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The Philosophes and the French Revolution: Reflections on Some Recent Research Author(S): Roland N Society for History Education The Philosophes and the French Revolution: Reflections on Some Recent Research Author(s): Roland N. Stromberg Source: The History Teacher, Vol. 21, No. 3 (May, 1988), pp. 321-339 Published by: Society for History Education Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/492999 Accessed: 07-08-2019 18:55 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Society for History Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The History Teacher This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:55:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Philosophes and the French Revolution: Reflections on Some Recent Research Roland N. Stromberg University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee I SWEEPING REVISIONS IN INTERPRETATION of the French Revo- lution during the last couple of decades,' calling into question conclusions reached by previous generations of historians, seem to encourage renewed attention to intellectual history. Socio-economic explanations of the Revolution's origin and purpose, characteristic of the older paradigm, have tended to collapse. Our old friend the "rising bourgeois," alias capitalist, class, which supposedly triumphed over the declining nobility in the Revolution, has fallen into sad confusion. Apart from the fact that the bourgeoisie was a privileged group destined for attack by the Revo- lution, nobody can distinguish clearly between it and the nobility or aristocracy; it was in any case neither revolutionary nor industrialist. The quasi-Marxist attempt to explain the Revolution in terms of the emergence of a new social class, as part of a model of successive social classes based on economic/technological changes, has been pretty thoroughly discred- ited. If (amid a sense of crisis or even "fragmented chaos" in the Revolution's interpretation) a new general framework has emerged, it is focused on the realm of mentalities, of language, discourse, of words and rhetoric. The Mode of Information replaces the Mode of Production even among neo-Marxists as the vital source of power. The discursive domains The History Teacher Volume 21 Number 3 May 1988 This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:55:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 322 Roland N. Stromberg have their own immanent structures, not derived from but co-equal with "practical and institutional" domains. It is argued that what was new in the French Revolution was the rhetoric of secular politics.2 A historian of the newer school opines that "a revolution can be defined as a transformation of the discursive practice of the community, a moment in which social relations are reconstituted and the discourse defining the political relations between individuals and the group is radically recast," adding that this was what happened in France in 1789.3 If one must grant a certain opacity in this verbiage about verbiage, the drift is nonetheless clear. Such an explanation was indeed familiar at the time of the Revolution. "It is by words that they accomplish their ends; words did everything," Lynn Hunt quotes from a Frenchman of that day. J.-F. La Harpe, the eighteenth-century critic, said that language was the Revolution's "fore- most instrument."4 Hunt also cites the eminent historian, Richard Cobb, who observed that sans-culottism was "more a state of mind than a social, political or economic entity." "Jacobins came from every social class," as Roland Mousnier reminded us." (Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeaux was a high aristocrat.) What defined these Revolutionary parties or coteries or ten- dencies was, much more than social status or economic class, an ideology or a common vocabulary, or--dare we say-ideas. True, "ideas" is a word the new historians rather like to avoid; the "in" words are "discourse," "the politics of language," or (rescued from contempt) "rhetoric." But this may nevertheless provide us with an excuse to look anew at the role of ideas as a factor in the Revolution. II Though it is a very old question, the relationship between Enlighten- ment ideas and the Revolution is itself up for reevaluation. Lester Crocker has recently declared that "No general, historically important account and interpretation of Enlightenment political thought...has as yet been writ- ten" that would reveal the relationship between thought and practice.6 The author of a recent scholarly study, Thomas Schleich, asserts that "No direct connection between Enlightenment ideas and French Revolution- ary events" has ever been demonstrated. This despite a long history of inquiry into this subject.7 The view that the eighteenth-century writers of thephilosophe school, the illumines or Enlightened ones, that celebrated gallery who after emerging in the late 1740s reached the peak of their fame and influence in the 1760s and 1770s just in time to indoctrinate the future leaders of the Revolution in their salad days,8 directly and intentionally brought on the Revolution is of course a familiar one. It actually much pre-dated the This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:55:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Philosophes and the French Revolution 323 Revolution, being found among the anti-philosophes of the 1760s, who saw a conspiracy to undermine and destroy the established order, carried on by Freemasons and other secret societies. This opinion was expressed during the Revolution by both its friends and foes. If the Abb6 Royou in 1790 found a legion of incendiary writers, purveying a false and atrocious philosophy, who conspired against throne and altar, and Catherine of Russia wrote to her old friend, the one-timephilosophe Grimm that "You were right not to wish to be included among the illumines and philosophes, since experience proves that all this leads to destruction," the classic statement of the conspiracy theory came from the Abb6 Barruel,9 to be repeated endlessly by the school of De Maistre. Among significant nineteenth-century historians, Taine observed that when we see an evi- dently quite normal man drink eagerly of a new liquor and then fall to the ground foaming at the mouth, we cannot be in doubt about the causal relationship.10 But this belief that the Revolution was almost self-evi- dently a consequence of the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers was not confined to the Right; the Revolution's advocates and participants also held it. Brissot boasted in September, 1791, that "Our revolution is not the fruit of an insurrection. It is the work of a half century of enlightenment." "Philosophy has directed a great revolution in France," a leading journal declared in April, 1793.11 Those who tried to guide the Revolution never ceased to legitimize or rationalize their actions by appealing to the words of Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, and other intellectual heroes of the Enlightenment, though they might do so selectively and erratically. Later liberals, as well as conservatives, attributed the Revolu- tion to Enlightenment ideas. How many began its history, as did Lamartine in his Histoire des Girondins (1848) with a chapter on Voltaire and Rousseau? ("When these two men had formed their ideas, the Revolution was accomplished in the high realm of the mind," and it only remained to work out the petty details.'2) Among the difficulties with seeing the Revolution as deriving from the ideas of the Enlightenment, perhaps the chief is that the surviving philosophes almost all rejected it, in most cases virtually from the start. Of the Holbach coterie,3 the leading late Enlightenment intellectual circle or salon that was seemingly so radical and revolutionary, virtually all, as Alan Kors shows, disliked the Revolution. These included such well- accredited, as it were card-carrying philosophes as Raynal, Saint-Lam- bert, Marmontel, Morellet, and Grimm. Raynal, author of perhaps the most revolutionarily influential tract of the 1770s, a defrocked priest condemned by the Parlement of Paris in 1781, one who stood in the revolutionary Pantheon right next to Voltaire and Rousseau, retired to Marseilles at the outset of the Revolution; invited to return to Paris in This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:55:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 324 Roland N. Stromberg 1790, he disconcerted the revolutionaries by delivering a blistering attack on what had happened during the past year. The equally anti-clerical Morellet denounced "anarchy" and became a rather extreme 6migr6 reactionary. Marmontel, finding "a dangerous fanaticism" everywhere, protested "the spirit of licence, faction, and anarchy" until, after being denounced by Marat in 1791, he left Paris to settle in rural obscurity. Saint- Lambert, the Marquis who had once fathered a child by Voltaire's mistress the Marquise de Chttelet which cost her life, withdrew early, sad and discouraged, to his country home near his mistress Mme. de Houdetot, who had once fired Jean-Jacques Rousseau to write the love story, La Nouvelle Hliiise, that revolutionized the consciousness of Europe. Grimm, as we said, who had so long served as a sort of secretary to the philosophe movement, went back to his native Germany, leaving his wealth to be confiscated by the revolutionary government, and became quite Burkean in his last years. (So did one of Rousseau's chief disciples, the Comte d'Antraigues.) Kors, on the basis of his thorough knowledge of this "radical" Enlight- enment group, argues that their opposition to the Revolution was consis- tent with their Enlightenment views, not an aberration of age or a case of their material interests winning out over their theoretical beliefs.4 They were believers in a rational order and scientific method which the disorders and wild rhetoric of the Revolution affronted.
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