‘REAPING THE HARVEST OF THE EXPERIMENT?’ THE GOVERNMENT’S ATTEMPT TO TRAIN ENLIGHTENED CITIZENS THROUGH HISTORY EDUCATION IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE 17891802
Matthias Meirlaen
‘Revolution starts when the tyrant ends’,1 the young Jacobin revolu- tionary Louis Antoine Simon de Saint-Just argued on 27 December 1792 at the trial of Louis XVI. With these words, he voiced the politi- cal feelings that had gained the upper hand aft er three years of revo- lution. Since the downfall of the absolute monarchy, it was no longer considered possible to reconstruct contemporary society in a moder- ate way by making laws based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. A totally new order had to be established, and before this could be done, tabula rasa had to be made with the ‘old regime’. Th e mistaken past had to be erased from the public scene literally as well as symbolically. All statues that once had been set up by the Bourbons were destroyed, churches were closed, street names that referred to monarchy, feudalism or religion were replaced by names that refl ected the revolutionary ideals, and so on. Only aft er this destructive action, could be given birth to a new Republican era. In order to herald the advent of a new age, a new secular calendar was invented.2 But—paradoxically—the revolutionaries’ desire to break with the past did not imply the end of the historical revival that had been devel- oping all over western Europe since the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury. Th e least one can say is that the way the revolutionaries dealt with the past was ambiguous. On the one hand, by destroying all symbols of the ancient social structures, they wanted to emphasize that a new, high-minded age had arrived, while on the other, they tried to legiti- mize the order they had established by appealing to historical argu- ments. Many revolutionaries, for example, admired the political system
1 Michael Walzer, Régicide et Révolution. Le procès de Louis XVI (Paris: Payot, 1989), 287. 2 Robert Gildea, Th e past in French History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 20–21. 248 matthias meirlaen of democratic Athens and adored the manner the Roman Republic functioned. Oft en, their awe for antique society went together with a quest for connections with the working of contemporary institu- tions. Jacques Pierre Brissot, one of the most important spokesmen of the Girondists, for instance, emulated Lucius Junius Brutus, according to the tradition one of the fi rst two consuls of Rome. François Noël Babeuf, a journalist and a fi erce agitator for the revolution, decided to change his name into ‘Gaius Gracchus’, in homage to this famous Roman tribune of the plebs known for his ‘social measures’. Implicitly, it was suggested that the ancient Greeks and Romans were the fi rst to pursue a society based on the strongly appreciated principles of ‘lib- erty, equality, and fraternity’.3 To enforce such historical legitimizations, the French revolutionar- ies used all kinds of symbolism. In the new meeting hall of the Assem- bly in the Tuileries in Paris, ‘saints’ of the Roman Republic like Marcus Furius Camillus, Lucius Junius Brutus, Publius Valerius Publicola, and Lucius Quintius Cincinnatus received life-sized statues together with the Greek scholars Solon, Lycurgus, Plato, and Demosthenes in 1793. Th e hall itself was equipped aft er the Roman model as well. Th e walls were painted to look like marble, and laurel crowns and fasces were drawn upon the gray blue colour to make the Assembly resemble the ancient senate. Moreover, the Roman past was honoured not only in the buildings of the new political order, but also in everyday life, where citizens had to become acquainted with the ancestors of the revolutionary and Republican ideals. Hence, busts of Roman heroes appeared on the street corners, new towns and roads were named aft er these ‘great men’, and so on.4 ‘Rebuilding society, meant repub- licanising everything’, noted the ‘prêtre citoyen’ (citizen priest) Henri Grégoire.5 To this end, the symbolic imitation of the ancient republic served as a guide. Yet, the revolutionaries did not use the past only because of its legitimizing function. Lynn Hunt demonstrated that their (historical) symbols also served the purpose of political propaganda by ‘grabbing
3 David Larmour, ‘History recreated or malfunctioned desire? Th e Roman Repub- lic re-membered in the French Revolution’. David Troyansky et al. (ed.), Th e French Revolution in Culture and Society (New York: Greenwood, 1991), 35–43, here 41–42. 4 Larmour 1991, 41. 5 Gildea 1994, 21.