The Philosophes and the French Revolution: Reflections on Some Recent Research Author(S): Roland N

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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

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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

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.

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 written" 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

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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 evidently 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-evidently 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

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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. The creation of a better world they expected to be the result "not of angry revolution but of gradual, controlled, and maximally predictable reform." They distrusted popular control extremely; Holbach himself, now dead, had written in his political magnum opus (Lapolitique naturelle, 1773) that "In revolutions, men, guided by fury, never consult reason." These intellectual aristocrats of the Old Regime wanted, one may argue, to be the new clergy or clerisy, replacing the old one they so hated; they wanted as educators to be the creators of a new mentality, which would first have to emerge before any political revolution could be meaningful, and would take a long time (for the masses, alas, were enslaved by superstition); they sometimes mentioned the middle of the next century at the earliest. "The political concern of the coterie holbachique was thus a gradual progress through the cautious translation into reform of an increase of knowledge and under- standing on the part of the thinkers and rulers of France." Thephilosophes wanted to work through established forms, including the monarchy and even the Church. Address oneself to the sovereign, as Diderot said. In fact, the philosophes had done just that; by 1787 they had infiltrated the government, the schools, the journals and press to an extent that almost warrants Fr6ron's view that they had become the Establishment.' (An- other of the many revisions in our view of the Revolution's status is 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 325 discovery that in fact the Old Regime state just before the Revolution had accomplished a great deal; far from the rois faindants of tradition, the monarchy through its developing apparatus of power had introduced a good deal of "Enlightened" reform. It was now less the benighted enemy of the Enlightenment than its ally.) Of the Marquis de Condorcet, who was the most celebrated pure philosophe to participate extensively in the Revolution, John Lough writes "Even in works published on the very eve of the Revolution we find Condorcet seeing in the slow progress of enlightenment the only means of solving France's social and political problems."'6 Condorcet's friend in the Soci6t6 de 1789, the Abb6 Sieybs, who had virtually emblemized the revolution of the Third Estate in 1789, also withdrew from the mainstream of politics in disillusionment after mid-1790.'7 Condorcet opposed the summoning of the Estates-General in 1789. Seen abroad as a wild-eyed revolutionary (in 1792, Dugald Stewart was assailed and forced to retract a passage in which he had mentioned Condorcet favorably), Condorcet in fact always spoke of the need to avoid agitations and crises and count on "la seule force irresistible de la v6rit6 g6n6ralement reconnue." If revolutionary circumstances led him beyond this, it was reluctantly and under pressure. "A revolution that would be far-reaching, but the inevitable-and peaceful-product of social and economic forces": thus Norman Hampson sums up the philosophe outlook.'8 He cites Brissot: "The governments of Europe will be drawn gradually to correct their abuses." Not "the chimera of Democracy," which would lead to the rule of the worst, but the wisdom of a small saving remnant was needed. The philosophes were, as is now well known, most antidemocratic; this was a function of their passionate belief in Truth, via Reason, which does not depend on majority votes.'9 The masses of people, in fact, are pretty stupid, they thought. "I do not like the government of the canaille," said Voltaire. "Political Economy" and other alleged sciences of man were the hope. The philosophes "wanted to be not the destroyers but the preceptors of the kings." So the attack on the king and evidently all order by relatively ignorant men backed by mobs represented their worst fears. "The discrepancy between the late Ancien Regime and the Revolution was so great," writes Thomas Schleich, "that hardly a survivor among the philosophes gave the Revolution his support."20 He and others have suggested, reversing the conspiracy theory, that the Enlightenment did not cause the Revolution; rather, the Revolution caused (invented) the (radical) Enlightenment! I.e., when the Revolution unexpectedly happened, its leaders, in desperation, looked back and created a body of thought to justify it, culling this from bits and pieces of philosophe writing but

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basically misrepresenting their position. (Or, if you want to be critically more up-to-date, constituting a new text.) Kors concedes that the rhetoric of revolution had been there; but the denunciation of tyranny, the call to liberty, the occasional hint that there might be justified revolt he thinks came only in moments of rhetorical exaggeration. It was less the core of philosophe thought than its marginal excrescence. The whole question of what the Enlightenment thinkers believed is summarized in another recent study, John Lough's The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France (1982), which subjects the political and social thought of the mainphilosophes to a thorough examination. Predictably, he finds considerable differences among them, and inconsistencies within most of them. It is wrong to say that they all wanted an Enlightened Despot, for example. The Maupeou affair of the early '70s, that rehearsal for 1789, which unlike it came when the great primevalphilosophes were still alive, split them badly; those like Voltaire and Condorcet who sided with the king against the parlements-better one lion than a pack of rats, Voltaire mused-were opposed by voices as eminent as Diderot's and Holbach's, and as popular as Mably's, while Helv6tius managed to admire both English liberty and Prussian despotism.21 "The search for the views of the Philosophes on the future government of France brings very little reward," Lough finds (p.42). One of the few things on which they completely agreed was opposing universal suffrage; he thinks (p. 56) that of all subsequent French regimes they would have liked best the July Monarchy of 1830-1848, that hated target of the revolution of 1848. (This is dubious: Destutt de Tracy, an authentic philosophe who managed to survive that long, was quickly disenchanted with the Bourgeois Monarchy.) None of them questioned the need for a monarch. (Neither did the revolutionists at first, as Michael Kennedy has shown.22) They might be hostile to that form of despotism they saw in power, but as Voltaire wrote, and they all agreed, "Democracy is suitable only for a very small country." Most wanted a free market economy, but it is wrong to put this in a context of nineteenth-century capitalism. In general, to the philosophes equality meant equality before the law-not actual equality, "an impossible chimera," but equal submission to the laws, a view Anatole France later parodied as the equal right of rich and poor to sleep in the streets, or (Blake) one law for lion and lamb is tyranny. In their attitude toward "welfare" the usual philosophe position would make today's relative hardliners look like softies: the Encyclopedie article "Mendiant" says the more deserving poor (including children) should be set to work in workhouses, the others exported to the colonies. Diderot (writing in Raynal's radical Histoire des deux Indes) complained that the land was covered with lazy men who found it easier to stretch out their

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hands in the streets than to perform honest toil in the workshops. The philosophes also mainly disapproved of social mobility: people should stay in their inherited stations, content with the occupation of their fathers rather than "senselessly migrate from one status to another" (Diderot). Such chaos profoundly disturbed their Newtonian sense of rational stability. Voltaire, as well as Rousseau, thought it most unwise to educate the poor. Ronald Ian Boss, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 84, notes that Voltaire occasionally allowed the possibility of a few of the canaille entering the ranks of civilized society via education, but "he considered this possible only for a small minority" (p. 191). Like almost all the philosophes, he saw the country basically divided into two societies, the propertied and propertyless, with the latter being outside the "nation" and redemption possible only for a few, perhaps for all time. Yet these same writers could savagely denounce the malefactors of great wealth, the exploiters of the poor, the priestly misleaders of minds, calling for a Spartan equality, even a socialism, in ways that defy any attempt to classify them according to later ideological criteria. One must attend to their own storehouse of ideas or climate of opinion or episteme, which made for associations illogical to later mental structures but not necessar- ily to theirs. It would appear that no one was revolutionary before 1789, even the future Jacobin revolutionists. "Woe betide those who provoke revolutions! Woe betide those who make them!" orated the youthful Danton; while young Robespierre delivered a high school enconium to the new king in 1775, and called himself de Robespierre, dropping this aristocratic pretense only in 1792.

III

Of those philosophes who were alive in 1789, we find at least one interesting group whose members made a valiant effort, ending in failure, to mediate between the great ideas of the past, on which they had been raised and which had dazzled them, and the tumultuous events of the present which might be the realization of those ideas. Gary Kates is the latest to study the Cercle Social, a place where intellectuals and politicians tried to meet constructively.23 This group was almost the intellectual or brains-trust arm of what came to be known as the Girondist faction or party, which had its season of power 1791-92 but perished at the hands of the rival "Jacobins" (better to say Montagnards or Robespierrists?4) Of course, the leading student of the Girondists has denied that they existed, such is the confusion of the Revolutionary parties or factions. But there

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was a distinctive group here, of great significance for the student of the relationship of Enlightenment ideas to the Revolution. This group strove valiantly to link up the two. On the intellectual wing it had a printing press, published several journals, and interested itself deeply in that process of education that the philosophes thought so vital. Condorcet was close to the Cercle Social, Brissot and the Rolands were more central to it. Another group, the Club of '89, more aristocratic and more moderate, included Lafayette, the philosophical Destutt de Tracy and for a time Condorcet; it can be said to have made the same attempt to bring Enlightened ideas to bear on the Revolution. But the Cercle Social/Girondist complex stands in the center. It more nearly than any other group represented the Revolution of the Enlightenment, and this failed. Through their press, the Imprimerie du Cercle Social, their newspapers and journals (La bouche defer, Chronique du mois, Sentinelle), their clubs (Amis de la verite), the Cercle sought first to provide "a forum where intellectuals and politicians met," a point of contact between thought and practice; and, second, to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment and the Revolution broadly among the citizens (at least the "active" or propertied ones.) As perhaps their greatest figure, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, put it, the Girondins wanted to develop rational political institutions based on the ideas of the Enlightenment, and to spread these among the people. This was based on the profoundly accurate perception that revolutions can never be the work of politics alone, of violent change and centralized elite dictatorships, but must go to the depths of society and change the hearts of men. Otherwise, as Yeats once wrote, the beggars change places but the lash goes on; the revolution will change nothing except the personnel of the ruling caste. (Foucault: "nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses on a much more minute and everyday level are not also changed."" Compare the "hegemony" concept of the more sophisticated kinds of Marxism such as Gramsci's.) As one of the French revolutionists then put it, "Cannons will win the Revolution, but public instruction will consolidate it; it is the basis of the Revolution."26 There was in this (to us) something of a totalitarian element: France must become a nation united behind the Revolution in a way akin to Rousseau's "civil religion" (of the Contrat social); a new moral cement, replacing that of the old religion, was a necessity. (This dream of total unity is a common denominator of all the Revolutionary groups.7 The notion of a pluralistic, value-free political community could scarcely be conceived.) It is also true that these intellectual leaders tended to see themselves as a new priesthood of reason. The Girondist segment included some of the most militant enemies of"priestcraft" and "superstition" in 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 329 best, or worst, spirit of the Encyclopedists, deists, anti-clerics. They supported, indeed created, the controversial Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which some of them saw as a reformed Christianity, others however as a non-Christian cult of reason). They sponsored a plan for national education to be supervised by a National Society for the Arts & Sciences, an intellectual elite of their own choosing. The Girondin vocabulary featured words like "unity," "universality," "harmony." "Religion and the laws..., institutions, rituals, customs, letters, arts, manners, and morality" should all be part of a single culture." An important part of the Enlightenment ideology, of course, was the belief, stemming from John Locke and preached by such as Condillac in France, that human nature can be changed by education. Let the State, then, by controlling education, and turning it over to the illuminds, mold a new species of mankind! (This was not a Girondist monopoly; the more radical Jacobins held even more extreme views. Robespierre wanted to take children away from parents, keep them in barracks: "The nation alone has the right to raise children.""29) But this cultural integration was supposed to work in the interest of the new Enlightenment-based social ideas: fraternity, liberty, civic equality within the national framework, popular participation in politics. "It is education that forms culture and prepares a generation of men disposed to cherish and respect the new regime" (Kates, 109). The Enlightenment ideas must be spread to the masses. Thephilosophes had addressed only an elite, the next task was to expand this charmed circle to embrace the whole nation. "Every man who is even part philosophe must feel that it is now necessary to write for this class of citizen," i.e., the "ignorant bulk of the Third Estate" ( J. M. Lequino, cited by Kates, 110). Unfortunately there was a gap here that proved too great. It seems unlikely that these upper-class intellectuals understood the popular mentality at all. Kates cogently argues that the Girondists were not on the whole the party of the bourgeoisie as some have argued, but of the Enlightenment intelligentsia. Though their program did include a Phys- iocratic free-market economy, with a minimum of government regulation, they were "neither a pro-socialist nor a pro-capitalist group"; the terms are anachronistic. They were for the most part upper-class people (the distinction between "bourgeois" and "noble" is largely meaningless in the late Ancien Regime) including lawyers, physicians, professors, priests, and quite a few aspiring writers. But so were most of the more radical Jacobins. What chiefly defined the so-called Gironde circle (the leading figures were in fact Parisian) was their literary and intellectual quality. As an example, the beautiful Manon Roland, daughter of a Paris engraver, had read Plutarch before she was 10, F6nelon at 15, Candide at

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16--before Rousseau seduced her intellectually along with so many others. The man she married was a factory inspector, but "definitely a philosophe." At their first meeting they argued about Rousseau, Voltaire, and Raynal. "Once I get involved in intellectual matters, in science and study, goodbye love!" she wrote." Most significantly, the Cercle Social Girondists were the group that took seriously the task of squaring the Revolution with the Enlightenment. As intellectuals they mostly proved poor politicians, unable to face violence, confusion, and unreason, often appearing, as Mme. Roland said of Louis S6bastien Mercier, one of the authors who sat in the Convention, as "nothing but a zero" there. The Gironde's "tactical ineptitude" cost its defeat in the final struggle with the Montagnards. Their greatest figures- Brissot, M. and Mme. Roland-are among the tragic heroes of the Revolution, the best and the brightest, who did their best and worst, and lost. The Jacobin followers of Robespierre and Saint-Just, who sent the Girondists to the guillotine or to suicide in '93-'94, bitterly denounced the philosophes and Encyclopddistes, who were to them almost symbols of Satanism. "Men of letters" became synonomous with traitors. Smashing the bust of Helv6tius in the Jacobin Club, the Montagnards assailed virtually all the Enlightenment thinkers as atheists, materialists, elitists- we might add feminists. (Robespierre's faction was violently anti-feminist, allowing the women to attend meetings only if they brought their knitting and sat quietly. The Committee of Public Safety accompanied the execution of Manon Roland and Olympe des Gouges with a sermon on how these arrogant would-be scholars had encompassed their ruin by "forgetting the virtues of their sex." The Girondists harbored the leading feminist strain, Condorcet being especially notable as an advocate of women's rights.) Such intellectuals were also said to be "egoists," individualists, enemies of Virtue (which, the key word in Jacobin discourse, meant the subordination of individual interests to the General Will). The Robespier- rists saw their enemies as "the most educated, the most scheming, the cleverest," who, Robespierre declared, "favor with all their power the rich egoists and the enemies of equality."31 Saint-Just explained that traitors "tried to fool the people with complicated intellectual arguments." Suspi- cious of theory, Robespierre thought that "It is not necessary to search in the books of political writers, who did not at all foresee this revolution..."'32 The Gironde reciprocated, until silenced by Terror; Brissot called Robespierre's speeches "unintelligibility posing as profundity;" Con- dorcet said that Robespierre had no ideas, no learning, no feeling, a cipher masking his intellectual bankruptcy by outrageous bluster and gestures.

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An evangelist, moreover: "Robespierre is a priest and always will be."33 We must of course add immediately what is well known, that the Jacobins used one major Enlightenment thinker, Rousseau, extensively, even obsessively. "Divine man," Robespierre called him. But they used Jean-Jacques as an anti-intellectual talisman-the Jean-Jacques whom they made their patron saint was the anti-philosophe, the enemy of Voltaire and Diderot. The pure soul of Rousseau had smelled out the decadence of those sophisticated urban intellectuals; his "invincible contempt for the scheming intriguers who usurped the name of philosophes" had called down upon him their hatred and persecution. The slogan "Down with the philosophes" was emblazoned on the banner of the Jacobin cult of Rousseau. Whether this accurately represented Rousseau is, of course, an old but still burning question. Had Rousseau lived to see the Revolution, Maximilien declaimed, "who can doubt that his generous soul would have embraced the cause of justice and equality with transports of joy?"' A good many have. The legal defender of Louis XVI at his "trial" before the Convention also quoted Rousseau. (Correctly, he pointed out that the General Will according to Du contrat social cannot decide particular cases.) The moderates, Brissot and Mme. Roland, were equally devotees of Rousseau; so were conservatives like d'Antraigues?5 Everybody in some sense was (all literate persons at any rate). They drew not only on different interpretations but different writings of Jean- Jacques, which still give rise to considerable differences of opinion in the vast literature on Rousseau. In contradiction to Robespierre, Buzot, Mme. Roland's lover, wrote from his death cell that if the philosophes, including Rousseau, had been alive, "they would have experienced the same fate. Like us, if they had not emigrated..., Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably would have been condemned to death; they would all have perished on the scaffold." About this eminent scholars have disagreed. Alfred Cobban thought Robespierre had very little real knowledge of Rousseau's writings (as some modem Marxists who never read more than a page of the 40,000 or so Marx and Engels wrote). The only Rousseau work that much affected him evidently was the Confessions, from which one could scarcely derive the Rousseauvian political philosophy. But Carol Blum's impressive recent study concludes that Robespierre's reading of Rousseau was "narrow, rigid, unnuanced...but nonetheless authentically faithful to a central core of the master's teachings."" The Disciples, we know, are the death of every art, invariably distorting the thoughts of the Masters as they pass through their simple, compulsive, activist minds. But the critics have now conditioned us to say that there is no "real" Rousseau, no essential meaning to the texts; what Robespierre found there was as true as anyone

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 332 Roland N. Stromberg else's perception. We can at least say that the strange nightmare of the Terror resulted (under the circumstances of the Revolution) from the ideas of perhaps the most powerful political writer of all times (in terms of ability to influence) being filtered through a kindred but lesser, disciple- type spirit (as with the case of Marx and Lenin).) More precisely, one might say that first the Enlightenment absolutized politics (taught that there is a single rational standard) and then Rousseau moralized it (spread over it his passionate concern to recover virtue from decadence). It was a lethal combination. An equally old debate concerns whether the Jacobins in the frenzied phase of the Republic of Virtue created a new religion. Recent scholarship has revealed that the clubs always contained a high percentage of clergy?8 Atheism was Robespierre's bete noire, equated in his eyes with aristocratic intellectualism which in turn equaled treason to the Republic. His deistic cult of the Supreme Being, celebrated in so bizarre a manner near the end of the Reign of Terror, in its basic structure resembled Christianity:

The faith of Thomas Miinzer during the "radical Reformation" that all Christians should be equal at the impending apocalypse did not much differ from this "new form of religion" during the radical phase of the French Revolution, when a "passion for equality" accompanied claims that a new priesthood, those who spoke for the People, were infallibly inspired and above all laws. The Church Militant became the Nation. Sermons at the Clubs nightly; the Holy Trinity of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; apostles, oaths, ceremonies, new rites and festi- vals, and a new calendar marked this secularized religion.39

Rousseauvian virtu seemed to equal the Holy Spirit. A religious vocabulary was much in use ("l'amoursacrd de la patrie"). The final manic Reign of Terror is only comprehensible as the work of spirit-possessed men who believed that they alone were in a state of grace (virtu or the General Will dwelling in them), were hence infallible, and those who opposed them sinners against the patriotic light. Blum cites a young revolutionary of 1831 who considered Jesus, Rousseau, Robespierre as the "holy and sublime trinity," marching inseparably together, alike as much in their martyrdom as in their creed. Furet and RichetI noted a resemblance in 1792-94 to methods used 200 years before by Parisians of the Catholic League. Certainly in a Saint-Just the new creed was conceived quite deliberately as a secular version of Christianity: "Heaven was no longer in men's hearts, they needed another more in conformity with human interests." Doctrinaire, sincere, rhetorical, a man of words and not of action (Robespierre almost never did anything; he made speeches), the self-

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 333 righteous Robespierre was above all an actor, a totally political man with no private self, inventing himself as the incarnation of the spirit of history.41 Like Jean-Jacques himself, the deputies who supported the Mountain tended to be provincials, from the peripheral regions, suspicious of Parisian sophistication; less urban and less educated as compared to the Gironde group.42 All of which may indicate that with the single exception of a highly selective and tendentious usage of Rousseau, Robespierrist predominance marked the point at which, as Alfred Cobban asserts, "the Revolution broke away from the Enlightenment."43 We may quote the rest of this passage from this eminent scholar, chief pioneer in Anglosaxony at any rate of the reinterpretation of the Revolution, on this subject:

The Revolution... strayed from the path of enlightened happiness to the strait and narrow road of Jacobin virtue, from the principle of representative and constitutional government to the rule of an authori- tarian elite, from the philosophes' ideal of peace to the revolutionaries' crusading war and the Napoleonic dream of conquest..., from the ideals of democracy and peace to a policy of dictatorship and war.

But this will hardly do. We need only recall that it was the Girondins who embarked on war, at a time when Robespierre was a pacifist; not to mention their questionable commitment to "democracy." Condorcet did finally reach that, probably reluctantly, in 1793. The main philosophe tradition to which the Girondins belonged had never held it; its authoritari- anism, that of allegedly scientific Reason, was as great in principle as that of the religiously inspired Robespierrians. But it is true that the Reign of Terror appalled the remaining philosophes, to a degree suggested by the researches of one scholar who found 37 of 38 remaining Encyclopddistes (contributors to that famous hallmark of the French Enlightenment) hostile to the Terror." It is arguable that the Girondists' political collapse stemmed from their inability to handle real violence, a common trait of intellectuals; traumatized by the bloody mob actions of August-Septem- ber 1792, they then could not accept guillotining the royal family, in that fateful issue on which they lost to the murderous logic of Robespierre and Saint-Just. We might say alternatively that first the intellectuals failed and then the new evangelists. So did the politicians; an option in addition to the two above seemed to have been Danton, who came to the fore for ten months between Brissot and Robespierre, and who is one popular candidate for failed tragic hero of the Revolution. He was a child of the Enlightenment (well read in thephilosophes), but not a literary man, not an ideologist, not

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a fanatic, yet a believer in the Revolution.45 Comte and Michelet long ago suggested that Danton stood between the "talkers" (Girondins) and the "bloody fanatics." Unfortunately he was also corrupt (with that cheerful promotion of self interest that seems typically Old Regime and perhaps typically French) and had little vision. We may perhaps draw the lesson that something of the idealism intellectuals provide is a sine qua non of political affairs, just as is the man of action's practicality; if it is ever possible to have the right combination of the two, this Revolution did not find it.

Danton belonged to a group of ambitious young provincials who came to Paris just before 1789 looking for fame and fortune, often as writers, or lawyers. A counter-culture world of obscure or underground intellectuals, of la basse littgrature, which Robert Damton has done so much to illuminate, was a rich source of future revolutionary leadership." These audacious autodidacts filled a vacuum of power during the Revolution; that was what Tocqueville meant by theorizing that the intellectuals substituted for an absent political middle class in France. That such doubtfully sane or decidedly criminal figures as Marat and Carra could have exercised considerable power for a time at a critical stage of the Revolution undoubtedly does say something about the French un- preparedness for responsible parliamentary government. But these marginal figures did not all become wild-eyed radicals; Brissot was one of them as much as Marat. As we noted, studies have indicated a more provincial, less Parisian as well as less "intellectual" provenance for the average radical Jacobin. Robespierre had been a provincial lawyer. No external social or economic categories can account for the ideological positions adopted. We need the help of psychology-were there data enough, and if we had enough time and wisdom to psychoanalyze each and every revolutionary personality. (It can hardly be without significance, many have noticed, that Rousseau and Robespierre had remarkably similar childhood experiences of orphanhood and abandonment.) If, then, action was not the sister of the dream, if intellect failed to match practice at this dawn of the modem political era, there are also some instructive lessons to be found among those authentic illumines who survived the French Revolution. One such was Destutt de Tracy who, escaping the guillotine by two days, lived on until 1836 (though with whitened hair from 1794). This sturdy aristocrat had been aphilosophe disciple ever since "my eyes were dazzled and my mind was astonished" by their works in his youth. He had been a member of the Society of 1789

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with Lafayette, Mirabeau, Lavoisier, et al., those aristocratic friends of the Revolution some of whom it was destined to devour, after they had tried to serve it. Too patrician to associate with sans culottes, Thomas Jefferson's friend Tracy was nonetheless radical enough to have voted with Robespierre on a few issues (slavery and colonialism notably). This grand seigneur, who managed to retain his great wealth through all the regimes, remained a dogmatic rationalist until belatedly discovering, like all social scientists, that men are irrational. Disciple of Condillac and Condorcet, he devoted much of his life to the quest of "bridging the gap between animate and inanimate nature" by developing Condorcet's "social mathematics." The result was the dubious science of "ideology," first embraced and then ridiculed by Napoleon, beloved of Thomas Jefferson, exerting an influence on August Comte and thus all of modem sociology. For us the interesting thing is that his miraculous rescue from the dread blade in the nick of time, after watching Condorcet, Lavoisier, Chenier, so many others die, led Tracy to withdraw from politics to the realm of pure theory. The Faith of Reason shown just as brightly for him, but it was back to the ivory tower to think out the foundations; "Tracy learned from the Terror that human nature had to be fully explored and explained before one could hope for successful self-government"47 One may find here the birth of the social sciences, whatever the future of that enterprise; or one may say that here the intellectual and the politician, theory and practice, parted company forever, or at least for a long season. The Revolution had registered the failure of praxis. The modern intellectual was born, at war with the real social world rather than at home in it, as for a moment during the last days of the aristocratic Old Regime in some sense he had been. Other epigoni suggest the same point. Another formerphilosophe was Saint-Martin, the "philosophe inconnu," who after 1794 became the leader of a new mystical religion associated with occult branches of Freemasonry." Rousseau's influence here extended in the direction of Romantic intuition and imagination, a personalist religion unleashing obscure cosmic forces in minds freed from the murderous dissections of analytical, materialistic science; quite the opposite of Tracy's scientism, but agreeing with it in the flight from political reality. If Tracy represented a bizarre exaggeration of the spirit of Voltaire, Martin did the same to Rousseau. Thought fragmented, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary disaster, to polarize in the extremes of Positivism and Romanticism, each taking flight in opposite directions from the real social world. Subsequent desperate attempts to reunite them are another story. There are no doubt other sequels to the Enlightenment's memorable

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encounter with Revolution.9 The two things were interlocked, as part of a larger dialectic of thought and action in human affairs; they did not mesh. Sophisticated Marxists or Hegelians who see this process as basic and do not expect utopian results can find room for their outlook here along with Christians to whom the Two Cities are destined never to be harmonious in this fatally flawed world. The rest of us can enjoy a fascinating piece of history which still seems somehow central to the whole modem world. For teachers of history, the topic combines dramatic events with a gallery of fantastic personalities and a deeply interesting exploration of how ideas (language, discourse, rhetoric?) interweave with circumstances (lesforces des choses) in the fabric of history. The French Revolution is great theater, whose inspired or manic actors tell us something profoundly important about the whole modem age: this was always understood, but today we seem to grasp it in a new way.

Notes

1. Roland N. Stromberg, "Reevaluating the French Revolution," The History Teacher 20:1 (Nov. 1986); William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (London, 1980); Frangois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (tr. London, 1981); Colin Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution," in Douglas Johnson, ed., French Society and the Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1976); Norbert Elias,"The Socio- genesis of the French Revolution," in his The Court Society (tr. New York, 1983). 2. Lynn Avery Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984). 3. Keith Michael Baker, "On the Problem of the Ideological Origins of the French Revolution," in Dominick LaCapra & Steven L. Kaplan, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 203-04. 4. Hunt, op. cit., pp. 51, 149, 187. On sans-culottism as elitist, see R.B. Rose, The Making of the Sans Culottes (Manchester, Eng., 1983). 5. Roland Mousnier, Social Hierarchies (New York, 1973), p. 135. 6. Crocker, "Interpreting the Enlightenment: A Political Approach,"Journal ofthe History ofIdeas, XLVI:2 (April-June, 1985), 230. 7. Thomas Schleich, Aufkliirung und Revolution (Stuttgart, FRG, 1981), p. 210. Among earlier inquiries, Daniel Momet, Les Origines intellectuelles de la Rdvolution frangaise (Paris, 1933); Furio Diaz, Filosofla et politica nel settecento francese (Torino: 1962). 8. Robert Shackleton, "When Did the French Philosophes Become a Party?" Bulletin oftheJohn Rylands University Library ofManchester, 60 (1977), 181-98. Another useful general discussion is Charles G. Strickler, Jr., "The Philosophe's Political Mission, 1750-1789," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 86. 9. Schleich, p. 207; J. Bertaud, Les origines de la Rdvolution frangaise (Paris,

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1971), p. 67. Barruel's Mbmoirespour servir a l'histoire duJacobinisme was published in London and Hamburg, 1797-99. Cf. Paul H. Beik, The French Revolution Seen from the Right (Philadelphia, PA, 1976); J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972). 10. Cited by Alfred Cobban, "The Enlightenment and the French Revolution," in Earl J. Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 1965). 11. Cited by Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1985), p. 14. Brissot, Discours sur l'utiliti des societis patriotiques et populaires... (Paris, 1791). 12. Carl Becker, in his famous essay The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932) likewise assumes that the Revolution tried to put into practice the ideals of the philosophes--to build their City of God. Byron: Did he not this for France? which lay before Bowed to the inborn tyranny of years? Broken and trembling to the yoke she bore Till by the voice of him and his compeers Roused up.... 13. Alan Charles Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment inParis (Princeton, NJ, 1976). 14. Kors, pp. 308, 321. The discussion of the Holbach survivors in confrontation with the Revolution is pp. 264 ff. 15. In 1785 Fr6ron thought "The partisans of Voltaire...occupy all the fine salons of Paris, rule the opinion of high society and distribute at their whim the prizes awarded to genius...." Linguet, perhaps the most truly revolutionary personality among the intellectuals of the era, was a foe of thephilosophes, at whom he flung epithets and who in turn called him a "madman." See the careful study by Darline Gay Levy, The Ideas and Careers of Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet: A Study in Eighteenth Century French Politics (Cham- paign-Urbana, IL, 1980). 16. John Lough, The Philosophes and Post-Revolutionary France (Oxford, Eng., 1982), p. 10. On Condorcet see Keith M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, IL, 1975). 17. Murrary Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbd Sieyes (Leicester, Eng., 1987), p. 7. 18. Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (London, 1983), p. 102. 19. Harry C. Payne, The Philosophes and the People (New Haven, CT, 1976). Disdain for the intellectual powers of the plebs was deeply laid among the eighteenth century intellectuals, and appears in even so radical a Jacobin as Marat; see Hampson, Will and Circumstance, pp. 210-11. See also Kors, pp. 322-24; Hunt, p. 143. 20. Schleich, op. cit., p. 210. 21. Lough, pp. 21-30. Schleich, op. cit., discusses Mably extensively. See also Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985); Bailey Stone, The French Parlements and the Crisis of the Old Regime (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986). 22. Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 270-72, 302: "Not until 1792 can Jacobinism be associated unequivocally with republicanism." Even after his attempted flight Louis retained the support of the National Assembly. Kennedy also finds that the Clubs did not generally believe in popular sovereignty and universal manhood suffrage until after the summer of 1791. 23. Gary Kates, op. cit.

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24. The Jacobin clubs, appearing all over France in 1789 with some roots in previous Masonic lodges, were virtually the consciousness of the Revolution all the way; they were moderate at first, and the various stages of Revolutionary leadership all worked through them. The Girondists as well as earlier the Feuillants were Jacobins in their time. Only in the 1793-94 phase did the Robespierrists or Montagnards or Conventionnels control the Jacobin Society having expelled the Girondists from it as well as from the legislature. 25. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York, 1980). 26. Cited by Kates, p. 263, from Bulletin des amis de la veritd, January, 1793. 27. Michelet wrote that Danton's great dream was "avast table in which all of France, reconciled, would be seated to break the bread of fraternity, without distinction of class or parties." (Cited by Arthur Mitzman, "Michelet, Danton, and the Corruption of Revolution- ary Virtue," Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 [1987], 453-66.) This was in fact everybody's dream. 28. On the Revolution's urge to standardize and nationalize the French language, wiping out the local dialects, see Peter O'Flaherty, "Langue nationale/langue naturelle: the Politics of Linguistic Uniformity during the French Revolution," Historical Reflections, summer 1987. 29. David P. Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre (New York, 1982), p. 157. See also R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Mona Ozouf, L'Ecole de France: Essais sur la Revolution, Utopie, et l'Enseignement (Paris, 1985). 30. Claude Manceron, Twilight of the Old Order 1774-1778 (tr. New York, 1977), pp. 268-272. On Mme. Roland see also Gita May, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York, 1970) and Martha Walling Howard, The Roland Woman (Ontario, CA, 1984). 31. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1986), p. 186, 175. See also Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1964). 32. Cited by Schleich, p. 155, from Robespierre's 1793 Report on the Principles of Revolutionary Government. 33. Cited by Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolutions: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of "Ideology" (Philadelphia, PA, 1978), p. 39. 34. Schleich, p. 236. On Robespierre and Rousseau see also Hampson, Will and Circumstance; Jordan, op. cit.; Cobban, loc. cit. in Wasserman, ed. An issue of Annales d'histoire de la Rdvolution Frangaise, 50 (1978) featured several articles on Rousseau and the Revolution, including M. Dorigny on Rousseau and the Girondins. 35. Cf. Gordon McNeil, "The Anti-Revolutionary Rousseau," American Historical Review, 58 (1953), 800-23. 36. L6onard Buzot, Mimoires sur la Rdvolutionfrangaise.... (Paris, 1823). 37. Blum, op. cit., p. 277. Joan McDonald's useful older study, Rousseau and the French Revolution 1762-1791 (London, 1965) has been criticized for exaggerating its thesis that the revolutionaries did not know Rousseau's thought but only his "myth." Yet no one doubts that it contains much truth. 38. Kennedy, Jacobin Clubs, calculates that the clubs contained a membership of 6 percent clergy compared to 5 percent in the whole population. 39. Stromberg, "Reevaluating the French Revolution," 99. See also among others Hampson, WillandCircumstance, pp.218, 234-35; Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers 1500- 1660 (Cambridge, Eng., 1982), I, 163-71. 40. Franqois Furet & Denis Richet, La Rdvolutionfrangaise (Paris, 1973); cited by Gerald J. Cavanaugh, "The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography," French

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Historical Studies, 7 (1972), 587-606. 41. See David P. Jordan, op. cit. 42. Hunt, op. cit., 133, 139-40, 149. 43. Cobban, in Wasserman, op. cit., p. 314. 44. Frank A. Kafker, "Les Encyclop6distes et laTerreur," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 14 (1967), 284-95. Also R. Mortier,"Les heritiers des philosophes devant l'experience r6volutionnaire," XVIIIme sidcle, 6 (1974), 45-57. 45. See Norman Hampson, Danton (London, 1978). 46. Robert Danton, The Literary Underground ofthe Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Kennedy, Jacobin Clubs, 67; Hampson, Will and Circumstance, part II; Schleich, pp. 218-21; Hunt, Chap. 6. 47. See Emmet Kennedy, op. cit., p. 38. See also Kennedy's "'Ideology' from Destutt de Tracy to Marx," Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 353-68. 48. See Kates, op. cit., 264 ff. Kates also calls attention to another former member of the Cercle Social, Sylvain Marechal, who survived to join B abeuf in 1796 and devoted himself to a frankly religious cult of revolution-developing Robespierre's Cult into a proletarian mythology. 49. In his Epilogue, Hampson (Will and Circumstance) invokes Mercier de la Rivibre, the utopist (The Year 2440) and sometime Girondist deputy, who in a confused way came to accept the conspiracy view, repudiating his rationalism in attributing the failures of the Revolution to too much reasoning a la Locke and Condillac.

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