IX
REVOLUTIO
A Continent in Turmoil c. 1770–1815
THERE is a universal quality about the French Revolution which does not pertain to any of Europe’s many other convulsions. Indeed, this was the event which gave the word ‘Revolution’ its full, modern meaning: that is, no mere political upheaval, but the complete overthrow of a system of government together with its social, economic and cultural foundations. Nowadays the history books are filled with ‘revolutions’. There have been attempts, for example, to turn England’s Civil War into the ‘English Revolution’, and still more attempts to upgrade the Russian Revolution into the third round of a universal series. There’s the Roman Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Military Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, even, in recent years, the Sexual Revolution. Not all of them deserve the title.
But in 1789 there was reason to believe that changes were taking place which would affect people far beyond France and far beyond mere politics. Paris was the capital of a dominant power, and the centre of an international culture. The revolutionaries had inherited the Enlightenment’s belief in the universal abstraction of man. They felt that they were acting on behalf of all people everywhere, pitting themselves against universal tyranny. Their most noble monument was not some parochial pronouncement on the rights of the French but a ringing declaration on the Rights of Man (see below). ‘Sooner or later,’ Mirabeau told the National Assembly,
the influence of a nation that … has reduced the art of living to the simple notions of liberty and equality—notions endowed with irresistible charm for the human heart, and propagated in all the countries of the world—the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day …
This was the sort of sentiment which has inspired the label of ‘Europe’s first Revolution’ in place of something that was exclusively French.
Foreigners shared the same vivid sense of involvement. A young English enthusiast, later to repent, was to write ecstatically: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ An elder statesman could bewail: ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ ‘Here and now’, remarked the leading writer of the age having watched the Battle of Valmy, ‘a new era in the world begins.’ Historians, whether for or against, have invariably resorted to strong words. Thomas Carlyle, appalled by what he dubbed ‘sansculottism’, called the French Revolution ‘the frightfullest thing ever born of Time’.3 Jules Michelet, harbouring the opposite feelings, began: ‘I define the Revolution: the advent of the Law, the resurrection of Right, and the reaction of Justice.’
Map 20. Europe, 1810
The French Revolution plunged Europe into the most profound and protracted crisis which it had ever known. It consumed an entire generation in its tumults, its wars, its disturbing innovations. From the epicentre in Paris, it sent shock waves into the furthest recesses of the Continent. From the shores of Portugal to the depths of Russia, from Scandinavia to Italy, the shocks were followed by soldiers in bright uniforms with a blue, white and red cockade in their hats, and with ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ on their lips. For its partisans, the Revolution promised liberation from the traditional oppressions enshrined in monarchy, nobility, and organized religion. For its opponents, it was synonymous with the dark forces of mob rule and terror. For France, it spelt the start of a modern national identity. For Europe as a whole, it provided an object lesson in the danger of replacing one form of tyranny with another. It began with hopes of limited peaceful change; ‘it ended amidst promises of resistance to any form of change whatsoever’. In the short run, it met defeat; in the long run, in the realm of social and political ideas, it made, and continues to make, a major and a lasting contribution.
The pageant of the Revolution contains personalities and clichés that are known to every European schoolchild. The central parade of revolutionary leaders—Mirabeau, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Bonaparte—is complemented by the long line of their opponents and victims: by scenes of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette on the scaffold, of Charlotte Corday, the peasant girl who murdered Marat in his bath ‘to save a hundred thousand men’: of the émigré Duc d’Enghien, seized and executed on Bonaparte’s orders. It is surrounded by a host of auxiliary figures of colour and enterprise—by radical Tom Paine, the exiled English philosopher who ‘saw Revolution on two continents’, by the inimitable Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord, ci-devant bishop, ‘the irreverend Reverend of Autun’, survivor supreme; by Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the ice-cold prosecutor-general. In every European country it is accompanied by a vast gallery of heroes and villains, ranged for or against—in Britain by Nelson dying on the deck of HMS Victory, in Germany by Scharnhost and Gneisenau, in Austria by the patriot-martyr Andreas Hofer, in Poland by the noble Marshal Poniatowski riding his white horse to a watery grave, in Russia by the indomitable Kutuzov trudging doggedly through the snow. In European art and literature it is enriched by a series of unforgettable tableaux in words and paint, from Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra or David’s portraits of Napoleon to Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
Any account of the revolutionary era must look successively at the causes, at the revolutionary events themselves, and at the consequences. Every chronological narrative must begin with the prelude of pre-revolutionary ferment. It must examine how moderate demands led to extreme changes, and how the conflict in France led to Continental wars. The crisis starts with the first waning of the Enlightenment in the 1770s, and closes with the Congress of Vienna which opened in 1814.
Prelude
The causes of the French Revolution are thé subject of endless debate. One can distinguish the setting (which sometimes threatens to become the whole of previous history), the profound causes, or deep-laid sources of instability, and the immediate events or ‘sparks’ which ignited the barrel. The setting, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, consisted of a generalized but deepening climate of unease right across Europe. The changes that generated the unease were not concentrated in France; but France was both a participant and a witness. France, facing political paralysis and financial stress, proved less capable of standing the stresses than her neighbours. ‘The revolution [was] imminent in almost all of Europe. It broke out in France, because there the Ancien Regime was more worn out, more detested, and more easily destroyed than elsewhere.’
On the political front, the major earthquake occurred across the Atlantic. Great Britain, which the philosophes had always regarded as the most stable and moderate of countries, was plunged into a war with its American colonists who, with French help, determined to break free of British rule. But the War of American Independence (1776–83) had important repercussions in Europe. For one thing, it pushed France’s financial crisis towards the brink. It also made Frenchmen, and others, consider their own predicament: if poor old bumbling George III was to be classed as a tyrant, how should one classify the other monarchs of Europe? If the Americans could rebel against a 3d. duty on tea, what possible justification could there be for the massive imposts under which most Europeans groaned? If the USA had to be created because Americans had no representation in the British Parliament, what should all those Europeans think whose countries did not even possess a parliament? American constitutional thought was magnificently simple and universally relevant:
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are created equal and independent, that from their equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.6
Europe’s participation in the American Revolution is formally acknowledged with statues and monuments. The American factor in Europe’s Revolution is not always acknowledged so readily. But in the dozen years which separated the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 from the inauguration of the first President, George Washington, on 29 April 1789, it was the creation of the USA which brought debates about modern government to a head.
Tom Paine (1737–1809), a Norfolk Quaker from Thetford, was the living link between Europe and America. ‘Radical Tom’ devoted himself to the American cause after being outlawed from England. His Common Sense (1776) was the most effective tract of the American Revolution; hisThe Rights of Man (1791) was to be one of the most radical responses to the French Revolution. He was to sit in the French Convention, and to escape the guillotine by a whisker. His The Age of Reason (1793), a deist tract written in firebrand prose, caused a scandal. ‘My country is the world,’ he wrote, ‘and my religion is to do good.’
In Eastern Europe, the three great empires were digesting the first Partition of Poland (see Chapter VIII). There was relief that war had been avoided; but the clouds of propaganda could not conceal the facts of violence. What is more, in Poland-Lithuania itself the Partition only inflamed resentments against Russian hegemony. The strains of Polish Enlightenment were leading inexorably to a confrontation with the Tsarina. The Russian sphere of influence was moving in parallel with that of France towards a collision between the ‘tyrants’ and the ‘friends of liberty’. It was no accident that the revolutionary era would eventually culminate in a titanic clash between France and Russia.
Beyond or beneath everyday politics, there were indications that deep forces invisible on the ordered surface of late eighteenth-century Europe were somehow getting out of control. One source of anxiety was technological: the appearance of power-driven machines with immense destructive as well as constructive potential. The second source was social: a growing awareness of ‘the masses’, the realization that the teeming millions, largely excluded from polite society, might take their fate into their own hands. The third source was intellectual: a rising concern both in literature and in philosophy with the irrational in human conduct. Historians are pressed to decide whether these developments were related phenomena: whether the so-called Industrial Revolution, the collectivist strand in social thought, and the beginnings of Romanticism were connected parts of one coherent process or not; whether they were causes of the revolutionary upheaval, or merely its companions and contributors.
The Industrial Revolution is a blanket term which is widely used to describe a range of technological and organizational changes that were considerably wider than the single best-known element: the invention of power-driven machinery. What is more, the term has come to refer, after immense historical debates, to merely one stage in a still more complex chain of changes—now called ‘Modernization’—that did not begin to have its full effect until the following century (see pp. 764–82). Even so, there are a dozen elements of ‘proto-industrialization’ that must be taken into consideration; they include farming, mobile labour, steam power, machines, mines, metallurgy, factories, towns, communications, finance, and demography.
Scientific farming was one of the obsessions of the Enlightenment, and of the physiocrats in particular. From its initial, rationalizing stage, it progressed to the point where horse-driven (though not yet power-driven) machinery was creating the potential for greatly accelerated production. An English farmer from Hungerford, Jethro Tull (1674–1741), had advertised a machine-drill in his Horse-Hoeing Husbandry, published as long ago as 1703; the steel-tipped Rotherham ploughshare came on to the market in 1803. Over the intervening century, agricultural experimentation had raged. But progress was painfully slow, the average level of agricultural production was dictated, not by the tempo of innovations, but by the pace of the average farmer, [CAP-AG]
As farms increased their food production, more people could be fed from the produce of the same land. Men once used to work the fields could be released for other forms of employment. The rise in agricultural efficiency aided a rise in the birth rate, and stood to create a pool of surplus labour, at least in those countries where peasants were free to leave the land. Yet a supply of unskilled peasants provided only half an answer. Industry was to need skills as well as manpower. The most favoured locations would be found where artisan traditions were most developed.
Steam-power had been known since antiquity. But it had never been given any practical application until it was harnessed in 1711 by Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729) to a clumsy great engine for pumping flood-water from a mine in Devon. The steam-engine was immensely improved by James Watt (1736–1819), a Scots instrument-maker from Glasgow, who in 1763 was called in to repair a model of Newcomen’s monster, and perfected the condenser. From then on, the different sorts of machinery to which the motive power of steam could be applied seemed limitless.
Machinery had been used ever since the water-mill and the printing-press. In the hands of the eighteenth-century clock-makers it had reached a high level of precision. But the prospect of a power source far more forceful than hand, water, or spring inspired a rash of inventions, all initially in the realm of textiles. Three Lancashire men, James Hargreaves (1720–78) of Blackburn, Richard Arkwright (1732–92) of Preston, and Samuel Crompton (1753–1827) of Hall’ith’ Wood, Bolton, built respectively the spinning jenny (1767), the spinning frame (1768), and the spinning mule (1779). The jenny was suitable only for hand use in cottages; the frame and mule proved suitable for steam traction in factories. A new level of sophistication was reached in France with the silk loom (1804) of [JACQUARD].
Steam-power and machines, however, could not be put into widespread use unless coal—the most efficient fuel for raising steam—could be mined on a much expanded scale. This was achieved through a number of innovations, including underground pumps, Humphry Davy’s safety lamp (1816), and the use of gunpowder for blasting. Machines, equally, which had to be made of hardened steel, could not be built in quantity unless the production of iron and steel could be expanded. This was achieved through a series of improvements, including those introduced at the Carron ironworks in Scotland (1760) and Henry Cort’s patents for the puddling and rolling of steel (1783–4).
JACQUARD
IN 1804 Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), textile engineer of Lyons, perfected a loom which could weave cloth into any number of predetermined patterns, using sets of punched cards to control woof and shuttle. In textile history, Jacquard’s loom was a major advance on the earlier inventions of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton. In the wider history of technology, it was an important step in the direction of automated machinery, the predecessor of all sorts of contraptions, from the pianola and the barrel-organ to punched-card data storage systems. Most significantly, perhaps, it established the dual principle on which computers would one day operate. The frame, and other working parts of Jacquard’s loom, were the ‘hardware’, the sets of punched cards were the ‘software’.1
The concentration of industrial workers under one roof, in a ‘factory’, long preceded the arrival of power-driven machinery. (‘Factory’ is a shortened form of ‘manufactory’, meaning ‘production by hand’.) Silk factories, carpet factories, and porcelain factories had been common enough throughout the eighteenth century. But the installation of heavy plant, requiring constant servicing and regular supplies of fuel and raw materials, turned factory organization from an option into a necessity. The sight of the ‘dark satanic mills’—vast, gaunt structures the size of a royal palace, set incongruously beside some little stream whose water they consumed, and belching forth pungent black smoke from a chimney the size of Trajan’s Column—came first to the textile settlements of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The appearance of factories caused the sudden growth of new urban centres. The archetype lay in Manchester, capital of Lancashire’s cotton industry. The first British Census of 1801 showed that Manchester had grown tenfold in a quarter of a century, from the proportions of a single parish to a town of 75,275 registered citizens. If population was drawn to new factory towns, it is also true that factories were drawn to the few large centres of existing population. Cities such as London or Paris, with a large pool of artisans and paupers, were attractive targets for employers seeking labour.
Inland communications were crucial; they had to be rendered as cheap and as effective as maritime trade. Huge loads of coal, iron, and other commodities such as cotton, wool, or clay needed to be moved from mines and ports to the factory. Manufactured goods needed to be delivered to distant markets. River, road, and rail transport were all involved. Once again, the greatest incentives arose in Britain. In 1760 the Duke of Bridgewater’s engineer, James Brindley (1716–72), improved the scope of earlier canals by building a marvellous waterway that crossed Lancashire’s River Irwell on the Barton Aqueduct (1760). In 1804, at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) coaxed a high-pressure steam locomotive into pulling coal wagons along a short railway. It proved more expensive than horses. In 1815 J. L. McAdam (1756–1836) gave his name (universally misspelled) to a system of road construction using a chipped-stone base and a tar surface.
Nothing could happen without money. Immense amounts of money were needed from investors willing to take immense risks to make immense but uncertain gains. Such money could only be forthcoming in countries where other forms of pre-industrial enterprise had accumulated a ready store of venture capital.
Demographic factors were also critical. It is not hard to understand the workings of the demographic motor where the processes of the Industrial Revolution generated an increase in population, and an increasing population encouraged the processes of the Industrial Revolution. The difficulty is to see how the motor was initially primed and fired. Certainly, in France, there was a long period of demographic impotence, where la grande nation of Europe, twenty million strong, proved incapable of increasing the population levels of the last three centuries. Great Britain, in contrast, enjoyed many advantages: prosperous farmers, mobile labourers, skilled artisans, ready supplies of coal and iron, an extensive network of trade, small internal distances, commercial entrepreneurs, a rising population, and political stability. It was decades before anyone else could begin to compete (see Appendix III, p. 1294).
Collectivism—the conviction that society as a whole may have rights and interests—was not well articulated in this period. It ran contrary to the individualism which had been strongly emphasized since the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. But it was an important development. It was implicit both in the idea of the modern state, which stressed the commonality of all its subjects, and in the discussions of the physiocrats and economists about the workings of the socio-political organism. It was explicit in Rousseau’s concept of the general will, and was a cardinal principle with the utilitarians. It may well have been encouraged by the mobs and crowds in Europe’s growing cities, by the sight of industrial workers pouring through the factory gates. At any rate, the power of the collective, whether ruly or unruly, could impress the imagination not just of philosophers but of generals, rabble-rousers, and poets.
Romanticism thrived on the growing tensions. After the initial inroads in Germany, the next generation was swelled by poets and publicists in England— notably by the trio of young Lakeland poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Robert Southey (1774–1843), and by the astonishing William Blake (1757–1827), poet, engraver, illustrator. German Romanticism was still productive. Goethe’s friend, Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), published his historical dramas Wallenstein (1799), Maria Stuart (1800), and Wilhelm Tell(1804) at a time when Goethe had moved off in another direction. But by the time that Wordsworth climbed the cliffs at Tintern in 1798, it was the English Romantics who were taking the lead. Europe was already plunged into the horrors of war and revolution. Mankind seemed to be irrational to the point of self-destruction. The world was ever more incomprehensible. The untrammelled rule of logic and reason had come to an end:
Ah! Well a day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
Around my neck was hung.
* * *
Oh rose, Thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
Hath found out Thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Doth Thy life destroy.
Here, if ever, were Freudian verses almost a hundred years before Freud, [FREUOE]
Defiant young rebels were staking out the frontiers of Romanticism still further. In 1797 in Germany, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis, 1772–1801) composed the mystical Hymnen an die Nacht, in which, like Dante for Beatrice, he sublimated his passion for a long-lost love. In 1799 Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), younger brother of the translator of Shakespeare, Dante, and Calderon, wrote the scandalous novel Lucinde which suggested that love of beauty should be the supreme ideal. In France, François-René Chateaubriand (1768–1843) published the Essai sur les revolutions (1797) and his Génie du Christianisme (1801) in the teeth of contemporary conventions. In 1812 in England, the outrageous Lord George Byron (1788–1824) published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which was to launch a Europe-wide cult.
Important, too, were the salons and centres which propagated the new ideas. The Jena circle of the Schlegel brothers was influential in Germany. But pride of place must go to Germaine Necker (Mme de Staël, 1766–1817), daughter of Louis XVI’s chief minister and one of the most effective purveyors of romantic ideas. An author in her own right, Mme de Staël held court, first on the Rue du Bac in Paris and then in exile, to all the literati of the day. Her novel Delphine (1803) had feminist leanings; Corinne (1807) was a manifesto of passion; De l’Allemagne (1810) was a tract that made the world of German Romanticism accessible to France.
Reason was not tamed, however, until the philosophers themselves turned against it. Vico’s earlier divergences from the Enlightenment were pursued in the unlikely setting of East Prussia. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), undoubtedly a giant among philosophers, bridged the gap between Reason and Romanticism. A pietist, a bachelor, and a creature of pedantic routine, he was peculiarly insulated from the stirring events of his lifetime. He never once left the environs of his native Königsberg, and made himself all the more inaccessible by writing dense, contorted, professorial prose. (‘Coleridge’s Kantian phase’, writes one commentator, ‘did not improve his verse.’) None the less, Kant’s three Critiques presented a body of ideas to which almost all subsequent philosophers claim to be indebted.
FREUDE
IN 1785, in the village of Gohlis near Leipzig, Friedrich Schiller composed I An die Freude, ‘Ode to Joy’. It was a paean to the spiritual liberation which overwhelmed him after a hopeless love affair and a winter of penury in Mannheim. It had political as well as personal overtones: a persistent rumour maintains that the original title was ‘Hymn to Freedom’:
Freude, schöner Götterfunken, Seid umschlungen, Millionen! |
Joy, brilliant spark of the gods,
Be embraced, you millions! |
Seven years later the young Beethoven publicly stated his intention of setting the Ode to music. He was to brood about it for more than thirty years.
Beethoven conceived the idea of a grandiose ‘German Symphony’ some time in 1817. He felt that it might culminate in a choral finale. His early notes mentioned an Adagio Cantique, ‘a religious song in a Symphony in the old modes … In the Adagio the text to be a Greek mythos (or) Cantique Ecclesiastique. In the Allegro a Bacchus festival’.2 Only in June or July 1823 did he turn definitively to the Ode, and then with constant misgivings. During those years, bitter and despondent from advancing deafness, he triumphed over his adversity through the Missa Solemnis and the wonderful run of piano sonatas, Op. 109–11.
Yet the Symphony No. 9 (Choral) in D minor (Op. 125) was to scale the heights of intellectual invention and emotional daring still further. After a brief, whispering prologue, the first movement, allegro ma non troppo, is launched by the extraordinary sound of the whole orchestra playing the descending chord of D minor in unison. The second movement, molto vivace, ‘the most divine of Scherzos’, is punctuated by moments when the music stops completely, only to restart with redoubled energy. The third movement, adagio, is built round two intertwined melodies of great nobility.
The transition to the finale was contrived by bracketing a disjointed recital of the preceding subjects within two outbursts of the famous cacophony or ‘clamour’. This, in its turn, is interrupted by the ringing appeal of the bass voice: ‘O Freunde, nicht diese Toene!’ (Oh friends, no more of these tones! Let us sing something full of gladness!) Shortly, a new motif steals in from the wind section. Repeated in the triumphant key of D major, the key of trumpets, it is the simplest and yet most powerful of all symphonic melodies. In a line of fifty-six notes, it possesses only three which are not consecutive. It is the tune which will carry Beethoven’s rearrangement of Schiller’s stanzas:
The dazzling complexities which follow drive performers and listeners into the outer realms of effort and imagination. An augmented orchestra is joined by a full choir and four soloists. The quartet sings the theme with two variations. The tenor sings ‘Glad, glad as suns through ether wending’ to the strains of a military march with Turkish percussion. An orchestral interlude in double fugue leads to the thundering chorus ‘Oh, ye millions, I embrace you!’. The soloists converse with the chorus over Schiller’s opening lines before another double fugue pushes the sopranos to sustain a top A for twelve endless measures. The coda sees the soloists blending into a sort of ‘universal round’, a passage of florid polyphony, and a last dash into a diminished version of the main theme. At the end, the words ‘Daughter of Elysium, Joy, O Joy, the God-descended’ are repeated maestoso before the final, affirmative drop from A to D.3
Despite a commission from the London Philharmonic Society, ‘the Ninth’ received its first performance in the Theatre of the Kaerntnertor in Vienna on 7 May 1824. The composer conducted. Unhearing, he totally lost control; he was still conducting when the music ceased. He was turned round by one of the players so that he could see the applause.
Beethoven was always seen as a universal genius. During the Second World War, the opening bars of his Fifth Symphony were used to announce BBC broadcasts to Nazi-occupied Europe. A century and a half after his death, his rendering of An der Freude was adopted as the official anthem of the European Community. The words, which were taken to celebrate the universal brotherhood of Man, linked a pre-nation-alist with a post-nationalist age. The melody was thought to fit the fervent hopes of a continent emerging from the cacophonous clamour of two world wars.
The Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781) denies that rationalist metaphysics can be accepted as a perfect science like mathematics. It insists that every phenomenon existing outside time and space has its own inscrutable source of being. Each such source was calleddas Ding-an-sich, ‘the thing-in-itself’. ‘I had to abolish knowledge’, he wrote apologetically, ‘in order to make room for faith.’ Reason is to be complemented by belief and imagination. The Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason, 1788) is a treatise of moral philosophy, elaborating Kant’s theory of the ‘categorical imperative’. It is sympathetic to traditional Christian ethics and stresses duty as the supreme criterion of moral conduct. The Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Evaluation, 1790) is a treatise on aesthetics. It makes the famous distinction betweenVerstand(intellect) and Vernunft (reason) as instruments of judgement. Kant argues that art should serve morality and should avoid the portrayal of nasty objects. ‘Beauty has no value except in the service of man.’
Kant was deeply interested in the philosophy of history. Like his contemporary, Gibbon, he was impressed by the ‘tissue of folly’, the ‘puerile vanity’, and the ‘thirst for destruction’ which filled the historical record. At the same time, he strove to find sense amidst the chaos. He found it in the idea that conflict was a teacher which would extend rationality from a few noble individuals to the conduct of all mankind. He wrote in his Concept of Universal History (1784), ‘Men may wish for concord, but Nature knows better what is good for the species. [Nature] wants discord.’ Kant’s politics advocated republicanism. He welcomed the French Revolution though not the Terror, denouncing both paternal government and hereditary privilege. In Zum ewigen Frieden (On Perpetual Peace, 1795) he called for the creation of a Weltbürgertum or ‘World Community’ which would commit itself to universal disarmament and bury the Balance of Power. None of these views was particularly fitting for a subject of the King of Prussia. [GENUG]
J. G. Herder (1744–1803), born at Mohrungen (Morag), started his career as an enthusiastic reader of Rousseau, giving up a job at Riga in order to sail to France. He later settled in Weimar, under Goethe’s patronage. His fertile mind produced a whole crop of original thoughts about culture, history, and art. He made an anti-rationalist contribution to the epistemological debate, propounding the idea that perception is a function of the total personality. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), he developed Vico’s cyclical concept of the birth, growth, and death of civilizations, but conceiving of progress as something much more complex than mere linear advancement. In his own estimation, however, his most important undertaking lay in a lifelong devotion to the collection and study of folklore and folksong, both German and foreign. Here was a subject that would play a central role not just in Romantic literature but in the whole story of national-consciousness (see pp. 816–17).
GENUG
WHEN Immanuel Kant died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, his last word was Genug (Enough). Never a truer word is spoken than in death.
Agrippina, Nero’s Mother AD |
59 |
‘Smite my womb’ |
Pierre Abelard, philosopher |
1142 |
‘1 don’t know’ |
Pope Alexander VI, Borgia |
1503 |
‘Wait a minute’ |
Chevalier de Bayard |
1524 |
‘God and my country’ |
Martin Luther |
1546 |
‘Yes’ |
King Henry VIII |
1547 |
‘Monks, Monks, Monks!’ |
François Rabelais |
1553 |
‘I go to seek the great perhaps |
Walter Raleigh |
1618 |
(To the executioner) ‘Strike, Man!’ |
King Charles I |
1649 |
‘Remember’ |
Thomas Hobbes |
1679 |
‘A great leap in the dark’ |
Julie de Lespinasse |
1776 |
‘Am I still alive?’ |
Voltaire |
1778 |
‘For God’s sake, let me die in peace’ |
Emperor Joseph II |
1790 |
‘Here lies Joseph who was unsuccessful in all his undertakings’ |
W. A. Mozart |
1791 |
‘I was writing this for myself’ |
Napoleon Bonaparte |
1821 |
‘Josephine’ |
Ludwig van Beethoven |
1827 |
‘The Comedy is over’ |
Georg Wilhelm Hegel |
1831 |
‘And he didn’t understand me’ |
J. W. von Goethe |
1832 |
‘More Light!’ |
Nathan Rothschild |
1836 |
‘And all because of my money’ |
J. M. W. Turner, painter |
1851 |
‘The sun is God’ |
Heinrich Heine |
1856 |
‘God will pardon me. It’s his profession’ |
Charles Darwin |
1882 |
‘I am not in the least afraid to die’ |
Karl Marx (asked for a last word) |
1883 |
‘Go on, get out!’ |
Franz Liszt |
1886 |
‘Tristan’ |
Emperor Franz-Joseph |
1916 |
(singing) ‘God Save the Emperor!’ |
Georges Clemenceau |
1929 |
‘I wish to be buried upright—facing Germany’ |
Heinrich Himmler |
1945 |
‘I am Heinrich Himmler’ |
H. G. Wells |
1946 |
‘I’m alright’ |
All the arts responded to the shifting climate. In music, both Mozart and Haydn stayed devoted to the classical canon of orderly form, delicacy, and harmony. But Beethoven, who had quickly mastered the classical conventions, moved steadily on into the musical equivalent of revolutionary storm and stress. He had already reached it by the time of his Symphony no. 3, the ‘Eroica’ (1805), originally dedicated to Napoleon. Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), sometime opera-master at Dresden, was to become a stereotype of the Romantic artist. His first successful opera, Das Waldmädchen(1800), presented the touching story of a dumb girl communing with the mysteries of the forest. The melodic genius of Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was cut short, like his Unfinished Symphony, by disease and an untimely death, but not before he had compiled a matchless œuvre of over 600 songs. Alongside the acknowledged masters, there was a strong supporting cast of almost forgotten names such as J. K. Dussek (1761–1812), Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), M. K. Ogiński (1765–1833), J. N. Hummel (1778–1837), John Field (1782–1837), or Maria Szymanowska (1789–1831)—the latter unusual in her day as a female performer and composer.
In painting, the appeal of neo-classicism was only partially overtaken. The most influential of French painters, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), never ceased to address classical subjects. But Romantic pathos crept into even early pictures such as Saint Roch (1780), inspired by the plague at Marseilles; and it furnished an important element in his heroic portrayal of the Napoleonic saga. Yet the most radical innovations appeared elsewhere. In Germany, the portraitist P. O. Runge (1777–1810) sought ‘symbols of the eternal rhythm of the universe’. In England, the animals of George Stubbs (1724–1806) passed from their classical pastures of utter calm and restraint to agitated scenes such as the much admired Horse Attacked by a Lion. J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) took the first steps along the road which would lead him all the way to Impressionism. He visited Switzerland for the first time in 1802, and painted The Reichenbach Falls. From the start he was drawn to the tempestuous powers of Nature, especially at sea. His contemporary, the landscapist John Constable (1776–1837), brought a gentler temperament but no less talent to the study of Nature’s moods. William Blake, as illustrator, entered the world of fantasy and the supernatural. His illustrations of Dante pointed to a Romantic taste that spread across Europe. In Spain, Francisco Goya (1746–1828), royal painter from 1789, found his métier recording all the nightmares and horrors of war and civil strife. ‘The Sleep of Reason’, he said about one of his pictures, ‘engenders monsters.’
For a long time historians sought the roots of the Revolution primarily in the intellectual and political conflicts of the preceding age. The philosophes were seen to have undermined the ideological foundations of the Ancien Régime, whilst the ministers of Louis XVI—Turgot, 1774–6, Necker, 1776–81 and 1788–9, Calonne, 1783–7, and Archbishop Loménie de Brienne, 1787–8—led France to national bankruptcy. Historians saw the calling of the Estates-General and the subsequent storming of the Bastille as the straightforward consequence of popular grievances, of excesses perpetrated by court, church, and nobility, and of reform pursued ‘too little, too late’. Burke suspected a conspiracy of the ‘swinish multitude’; Thiers, writing within memory of the Revolution, stressed the injustices of absolute government; Michelet stressed the miseries of ‘the people’.
An important finesse to the debate was provided by Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59). In his Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856) he showed that the dynamic of reform and revolution was no straightforward matter. Many aspects of government were actually improving under Louis XVI, who had always been genuinely committed to reform. ‘The social order destroyed by a revolution,’ he wrote, ‘is almost always better than that which preceded it; and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform …’ The slightest acts of arbitrary power under Louis XVI seemed harder to endure ‘than all the despotism of Louis XIV.’
More recent research has given precision to many of these assertions. It has revealed the role of the Paris Parlement in blocking the King’s reforms, of the Parlement’s pamphleteers in spreading the ideas of the philosophes, and of ideology as a force in its own right. One study even claims that Necker had succeeded in balancing the budget during his first ministry. This would suggest that the financial crisis following the War of American Independence, which precipitated the calling of the Estates-General, was the result not of systemic collapse but of simple mismanagement.13
At one stage in the debate, prime emphasis was placed on the economic and social problems which were judged to underlie the political upheaval. Marx had been an historical sociologist, who belonged to a vintage for whom the French Revolution remained the focus of all historical discussion; and many Marxists and quasi-Marxists followed suit. In the 1930s C. E. Labrousse published quantitative evidence both for cyclical agrarian depressions in late eighteenth-century France and for an acute food shortage and price catastrophe in 1787–9.14 In the 1950s a long interpretative war between the followers of Lefebvre and Cobban only served to give prominence to their sociological preoccupations.15 A consensus appeared to emerge about the primacy of ‘bourgeois’ interests. ‘The revolution was theirs,’ concluded Cobban, ‘and for them at least it was a wholly successful revolution.’ ‘The French Revolution’, wrote another participant, ‘constitutes the crowning point of a long social and economic evolution which made the bourgeoisie the mistress of the world.’ But then the bourgeois theory was challenged, and investigations shifted to the artisans and the sans culottes. Much of this class analysis retains a strong Marxian flavour, especially with those who deny any Marxist connections. In one view, the ‘bagarre des profs’ over the French Revolution ‘has become the Divine Comedy of the modern secular world.’
As always in a crisis, psychological factors were paramount. The King and his ministers did not have to be told that disaster loomed; but, unlike historians, they did not have 200 years in which to study it. Indeed, with no popular representation in place they had no reliable means of gauging public attitudes. Similarly, in the depths of a serf-run countryside, or of proletarian Paris, there was no means of regulating the waves of poverty-led fear and of blind anger. The combination of indecision at the centre and of panic amidst large sections of the populace was a sure recipe for catastrophe. Above all, violence bred violence. ‘From the very beginning … violence was the motor of revolution.’
There is much to be said for exploring the Revolution’s international dimensions from the very earliest point.20 When one considers the mechanisms which transformed generalized ferment into explosive revolution, political and military logistics have to be taken into the equation. There were several casks in the European cellar which were ready to blow their corks, and which actually did so. But in the case of the lesser casks, the corks could be swiftly replaced. It was only when one of the bigger barrels threatened to explode that the cellar as a whole was in danger. It is for this reason that historians have paid almost exclusive attention to events in Paris. Yet in terms of chronology and precedence, several other centres of ferment have to be brought into the reckoning. Extremely important, though not always mentioned, were developments in the Netherlands, first in the United Provinces and later in the Austrian Netherlands. Important, too, was the advanced disaffection of several French provinces, notably in the Dauphiné. Crucial for the whole of Eastern Europe was the meeting of the Great Sejm of Poland-Lithuania, bent on reform at all costs. Each of these stress-points acted to some degree on the others. Together, they showed that the revolutionary ferment had assumed transcontinental proportions before the explosion occurred.
In the United Provinces, the ancient conflict between the Stadholder and his opponents reached a new boiling-point in October 1787, when the Prussian army was invited in to maintain the status quo. The Dutch had suffered acutely from their adherence to armed neutrality during the American War of Independence, and from the resultant naval war with Great Britain. By the late 1780s old-established commercial and republican interests were in revolt against the Stadholder, Willem V (r. 1766–94), and his British and Prussian allies. They began to call themselves ‘patriots’ in the American style, and claimed to be the champions of the people against the princes. They caused an international outcry when in the course of their campaign against the government they kidnapped the Stadholder’s consort, Wilhelmina. It was Wilhelmina’s misfortune which spurred the Prussians into action and provided the pretext for the pacifications which followed in Amsterdam and elsewhere. But the appeal to force was not lost on those who were watching on the sidelines. It undoubtedly strengthened the resolve of the ‘patriots’ in the Austrian Netherlands, who were engaged in a trial of strength of their own; and it caught the attention of the French at the very time when relations between the monarch and his subjects were coming under intense scrutiny. French dissidents had looked to Holland as a haven of liberty ever since the days of Descartes. From 1787 the Dutch dissidents were looking again to France as the only realistic source of a rescue.
The Estates of Dauphiné met in the Salle du Jeu de Paume in the Château de Vizille, near Grenoble, on 21 July 1788. The meeting, which was illegal, had been conceived by local prominents as a means of defending the provincial parlement against the royal decrees which it had recently been ordered to register. It was the first assembly of its kind since 1628, when Richelieu had suspended many provincial institutions; and it was prompted by a riotous demonstration in support of the parlement which had taken place in Grenoble on 7 June. It started a process of escalating demands which anticipated many of the events in Paris a year later. The Parlement of Dauphiné had been defying royal authority for more than twenty years. Its refusal to legalize many of the King’s demands for increased taxation had given it great local popularity. The decrees of May 1788, which aimed to break all such recalcitrant parlements and which provided for the banishment of offending magistrates, threatened to overthrow the comfortable stand-off of a whole generation.
A second meeting of the Dauphiné Estates at Romans in September 1788 was technically legal, since it coincided with authorized preparations for the Estates-General. But it saw the passage of a veritable provincial constitution. Apart from the election of deputies to the Estates-General, among them Lefranc de Pompignan, Archbishop of Vienne, it heard impassioned speeches on civic rights from its chairman, Judge J.-J. Mounier (1758–1806), the future Chairman of the Constituent Assembly, and from Antoine Barnave (1761–93), soon to be the author of the Jacobin Manifesto. It arranged for the doubling of the representation of its Tiers État, for joint debate of the three orders, and for individual voting. Each of these measures, when repeated in the Estates-General, was to turn a subservient body convened by the King into an independent assembly bent on implementing its own agenda. As the local guidebook proudly proclaims, ‘1788 est l’année de la Revolution dauphinoise.’
The mini-revolution in Dauphiné caused ructions at the royal court. It provoked the resignation of the King’s chief minister, Archbishop Loménie de Brienne, who had set in motion the convocation of the Estates-General but who was now refused permission to crush the rebel province by force. The way was thus opened for the return of Jacques Necker, the Swiss banker, who was recalled to rescue the King’s finances. The events in Dauphiné dominated the deliberations of the (second) assembly of notables which was summoned to Versailles in November 1788 to advise on preparations for the Estates-General. The proposals of the dauphinois regarding the role of the Third Estate undoubtedly influenced the most radical pamphlet of the day. ‘What is the Third Estate?’ asked the pamphlet’s author, the Abbé Sievès. ‘Everything. And what has it been until the present time? Nothing. And what does it demand? To become something.’
In Warsaw, the assembly of the Wielki Sejm or ‘Four Years’ Diet’ in October 1788 was conceived as part of a royal scheme to gain Russian approval for restoring the Republic’s independence. It started a process of reform in Poland-Lithuania which ran parallel to developments in France until both were overtaken by coercion. Much had changed in recent years. Frederick the Great was dead, and the new King of Prussia was well disposed to his Polish neighbours. Russia was heavily engaged in campaigns against both Swedes and Turks. Austria under Joseph II was preoccupied with the Netherlands. In 1787 Stanisław-August judged the moment ripe for an overture to the Empress Catherine. If the Empress would permit the Republic to raise a modern army, and the financial and administrative structures to support it, the King would immediately sign a treaty of alliance with Russia for common operations against the Turks. Russia and the Republic could then pursue their objectives in harmony. In May the King received the Russian Empress on the Dnieper near the royal castle of Kaniów. In this, the last meeting with his former lover, he learned little from Catherine. But it gradually emerged that the Empress, who also conferred with Joseph II, was not well disposed. In fact, she was determined to maintain the status quo at all costs. Polish aspirations were not to be accommodated.
Poland’s Diet pressed on regardless with the internal aspects of the King’s scheme. In October 1788 it began by declaring itself a confederation and subject to majority voting, thereby bypassing the liberum veto of its russophile members. It then proceeded to vote for the creation of a national army of 100,000 men, a step which had been blocked ever since the Russian-guaranteed constitution of 1717. It also backed a rapprochement with Frederick-William II of Prussia. Its activists were grouped round the anglophile King, who dreamt of a British-style monarchy, and a group of intellectuals—the Revd Hugo Kołłataj (1750–1812), Rector of the reformed Jagiellonian University, the Revd Stanisław Staszic (1755–1826), and Stanisław Małachowski (1736–1809), Speaker of the Sejm, who were all strong admirers of the American example. After three years of frenzied legislation, their brief moment of glory was to come in May 1791, when they pushed through their Constitution of Third May (see below).
In November 1788 the Estates of Brabant and Hainault took an equally momentous step. Infuriated by the torrent of reforms imposed by their overlord, the Emperor Joseph II, they voted to withhold the provinces’ taxes. They had long felt aggrieved both on religious and on political grounds. As Catholics of the Spanish school, they could not easily accept the imperial decrees which had suppressed seminaries, pilgrimages, and contemplative orders; which had replaced episcopal by state censorship; and which had subjected the Church to direct taxation. Equally, as beneficiaries of privileges which had functioned since 1354, they could not bear the Emperor’s lack of consultation. The cities of Brussels, Antwerp, and Louvain were jealously attached to their traditional right of veto over the deliberations of the Estates. Yet by making their stand at the time they did, they precipitated a constitutional crisis which would play itself out in the Austrian Netherlands one step ahead of the parallel crisis that was brewing in France. The Belgian ‘patriots’ hit the headlines in Paris in the same week that France’s notables were heading for Versailles to advise on the agenda of the Estates-General. The Emperor tried to impose a new constitution on the Belgian Estates on 29 April 1789, exactly six days before France’s Estates-General convened. When the Emperor’s impositions were rejected by the State Council of the Austrian Netherlands, he determined to use force. The Austrian army invaded Brussels, dissolved the State Council, and abolished the Joyeuse Entrée on 20 June 1789. This was the self-same day when a defiant Estates-General, by taking the ‘Tennis Court Oath’, was setting the revolutionary process in motion in France (see below).
Brussels and Paris shared the same language. News travelled fast between them. The ‘Belgian Revolt’, which continued to run long after the Emperor’s coup, was an essential component of the ‘French Revolution’. Paris did not lead Brussels; Brussels led Paris.
The last week of April 1789 brought death to the streets of Paris. An exceptionally cold winter had added to the hardships inflicted by a bankrupt government, rising prices, and lack of work. Hunger stalked the poorer districts, and raids on bakeries were frequent. When a rich manufacturer called Réveillon dared to say in public that his workmen could live well off half the 30 sous per day which he paid them, his house in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was surrounded. On the first day, the angry crowd demolished several buildings amidst cries of ‘Vive le tiers!’ and ‘Vive Necker!’. On the second day, when soldiers of the Régiment du Royal-Cravatte were brought in, they were pelted with missiles; and someone fired a shot. The soldiers responded with volleys of musket-fire that left at least 300 dead. This was the news which awaited the members of the Estates-General when they converged on the capital at the weekend from all ends of France.
Revolution
In France, as in England 149 years before, the general crisis came to a head when a bankrupt King summoned a long-neglected Parliament to his aid. The expectation on all sides was that financial relief for the royal government would be granted in return for the redress of grievances. By prior arrangement, therefore, all the delegations elected by the provinces and cities came to the Estates-General armed with cahiers de doléances or ‘catalogues of complaint’. These cahiers were intended by the King’s ministers, and are widely used by historians, as a prime instrument for assessing the nature and proportions of popular discontent. Some of the complaints were less than revolutionary: ‘that the master wig-maker of Nantes be not troubled with new guild-brethren, the actual number of ninety-two being more than sufficient.’
The opening scene in Paris, on Sunday 4 May 1789, was painted in one of Carlyle’s memorable word-pictures:
Behold … the doors of St. Louis Church flung wide: and the Procession of Processions advancing to Notre-Dame! … The Elected of France, and then the Court of France, are marshalled … all in prescribed place and costume. Our Commons ‘in plain black mantle and white cravate’; Nobles in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best pontificalibus. Lastly comes the King himself, and the King’s Household, also in the brightest blaze of pomp … Some fourteen hundred men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand.
Yes, in that silent marching mass there is futurity enough. No symbolic Arc, like the old Hebrews, do those men bear; yet with them, too, is a Covenant They, too, preside at a new era in the history of men. The whole future is there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it, in (their) hearts and unshaped thoughts …
Once summoned, however, the Estates-General proved impossible to control. The three orders of clergy, nobility, and Third Estate were supposed to meet separately, and to follow an agenda laid down by the royal managers. But the Third Estate, which had been granted double representation as in Dauphiné, soon realized that it could bend the proceedings to its own desires, if the three chambers were permitted to vote as one. The clergy and nobility, who included many sympathizers, offered no concerted opposition. So on 17 June, having invited the two other Estates to join them, the Third Estate broke the existing rules and declared itself to be the sole National Assembly. This was the decisive break. Three days later, locked out of their usual hall, the deputies met on the adjacent tennis court, le jeu de paume, and swore an oath never to disband until France was given a Constitution. ‘Tell your master’, thundered Count Mirabeau, to troops sent to disperse them, ‘that we are here by the will of the people, and will not disperse before the threat of bayonets.’ [GAUCHE]
Pandemonium ensued. At court, the King’s conciliatory ministers fell out with their more aggressive colleagues. On 11 July Jacques Necker, who had received a rousing welcome at the opening of the Estates-General, was dismissed. Paris exploded. A revolutionary headquarters coalesced round the Due d’Orléans at the Palais Royal. The gardens of the Palais Royal became a notorious playground of free speech and free love. Sex shows sprang up alongside every sort of political harangue. ‘The exile of Necker’, screamed the fiery orator Camille Desmoulins, fearing reprisals, ‘is the signal for another St Bartholomew of patriots.’ The royal garrison was won over. On the 13th a Committee of Public Safety was created, and 48,000 men were enrolled in a National Guard under General Lafayette. Bands of insurgents tore down the hated barrières or internal customs posts in the city, and ransacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare in the search for arms. On the 14th, after 30,000 muskets were removed from the Hôtel des Invalides, the royal fortress of the Bastille was besieged. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, after which the governor capitulated. The King had lost his capital.
At that point, at the centre of affairs, there was still hope of an orderly settlement. On the 17th, to much surprise, Louis XVI drove from Versailles to Paris and donned the tricolour cockade in public. In the provinces, in contrast, news of the fall of the Bastille triggered an orgy of attacks on ‘forty thousand other bastilles’. Castles and abbeys were burned; noble families, indiscriminately attacked by hungry peasants, began to emigrate; cities declared for self-rule; brigandage proliferated. France was dividing into armed camps. It was the season of la Grande Peur, the Great Fear—a summer of unprecedented social hysteria fired by rumours of aristocratic plots and peasant atrocities across the country.25
From then on, the Revolution acquired its own momentum, its rhythms dictated by tides of uncontrolled events. It passed through three main phases.
In the first, five-year phase, 1789–94, the French Revolution accelerated through ever-increasing degrees of radicalism until all the institutions of the previous social and political order had been swept away. For more than two years the National Assembly, the Constituante, laboured over the design of a constitutional monarchy. In one full night, 4–5 August 1789, thirty separate decrees abolished all the apparatus of serfdom and noble privilege. The Declaration of the Rights of Man (26 August 1789) was followed by the abolition of the provinces (December 1789) and the civil establishment of the clergy (June 1790). It appeared that stability and consensus might have been achieved when, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, on 14 July 1790, the whole of France joined in a Grand Festival of Federation. In Paris, the King attended mass in the presence of the leaders of the assembly, and the commander of the National Guard, General Lafayette, swore a solemn oath of allegiance proffered by the Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand.
In the Austrian Netherlands, the revolution was moving still faster. In August 1789 the powerful Archbishopric of Liège was seized by ‘patriots’ in a bloodless coup. In August a patriotic army was raised by General de Mersch to confront the Austrians. In November demonstrations in Ghent ended in bloody massacres; and finally, in December, Brussels expelled its Austrian garrison. By the end of the year an independent Union of Belgian States had been declared. It lasted for thirteen months, before the re-entry of the Austrians in force in February 1791.
In France, the introduction of a consolidated Constitution (September 1791) called for elections which swept the original, moderate leaders aside. The new Legislative Assembly was much less sympathetic to the monarchy. It struggled to get a grip for twelve months until it, too, was overtaken by the declaration of a Republic and the opening of the Republic’s National Convention. Then, in the summer of 1792, with France at war, the mainstream revolutionary movement was hijacked by root-and-branch radicals, who had earlier seized control of the municipal Commune of Paris. Hence, if the Estates-General and the National Assembly (1789–91) were dominated by Mirabeau’s constitutionalists, and the Legislative Assembly (1791–2) by republican Girondins, the National Convention (1792–5) took its orders from Robespierre’s extremist Jacobins.
The two dread years of Jacobin supremacy began during the invasion scare of 1792, when the Prussian army was thought to be in striking distance of Paris (see below). When the King dismissed his Girondin ministers in expectation of foreign rescue, popular resentments began to rise. In July, when the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick announced his intention to liberate the King and to execute the whole population of Paris if the Royal Palace was touched, they boiled over. It was exactly the pretext which the Jacobins needed to declare ‘the fatherland in danger’, and to call for the abolition of the monarchy. Five hundred ardent Massilians marched to the support of Paris. On 10 August, with the Massilians in the van, the Tuileries was duly stormed and the King’s Swiss Guard massacred. In September, with the Commune controlling the capital, thousands in the Paris prisons were butchered in cold blood; the King was deposed; and the Republic declared.
GAUCHE
FROM the earliest days of France’s Estates-General, the nobles of the Court Party instinctively positioned themselves to the right of the King, whilst the Third Estate sat on the left. To sit on the right-hand of authority, as on ‘the right-hand of God’, was an established mark of privilege. As a result, ‘the Right’ became a natural synonym for the political Establishment, whilst ‘the Left’ was applied to its opponents. These divisions grew more marked after 1793 in the National Convention, where the Jacobins and their associates occupied benches in the left and upper sections of the chamber. They formed the revolutionary block of deputies on the ‘Montagne’, which physically towered over the moderates of the ‘Plaine’ below. The opposition of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ has provided a basic metaphor for the political spectrum ever since.1
Yet the metaphor has its problems. It only works if the political spectrum is seen to be ranged along a straight line, with ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ separated by the conciliatory ‘Centre’ between them:
Reform————Status quo————Reaction
Extreme—Left—Centre-Left—CENTRE—Centre-Right—Right—Extreme
Left
Right
In this scheme, the most successful politicians are likely to be those who command the consensus of ‘the centre ground’ with the help of either the moderate Left or the moderate Right.
Marxists, and other dialecticians, however, see the political spectrum not as unilinear, but as bi-polar. In their scheme, politics consists of a struggle where two opposite forces are fated to contend, and where one or the other will necessarily establish supremacy. In the long run, as in a tug-of-war, or with a pair of scales, the Centre cannot hold the balance indefinitely, and must always give way to ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. The notion of a political order based on consensus, tolerance, compromise, restraint, or mutual respect for the law is a ‘bourgeois illusion’.
What the unilinear and the bi-polar schemes share is the dubious assumption that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are simple opposites.
The spatial arrangement of political assemblies, therefore, involves important considerations. The British House of Commons, for example, places the Government benches on the Speaker’s Right in direct confrontation with the Opposition benches on the Speaker’s Left. It accurately reflects the adversarial politics of the two-party system, putting ministers and shadow ministers face to face in their exchanges across the despatch box. This, too, is a dialectical concept, actively discouraging the activities of a third party and the spirit of coalition on which most Continental assemblies depend. It could not be adapted to the purposes of an assembly elected by proportional representation. The House of Lords, in contrast, which has to make provision for a substantial body of independent members on the ‘cross benches’, is arranged round three sides of an open rectangle. In the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the massed rows of an undivided hall indicated the compulsory unanimity of all present (see Appendix III, p. 1334).
None the less, twentieth century experience has shown that the political Right could be every bit as radical as the political Left. In addition to opposing each other, the radical elements of Left and Right shared the ambition for overthrowing the democratic consensus. In this light, the realization dawned that political forces may best be aligned round a circular track. In this scheme, not only does Left oppose Right, but Totalitarianism opposes Democracy:
Given these considerations, it emerges that a horse-shoe or a semicircle provides the most appropriate spatial arrangement for the multiple but competing interests within a democratic assembly. Such is the layout, not only for many national assemblies in Europe, from Warsaw to Paris, but also for the ‘hémicercle’ of the European Parliament at Strasbourg.2
On 20 September, the opening of the National Convention coincided exactly with the cannonade at Valmy which saved the Revolution from suppression from abroad. 22 September, the day when the Republic was proclaimed, was later judged to be the starting-point of the Revolutionary Calendar, [VENDÉMIAIRE].
In due course executive power was concentrated in two successive Committees of Public Safety—the first (April-July 1793), dominated by Danton, the second (July 1793–July 1794) by Robespierre. The Convention’s independent initiatives were ended. The foreign war was prosecuted with vigour. The ‘Counter-Revolution’, in the Vendée and elsewhere, was mercilessly assaulted. A new super-democratic Constitution providing for universal suffrage, for referenda, and for an elected government was passed, but remained a dead letter. The Committees of Public Safety in Paris maintained their grip on the whole country through a network of subsidiary committees in every commune and department in France. These committees, formed by the law of 21 March 1793 for regulating foreigners, became instruments of unlimited dictatorial control.
VENDÉMIAIRE
IN October and November 1793, France’s National Convention voted to introduce a Republican Calendar based on revolutionary principles. In a series of decrees it was decided that the year should begin at midnight on the autumnal equinox of 22 September, and that Year I of the Republican era should be judged to have begun on the day of the Proclamation of the Republic, 22 September 1792. The year was to be divided into twelve equal months of thirty days, and each month into three ten-day ‘decades’ (There were to be no more weeks, or Sundays.)
MONTHS: Vendémiaire (Month of Harvest); Brumaire (Month of Mist); Frimaire (Month of Frost); Nivôse (Month of Snow); Pluviôse (Month of Rain); Ventóse (Month of Wind); Germinal (Month of Seeds); Floréal (Month of Flowers); Prairial (Haymaking Month); Messidor (Month of Reaping); Thermidor (Month of Heat); Fructidor (Month of Fruits).
DAYS: 1,11,21, primidi; 2,12,22, duodi; 3,13,23, tridi; 4,14,24, quartidi; 5, 15, 25, quintidi; 6,16, 26, sextidi; 7,17, 27, septidi; 8, 18, 28, octidi; 9, 19, 29, nonidi; 10, 20, 30, decadi. (See Appendix III, pp. 1288–9.)
When the system was put into operation, 1 January 1794 was officially transformed into Duodi of the 2nd Decade, 12 Nivôse, Year II.
To keep in line with the natural year of 365¼ days, the calendar years were organized into four-year groups called franciades; and each year was allocated five complementary days, the sans-culottides. The fourth year of each franciade received an extra ‘leap day’, the Jour de la Révolution.
The Republican Calendar was officially maintained for fourteen years; but it was virtually abandoned after six. The Gregorian Calendar was in widespread use again under the Consulate, long before it was formally restored on 1 January 1806/11 Nivôse XIV.
Nothing was better calculated to disrupt the nation’s sense of orientation than the change of calendar. Counter-revolutionaries tried to keep up the old time. Revolutionaries tried to insist on the new. Historians have to cope with both.
The Revolution started to devour its own children. The Terror raged, consuming an ever-mounting tally of victims. Danton and his associates were denounced and executed in April 1794, for questioning the purposes of the Terror. Robespierre, the chief terrorist, met denunciation and death on 28 July 1794,10 Thermidor II. [GUILLOTIN]
The fate of the monarchy mirrored these developments. In October 1789, after a Women’s March of protest to Versailles, Louis XVI had been brought with his family to their palace of the Tuileries in Paris. He was already the butt of indecent humour:
Louis si tu veux voir
Bàtard, cocu, putain,
Regarde ton miroir
La Reine et le Dauphin.
(Louis if you wish to see I Bastard, cuckold, and whore, I Look at your mirror I Your queen and your son.)
In June 1791, after repudiating all concessions made since the days of the Tennis Court Oath, he had fled in disguise to the eastern frontier, only to be caught at Varennes in Champagne. Returned to Paris in disgrace, he then signed the first Constitution as prepared by the National Assembly, becoming the ‘hereditary agent’ of the people. In August 1792, when the Tuileries was stormed, he was arrested and ‘suspended’. In September, he was deposed. On 21 January 1793 he was tried and executed as a traitor. On 16 October Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate. The ten-year-old Dauphin, Louis XVII, was handed to plebeian foster-parents, and subsequently died from neglect and tuberculosis.
In Poland-Lithuania, events followed the same progression from constitutional reform to revolutionary terrorism. In the Constitution of 3 May 1791, in one short document of eleven clauses, all the obvious abuses of the old system, including the liberum veto, were abolished. TheRzeczpospolita oboyga narodów, the ‘commonwealth of two nations’ was established as a modern constitutional state. The monarchy was declared hereditary (though the King was an ageing bachelor). The bourgeoisie was admitted to the franchise previously limited to the nobility. The peasants were brought within the realm of public law, from which they had been excluded. Here was the first concrete success of peaceful reform, the first constitution of its type in Europe, formulated, passed, and published four months before its counterpart in France. It was the sort of advance which liberal reformers had been hoping for far and wide. In London, the enthusiasm of Edmund Burke knew no bounds. The Polish Constitution of Third May, Burke wrote ‘is probably the most pure … public good which has ever been conferred on mankind’:
The means were as striking to the imagination as satisfactory to the reason, and as soothing to the moral sentiments … Everything was kept in its place and order, but… everything was bettered. To add to this unheard-of conjunction of wisdom and fortune, this happy wonder, not one drop of blood was spilled, no treachery, no outrage … Happy people if they know how to proceed as they have begun.27