The French Revolution

Transcription

1 The French Revolution

2 A volume In THE DOCUMENTARY HISTORY of WESTERN CIVILIZATION -

3 The French Revolution Edited by PAUL H. BEIK PALGRA VE MACMILLAN

4 ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / THE FRENCH REVOLUTION English translation copyright 1970 by Paul H. Beik Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published in the United States 1970 First published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Associated companies in New York Toronto Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN

5 Contents Introduction x PART I. CROWN, PARLEMENT, AND ARISTOCRACY 1. November 19, 1787: Chretien Fran~ois de Lamoignon on Principles of the French Monarchy 1 2. April 17, 1788: Louis XVI to a Deputation from the Parlement of Paris 3 3. May 4, 1788: Repeated Remonstrances of the Parlement of Paris in Response to the King's Statement of April December 12,1788: Memoir of the Princes 10 PART II. THE SURGE OF OPINION 5. January, 1789: Sieyes, What Is the Third Estate? 6. February, 1789: Mounier on the Estates General 7. March 1, 1789: Parish Cahiers of Ecommoy and Mansigne 8. March 14, 1789: Cahier of the Nobility of Crepy 9. March 26,1789: Cahier of the Clergy of Troyes PART III. THE Loss OF ROYAL INITIATIVE 10. June 16, 1789: Barentin's Memorandum on the Crisis in the Estates General June 22, 1789: Montmorin's Testimony in Support of Necker June 23, 1789: Louis XVI at the Royal Session of the Estates General August 2, 1789: Rivarol on the Meaning of July PART IV. THE DEFEAT OF A MODERATE CoALITION 14. August 4, 1789: Night Session of the National Assembly August 20-26,1789: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 94

6 Vlll CONTENTS 16. September 1,1789: Mirabeau on Royal Authority September 4, 1789: Abbe Gregoire on the Royal Veto and the Legislature of Two Chambers 107 PART V. THE POWER OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 18. October 10, 1789: Talleyrand on Ecclesiastical Property October 15, 1789: Mirabeau, a Secret Memoir January 28, 1790: A Petition to the National Assembly from Leaders of Jewish Communities ] May 29, 30, 1790: Debate on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy "I 3 6 PART VI. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY BETWEEN CoUNTERREVOLUTION AND DEMOCRACY 22. April, 1791: Robespierre on the Suffrage June 14, 1791: Chapelier on Organizations of Workers June 20, 1791: Louis XVI on the Subject of His Flight August 11,1791: Barnave on Representative Government and the Social Order September 8, 1791: Marie Antoinette on Ending the Revol ution 176 PART VII. WAR AND REVOLUTION 27. January 11, 1792: Robespierre on War January 20, 1792: Brissot on War April 27, 1792: Malouet, a Conservative View of the Revolution July 7,1792: Marat, a Radical View of the Revolution 215 PART VIII. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CONVENTION 31. November 19, 1792: Petitioners vs. Roland on Price- Fixing December 12, 1792: An Attack on the Slave Trade February 15, 1793: Condorcet Presents His Constitution to the Convention March 10, 1793: Danton on Crisis Measures May 10, 1793: Robespierre on Constitutional Principles 255

7 CONTENTS ix PART IX. THE CONVENTION AND THE SANS-CULOTTES 36. June 25, 1793: Roux Before the Convention September 2, 1793: Section des Sans-Culottes, Social Views November 7,10,1793: Dechristianizing November, 1793: Pere Duchesne, His Plebeian Appeal February 5, 1794 (17 Pluviase, An II): Robespierre's Report on the Principles of Political Morality February 26, March 3, 1794: Saint-Just on the Ventase Decrees May 7, 1794 (18 Floreal, An II): Robespierre's Report on Religious and Moral Ideas and Republican Principles 299 PART X. THE SEARCH FOR STABILITY AFTER THERMIDOR 43. June 23, 1795: Boissy d'anglas on a New Constitution July, 1795: Louis XVIII, Declaration of Verona November 30, 1795: Babeuf's Le Tribun du peuple, No December 6, 1795: Mallet du Pan After Vendemiaire , 1795, 1796: Joseph de Maistre on Reason, Monarchy, and Aristocracy September, 1796: TheoanthropophiIe Manual September 19, 1797: Bonaparte to Talleyrand About Sieyes February or March, 1799: Mme. de Stael on Constitutionalism and Dictatorship 361 The Republican and Gregorian Calendars 372 Chronology 374 Selected References 386 Index 391

8 Int roduction THE FRENCH REVOLUTION lives in the consciousness of world opinion as a reference point for change. It retains a remarkable contemporaneity, product of the passage from a traditionalistic, aristocratic society toward one whose contours are the focus of today's contestations. What began to be visible in the wreckage of the old regime at the end of the eighteenth century was not yet today's world; one may not ask of one era that it be another. Many of the projections of the revolution did not come to passfor example, the vision of a society of small independent producersand although our political and social vocabulary owes much to the revolutionary era its terms have been buffeted since then by many contexts. Yet the evolution, even distortion, of terms was to do honor to the importance of the issues raised but not solved at the end of the eighteenth century, and some of the revolution's principles-for example, the sovereignty of the people and national self-determination-have gone from triumph to triumph. What the revolution possessed, owing to the breakdown of authority and the struggle for the succession on the part of contending groups and programs, was intensity, seriousness, and variety. The revolution never spoke with one voice except in the claims of its competing children and their descendants. It was a collective experience, unplanned, a clashing of wills and purposes. It remains a point of reference because of this, because the attackers and defenders brought out problems of political organization and social justice and, when these needed backing, propositions about the nature and prospects of man. Such a revolution could not fail to be an international event, a "challenge" to the institutions and conceptions of Europe and, to a lesser degree, of America, and a "struggle" over their futureto use the metaphors of Robert R. Palmer. The French were not alone in making this challenge, nor were they the first to do so,

9 INTRODUCTION xi and they never claimed that the principles at stake in the struggle applied only to France. Where the French Revolution was unique was in its combinations of men and circumstances, its timing, its stages, and its methods. And since France was by many indexes the most powerful, advanced, and influential country in Europe, the French experience in all its intensity became the model that overshadowed the others and gave its name to the era. The earliest decision in the making of this book of documents about the revolution was to concentrate on this French experience rather than on the international, in order to make room for the fullest possible expression of what the French thought was happening to them or ought to happen. These events and prospects were long considered, and for some are still thought to have been, primarily political. Certainly the revolution was a political effort of great staying power, brought on by the failure of those in charge of the absolute monarchy to make reforms without losing the initiative and authority essential to government; it became a political effort to replace absolutism by some form of representative institutions, an effort that lasted for ten years before its temporary diversion into other channels by Napoleon. This central theme encompassed many technical problems of a growing political science; but what is most interesting in the experience is its core, the linking of government to society, which in the given circumstances produced some half-dozen possibilities. The least drastic change would have been a representative system guaranteeing the old social system as long as its defenders, preponderant in the Estates General, wished to preserve it. The next possibility, recommended by men such as Jean Joseph Mounier and his fellow Anglophiles, featured strong royal authority and a legislature of two chambers in an effort to conciliate the aristocracy and contain the lower classes; the Anglophiles, while hoping for the support of all propertied and educated people, including nobles and clergy, in reality deprived the aristocracy of the guarantees that most of them wanted. Other positions followed, both logically and as the products of events. There were Constitutionalists, followers of Lafayette or of Antoine Barnave and his friends, two wings that came together as Feuillants in later, adverse times in a futile effort to check the democratic avalanche before its weight became ON"erwhelming. The Constitutionalists at first opposed some of the Anglophile brakes on popular enthusiasm, although they agreed with the Anglophiles in wanting to liinit the suffrage and in regard-

10 xii INTRODUCTION ing representation as a political function best reserved for persons of tested capacity, the most obvious test being possession of property. Under the pressure of events, some of the Constitutionalists tended to evolve backward toward the Anglophile political position. Both groups were left behind by the revolution, but it would be an error to assume that their social and political preferences died out in France during the Terror; many of the Anglophiles and Constitutionalists survived in disguise or in silence, to emerge after Thermidor as royalists or moderate republicans. Meanwhile, owing to the violent overthrow of the monarchy in wartime conditions and under the threat of counterrevolution, moderates had to give way, throughout two-thirds of the period of the Convention, to democrats of varying degrees of egalitarianism. Girondin and Mountain deputies, some of them secretly reluctant, competed with each other in the presence of the powerful, spontaneous revolutionary movement of the sans-culottes, which, with its sincere but unsophisticated notions of direct democracy and social justice, and by virtue of the efforts of neighborhood leaders to take power in its name, threatened their leadership and at times the very existence of the Convention. Representative government in the crisis of the war and its hardships, complicated by yearnings for a better life awakened by the unusual, habit-destroying circumstances of the revolution, could be reconciled with order and with swift wartime decisions only by new theories of revolutionary government; these amounted to dictatorship in the name of unimpeachable values, and these means were resorted to during the Terror. The succession of political changes during the revolution, if it can be described systematically, must nevertheless be explained historically by combinations of circumstances. Nor did political programs fail to evolve with these circumstances. One cannot, for example, appreciate either the meaning or the dynamics of the revolution without awareness of the effects of the counterrevolution, which, moreover, itself tended to evolve, as did its opponents in the fight. The partisans of absolute monarchy, few and without influence in 1789, were predominant in the emigration in 1795 at the time of Louis XVIII's Declaration of Verona and were soon to be reinforced by intellectuals such as Joseph de Maistre, whose doctrines represented the maturing of a reactionary position inexplicable without the experience of the revolution. At the other extreme, another process of maturation was taking place as Franc;ois

11 INTRODUCTION Xlll Noel Babeuf concluded that the partitioning of properties was not enough. By 1797, when de Maistre became famous and Babeuf was executed, the problems confronting a moderate republican within France, or a moderate royalist, or a radical Jacobin, were by no means the same as they had been in, say, the summer of The revolutionary spectrum was, if not kaleidoscopic, at least not static. To many historians and others who use it as a point of reference, the revolution was most significant for what it did to the control of resources, over which the hold of the aristocracy was diminished and that of the middle classes and richer peasants was increased. Similarly the possession of property took on added importance as an influence on one's position in life, because advantages which in the old regime had been reserved by law for certain groups were abolished, with the result that the society was no longer one of legalized privileges; indeed it was no longer, in principle, one of groups having different sets of rights but one of equal individuals so far as the law was concerned. This social revolution is to be found everywhere in the documents assembled in the present collection, not only in the more obvious classical expressions such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the reforms of the night session of August 4, 1789, and not only in such master works as Sieyes's famous pamphlet of January, 1789, or Mounier's of the following month, or in still later expressions by Chapelier, Roland, Robespierre, and others. One can, in addition, find the contours of the social revolution in the protests of its critics, de Maistre and the more moderate Pierre Victor Malouet and Jacques Mallet du Pan on the right, and men on the left such as Jacques Roux and Jacques Hebert, who had learned the language of the sans-culottes, and Babeuf, in whose moral condemnation of the dominant forces of the revolution a form of revolutionary socialism had crystallized. Everywhere on the political spectrum will be found social aspirations and attitudes more or less consciously formulated as doctrines, because that was what the political struggle was about. Nor was the social side of the revolution altogether materialistic. It is impossible to mistake the moral fervor of a Condorcet, a Robespierre, or a Saint-Just, which has more to do with the dignity of man than with changes of ownership. This respect for the individual is a dominant note in the revolution, testified to even by conservatives in their varying shades, a Rivarol, a Malouet, a Mallet du Pan. The revolution as a contest over values reached its

12 XlV INTRODUCTION quintessence in disputes over the nature of man and the nature of religion. Man's capabilities and his place in history provided an issue visible whenever it was necessary to call upon overpowering premises. At the extremes of those represented here are de Maistre, with his view of man's weakness and need for help, and the dechristianizers, with their celebration of man's powers, but there were many nuances concerning religion. Robespierre's repon of May 7, 1794, and Chemin's Tbeoanthropophile Manual of 1796 illustrate positions between atheism and Christianity. It is natural to ask, "What of those who left no traces on paper, who cared little for politics, whose social aims did not extend much beyond material things, or whose values did not encompass much more than family and community loyalties and routine practices?" There is no penetrating that mass, who expressed themselves mainly by action or abstention, but perhaps never before had there been such swiftly growing consciousness of them, of the people, on the pan of the literate and reflective minority. The present collection of documents is drawn from the literate minority of observers and contestants, with an eye to the principal shadings of opinion; from expressions identifiable by author, time, and place. These are documents by persons who took stands, and that. is why their spectrum is, to begin with, political. This established, one notices that they cared deeply about society and values; theirs was a social politics; and one notices, again and again, that they were drawn into taking stands about the people and their potentialities. If I have had any special leaning, it has been toward such expressions, and toward the presentation of a full spectrum of opinions about this question of the people, so vital to politics, society, and values. This, then, is a book about the revolution that people thought was happening, or were trying to make happen. There was another revolution that was happening in spite of them-or, rather, through the instrumentality of their wills and aspirations-but above them and beyond the reach of any man or group, a grand total, so to speak, out of control: in short, the revolution of facts, of conditions and institutions; of statistics when it comes to documents. That revolution, with which French scholars have been concerning themselves to good effect, and particularly since Georges Lefebvre broadened the subject of the inquiry to include all social levels and the provinces as well as the center, is no less human than the revolution of the participants and observers. I have taken care to

13 INTRODUCTION xv record the latter's awareness of it but have had to renounce its statistical side, along with the international revolution, and along with laws, constitutions, and descriptive accounts that are readily available elsewhere, in order to devote this volume to the consciousness of contemporaries and to their conflicts of will and purpose. Those represented here are all French, it should be added, except for Joseph de Maistre, Mallet du Pan, and Mme. de StaH, who have special claims. Of course there cannot be an account of the evolution of each person, although in this respect Robespierre has been somewhat favored; in general, however, each has been called upon at a moment significant for him and for the revolution. And since there is not enough room for a spectrum for each year or period, I have emphasized certain problems at each stage: the conflict of the aristocracy with the officials of the absolute monarchy as public discussion increased offstage; the monarchy's loss of control and the failure of a moderate coalition to take charge; the rise and interaction of counterrevolution and democracy; certain key reforms, though here it was necessary to renounce comprehensiveness; the conflict of popular aspirations with the necessities of war and the ideologies of the leaders; the accumulation of competing views and the hazards of attempts to achieve stability. One could devote many pages to a search for an ideal periodization of the revolution; much of the pleasure of working with historical materials consists of such exercises of judgment; I have not deprived the reader of this pleasure but have simply placed the documents in chronological order and have provided a few headings and a substantial chronology of events to go with them. Naturally these documents are of varying lengths. Wherever possible, they have been included in their entirety. There are, however, superb pieces that are really small books, such as Condorcet's presentation of the so-called Girondin constitution to the Convention, Robespierre's report of May 7, 1794, and No. 35 of Babeuf's Tribun du peuple. In such cases, it has been necessary to adopt various devices, depending on the material. That of Condorcet is the most unusual, for, owing to the nature of the material, no effort has been made to represent all of the major ideas; rather, certain of the most significant passages, long enough to be self-contained, have been selected. In the case of Robespierre's May 7 report, as in that of Sieyes's What Is the Third Estate? mentioned earlier, and a number of other writings, the whole structure of the argument has been retained. In the case of Babeuf's

14 xvi INTRODUCTION No. 35 and a few other works, it has been possible to use the conclusion, or most of it, as a distinct entity. In every case, the headnote explains what has been done unless no cuts have been made. Most of these documents have not before been translated into English, and most of those that have been translated have been presented in truncated versions, and frequently in translation by nineteenth-century writers whose punctuation and choice of words now seem rather far removed from the original French in spirit and sometimes in literal meaning. In any case, all of the documents with the single exception of Louis XVIII's Declaration of Verona appear here in new translations. The accomplishment of this considerable task would have taken twice as long without the talent and efficiency of Doris Beik, my wife, who prepared preliminary drafts of them all, which I then revised with an eye to historical circumstances and usages, so that the translations are our joint effort, the greater contribution being hers and the responsibility mine. In sum, this is a book about the meaning of the revolution to those who were going through it, and about its problems, viewed from the principal points of view of that time and place, and with attention to the stages through which the revolution passed. It abstains from comprehensiveness and is intended as a companion volume to other studies while standing on its own as a body of literature representing a variety of attitudes in the participants and onlookers.