakneck course. Yet local radical movements were rooted in national or even regional contexts. Those who conformed closely to the shifting shapes of the French model were few: the Italian Giacobini could probably came closest to sharing the political egalitarianism and social reformism of the French Jacobins in their heyday of 1793-4. The radical response to the French Revolution varied from one context to another, including differences in political and cultural inheritance, diversities in social interests, the obstacles and scale of resistance to radical demands and the extent and nature of political violence. Complex though these 1 E. Burke, Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the present Parliament, on the proposals for peace with the Regicide Directory of France (London, 1796), 144. 2 W. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), 218-19. 2 varieties were, they permit a nuanced understanding of the international impact of the French Revolution. For many years, the international varieties of ‘Jacobinism’ were debated within national contexts. In some interpretations, it was a foreign import, dangerous and traitorous at worse, or irrelevant to the nation’s past at best. For liberals, the ‘Jacobins’ may have been on right the side of the struggle for progress, but their legacy was negligible because they were (variously) misguided, prone to social levelling, too closely-linked to France or out of touch with the real needs and customs of the people. In Italy, this tendency dates to the very aftermath of the upheaval itself. In 1801 the disenchanted Jacobin Vincenzo Cuoco published his Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799. In explaining its failure, Cuoco coined the term ‘passive revolution’, a phrase later adopted by the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, to mean one imposed ‘from above’ by an élite on an apathetic or hostile population: Our revolution being a passive revolution, the only means of bringing it to a successful conclusion was by winning popular opinion. But the views of the patriots and those of the people were not the same; they had different ideas, different customs, and even different languages.3 This was central problem faced by radicalism across Europe: it was primarily the preserve of a literate, usually urbanised, minority. Even where it had the makings of a nationwide network, it usually attracted only a small section of the middle-class professionals, artisans and craft workers and so it struggled to impose itself on society at large. The essence of Cuoco’s charge was taken up by the twentieth-century liberal-nationalist historian, Benedetto Croce. Croce declared that ‘modern Italy, the new Italy, our Italy’ was born in 1799 because of the patriotic awakening during the Neapolitan revolution. Otherwise, the Neapolitan 3 Quoted in D. Beales (ed.), The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (London, 1971), 113-14. 3 Jacobins had little real understanding of their own country, so the democracy and egalitarianism that they represented could never be relevant to modern Italy.4 The destra storica, conservative Italian historiography, saw Jacobinism as so utterly foreign to the Italian nation-state that it was both irrelevant and insidious.5 Such judgments stuck because ‘Jacobinism’ frequently depended upon French military intervention for any chance of success, throwing the poisonous problem of collaboration and resistance into the controversial stew. Nineteenth-century German assessments painted the Rhineland Jacobins as ‘black-hearted traitors’6 because they worked with the French and in the early twentieth century Herman Theodoor Colenbrander accepted the good intentions of the Dutch Patriots, but argued that, once crushed by Prussian intervention in 1787, they had to learn from the real masters of revolution, the French. When they returned to power in 1795, they were merely ‘marionetten’, puppets on French strings. The trauma of the two World Wars intensified such views. One post-war Dutch periodical condemned the Patriots as the ‘NSBers’, or Dutch Fascists, of the eighteenth century.7 Yet there were more positive views of ‘Jacobinism’. Left-wing historiography saw it as the forerunner of twentieth-century communism or social democracy. The British post-war labour history tradition placed the British radicalism of the 1790s within the longer-term movement for democracy and social justice.8 E. P. Thompson’s subtle analysis of working- class radicalism argued that the political agitation of the 1790s ‘altered the sub-political 4 J. A. Davis, ‘The Neapolitan Revolution, 1799-1999: Between History and Myth’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, iv (1999), 350-1 [350-79]; D. Mack Smith, ‘Benedetto Croce: History and Politics’, Journal of Contemporary History, viii (1973), 42 [41-61]. 5 M. Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy 1773-1821: State Building in Piedmont (Lewiston, 1997), 3. 6 T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz 1743-1803 (Cambridge, 1974), 295. 7 Quoted in S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (London, 1992), 16, 19. 8 J. Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London, 1954); G. D. H. Cole and A. W. Filson (eds), British Working Class Movements: select documents, 1789-1875 (London, 1951); 4 attitudes of the people, affected class alignments, and initiated traditions which stretch forward into the present [twentieth] century.’9 For more orthodox Marxists, Jacobinism represented the bourgeois phase of human history: the East German historian Heinrich Scheel, for example, argued that the Mainz republic of 1793 was ‘the first bourgeois- democratic republic on German soil’ and so was the forerunner of the ‘first German workers’ and peasants’ state’, the DDR.10 These interpretations were applied within national contexts, an approach challenged by the ‘Atlantic’ perspective proposed by Robert R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot, who suggested that the revolutionary upheavals across the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were part of a single movement, broadly similar in causes and aims, in an age of ‘democratic’ or ‘Atlantic’ revolution. Marxist historians like Marcel Reinhard and George Rudé responded that it was wrong to lump the French Revolution together with the more moderate American Revolution or the British radical movement.11 The ‘Atlantic’ thesis took this battering from the left and then suffered death by a thousand cuts by revisionist research on the local experience of revolution, war, occupation and resistance. Such work emphasised pre-existing social developments and conflicts, political geography, earlier patterns of reform, customs and identities.12 Much of this scholarship, focussing on resistance to French domination, tends to downplay the importance ‘Jacobinism’ outside France. Yet it has effectively built up a complex mosaic representing a stunning diversity of local contexts in which the French Revolution was received, ‘Jacobinism’ expressed and responses shaped. Moreover, new life 9 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), 111. 10 Quoted in T. C. W. Blanning, ‘The German Jacobins and the French Revolution’, Historical Journal xxiii (1980), 985. 11 R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America,1760-1800 2 vols (Princeton, 1959-64); J. Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770- 1799 (New York, 1965). The debate can be followed in P. H. Amann (ed.), The Eighteenth-Century Revolution: French or Western? (Lexington, 1963). 12 See, for example, Broers and Schama, already cited, and T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation

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