FOUR
Throughout newly constituted republics on both sides of the ocean, men and women who had never before enjoyed the privilege of considering the affairs of state gathered in public spaces beyond parliaments and state houses to read newspapers and discuss politics. French journalist Camille Desmoulins triumphantly announced to his readers: “the fermentation is universal.” The rising volume of revolutionary politics and the ever intensifying news cycle drew readers and listeners to clubs, notably in France, but also in revolutionary Poland, and even England with its pockets of revolutionary agitation. Together, the clubs and newspapers recast the political community between 1789 and 1793.
In the heart of Paris, the artisan Jacques observed hundreds of Jacobins gathering three to four times a week across from his stall in the Rue Saint-Honoré. At the end of December 1790, he decided he had watched long enough. He worked up the courage and followed the other common people of Paris through the doors into one of the many “clubs for the people’s use, simply organized and unpretentious.” Inside, Jacques found artisans like himself learning to think for themselves. Reading newspapers and listening to speeches, they had emerged from “the shadow of ignorance” cast by the Old Regime, Jacques reported.1 These were the Jacobins whose specter in Sierra Leone so frightened English Lord Wilberforce.
Jacques the Jacobin did not actually exist. His was a fictional account published in the most widely read of the multitude of new French newspapers, Les Révolutions de Paris (Revolutions of Paris) to draw the uninitiated into the realm of politics. If pamphlets opened revolutionary discussions, newspapers amplified the political debate, often escalating the incendiary rhetoric of the clubs. Political news was in such demand that clubs with newspaper subscriptions often regulated the time a reader could monopolize a newspaper before passing it along to waiting readers. Some clubs even chained particularly popular papers to tables and stamped them with special seals so that they could not be removed. Other clubs solved the problem of high demand by reading papers aloud to the assembled multitude. Two centuries after the invention of the printing press, newspapers overtook pamphlets as the mouthpiece of political dissent.
The Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had observed in 1762 that “the better constituted the state, the more public affairs dominate private ones in the minds of the citizens,” because “in a well-run polity, everyone flies to assemblies.”2 A German professor noted the omnipresence of politics: “Everyone is eager for the most recent news of world events, from the Regent, who receives it at first hand from his envoys and messengers, down to the countryman, who hears … the newspapers read by his political schoolmates every Sunday in the pub.”3 Clubs, from the Paris Jacobins meeting across the street from Jacques’s stall to the London Corresponding Society assembled at Bell Tavern on Fleet Street to the Warsaw Citizens offering Aid gathered in the empty Radziwell Palace, took it as their responsibility to inform or, in their words, to enlighten citizens. They constituted an alternative political sphere.4
Before the revolutions, individual wealthy readers typically perused their newspaper alone in the comfort of their home, although some read papers in reading clubs that admitted the elite. European politics had generally been the business of the expensive international gazettes because they were not subject to national censorship. A typical issue of the Courrier de l’Europe (Courier of Europe), published in London, featured bylines from Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, Vienna, Madrid, Maastricht, Liège, Brussels, and Paris. Like most eighteenth-century newspapers, it regularly republished translated articles from other journals without attribution.
With the revolutions, circulation exploded. One-third of Londoners read a weekly newspaper at the time of the American Revolution. “These days political newspapers outsell others by a ratio of ten to one,” the duc de Choiseul reported from Paris in 1789.5John Adams boasted to friends in Congress of his “secret connections” with Dutch journalists who promoted the American cause of liberty to an enlarging reading public throughout Europe. “The Gazettiers in this Country are not mere Printers,” Adams told his compatriots, alluding to the old perception of the colonial printer in America as “a mere mechanic in the art of setting and blocking types,” without a mind of his own. That image evaporated with the American Revolution. The Dutch editors, Adams asserted, “are men of Letters and as these Vehicles have a vast Influence in forming the public opinion.”6 Most notably, Antoine Cérisier, the French-born Dutchman, wielded a pen that had “erected a monument to the American cause more glorious and more durable than brass or marble.” Cérisier’s articles in Le Politique hollandois (Dutch politics) “were read like oracles and his sentiments weekly echoed and reechoed in gazettes and pamphlets” from The Hague to Milan, Adams told Congress.7 Stories of American victories in their War for Independence, recounted in the Gazette de Leyde (Leiden gazette), were read by the Polish king’s advisers in Warsaw.
From Philadelphia to Warsaw, the press trumpeted news of the humblest hints of insurrection, building to a crescendo with the Jacobin clubs of the French Revolution. The Gazeta Narodowa I Obea (National and international gazette), published in Warsaw, also carried all the latest news from revolutionary France, including the regulations adopted by the Parisian Jacobins in February 1790. Accounts of French political debates covered by the Gazette de Leyde published in the United Provinces were translated by Thomas Jefferson and reprinted in English in the Gazette of the United States of Philadelphia. Stefan Luskina then translated and reprinted them in Polish for the Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw gazette). This overlapping coverage knit the revolutionary world together.
From The Hague, the ever-active Cérisier countered the malicious rumors circulated by the British press that he was a foreign agitator for the American cause. “Someone has said that I was neither a good Englishman, nor a good Frenchman and that I was an even better American than I was a Dutchman,” Cérisier informed Adams. “All I know is that I have the principles of liberty too deeply engraved in my heart to ever betray its cause.”8 He had been born not a Frenchman but a “politico-mane.”9 The journalist identified himself simply as a citizen of this revolutionary Atlantic world.
“All the loudest trumpets”: The Press and the People of Revolutionary France
The Révolutions de Paris, the newspaper that invented Jacques the Jacobin, first appeared on the streets of Paris on 19 July 1789, two months after the Estates General assembled in Versailles. Aspiring journalists had been requesting permission from the French government to publish the proceedings of the Estates General because the set of national gazettes authorized to reprint government decrees, once of little interest but now newsworthy, was severely restricted. International gazettes still imported more news into France than they relayed outward, and elite readers alone could afford these expensive papers.
While Louis XVI’s ministers stalled in their discussions of the appropriate role of the press, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, the French lawyer and journalist who had covered revolutions in Geneva and America, deliberately flouted French censorship regulations, publishing and distributing the Patriote français (French patriot). Pamphlets had sparked interest in the revolution, he acknowledged, but only the serial publication of “a political journal or gazette” could keep the people in the large French nation informed. According to Brissot, “without the newspapers, the American Revolution, in which France played so glorious a part, would never have been achieved.” Common Sense, reprinted and disseminated throughout Europe “would have remained … unknown and without influence.”10 Other unsanctioned newspapers quickly followed Brissot’s into print.
Threatened with arrest for breaching censorship regulations, Brissot promptly ceased publishing, but the philosopher and delegate to the Third Estate the comte de Mirabeau, editor of États généraux (Estates general), persevered. “Twenty million voices are crying out for press freedom: Nation and King are unanimous in their wish for help and ideas,” he explained. He owed the people an account of the proceedings.11 A free press was vital to the open discussion that fueled a revolution, he believed. He called on his workshop of Genevan revolutionaries, especially Étienne Dumont, to contribute articles to his new paper. Camille Desmoulins, a poor Parisian lawyer who, from atop a café table had dramatically announced the king’s dismissal of the popular financial minister Genevan Jacques Necker, joined the ranks of journalists challenging press restrictions. The French government retaliated by raiding the booksellers and arresting the women peddlers who sold newspapers.
When censorship and suppression failed to check the tide of publication, the French government relented and granted permission to journalists to cover meetings of the Estates General. That opened the floodgates; 194 new papers appeared in Paris and 90 in the French provinces in the first year of the French Revolution.12 The cost of printing one thousand copies of a popular newspaper was only forty to forty-five livres, the price of a good meal at a restaurant in the Palais Royal or of a box at the opera.13 What was expensive was the paper, so most eighteenth-century editors sought a format that maximized words and minimized space. With a run of one thousand copies, editors could expect to break even. In January 1788, only 5 percent of French journals had dealt with political questions, but by 1789, two-thirds of French journals focused on the debate of the revolution.14
FIGURE 4.1
Révolutions de Paris. 27 November to 4 December 1790. The story of the artisan Jacques appears in this issue “dedicated to the nation.” With permission of the New York Public Library
Revolutionary readers in France not only had a choice of newspapers, they had a choice of political perspective in a world where impartiality was not necessarily a virtue. One skeptic warned readers, “Those who have made the revolution also want to retell it; after having tormented and massacred their fellow citizens, they wanted to mislead posterity.”15 Revolutionary journalists aspired to provide more than “a dry recital of facts.”16 These were new roles for French journalists who had previously been content to recount official information without commentary for the elite. Conservative journalist Antoine Rivarol decried this “liberty of the press.” What could not be said aloud in public “could be conveyed in print.” With their incendiary stories, newspapers, “the artillery of thought,” roused to action people who had never before ventured into politics.17 L’ami du Peuple (The friend of the people), edited by Jean-Paul Marat, targeted “cultivators of the land, the small merchants, the artisans, the workers, the laborers, and the proletarians,” in contrast to the international papers, which were written in a language unknown to tradesmen and artisans and sold at a price beyond their budgets.18
New French newspapers proved more agile than the international press and better able to capture revolutionary events as they happened. Their news did not have to travel out of the country to be published and brought back in again. The Gazette de Leydecountered in vain that as a foreign press, it “had a little more freedom” to reveal “the truth” than the French papers, but “the truth” was relative, and speed was essential.
Revolutionary crowds materialized with such seeming spontaneity that editors of international gazettes initially refused to believe Parisian reports of the storming of the Bastille. The Gazette de Leyde waited two weeks for corroboration of rumors that the people of Paris had taken the monument. French journalists, for the most part clustered in Versailles to catch news of the debates of the National Assembly, also missed the Parisian uprising. The popular insurrection in Paris did not go unreported, however. Playwrights and bookbinders joined the fray, eager to report that “the arms used by former monarchs to enslave men under their royal tyranny are now in the hands of wigmakers’ apprentices and clerks serving the cause of liberty.” The editor of Révolutions de Paris was not exaggerating when he confided in his readers, “All of Europe is watching you.”19
American newspapers published Robespierre’s speech in 1789 to the National Assembly on the liberty of the press. Some papers reprinted excerpts, others the whole speech, but all highlighted Robespierre’s statement “that the Freedom of the Press will contribute more to the freedom and happiness of the people, than the strength of all your National Militia combined.” The French revolutionary leader recognized the liberating power of “the free discussion of every man’s sentiments among his fellow subjects,” thePennsylvania Mercury reported.20 American journalists, even those who decried Jacobin politics, concurred, at least in theory, that the business of the press was to inform and, it seemed to follow, to persuade an ever larger public in this revolutionary age.
A journalist, according to Jean-Paul Marat, newly returned from England, had a duty as a sentry to keep watch and “sound the alarm” rousing the popular classes when their representatives in the National Assembly wavered from “good principles.”21 His and other revolutionary papers read almost as serial pamphlets, their publication eagerly anticipated in the provinces as well as in Paris. Jacobin clubs in the French provinces met on days when the mail from Paris was expected, to take advantage of the timely arrival of the press. If floods or storms delayed the post, rumors replaced the news, often full of speculation of counterrevolutionary sabotage.
Many clubs were open around the clock so that members could come by anytime to read newspapers and converse. In 1791, clubs in Rouen, Castres, Strasbourg, and Montpellier each subscribed to more than twenty newspapers, almost all French.22 Clubs rarely got more expensive international gazettes. Papers on the right, including the Mercure de France and the Gazette de Paris, did not appear on subscription lists either, the Jacobins explained, because they spread “the spirit of fanaticism and revolt.”23 Similarly, the Jacobin reading rooms shunned papers on the far left, including Marat’s L’Ami du Peuple. “It is only from knowing the whole news that truth can be found,” Jacobins pronounced, in support of their multitude of newspaper subscriptions, even if they all leaned one particular way.24
Clubs and newspapers reinforced each other, acculturating subjects first as revolutionaries and then as citizens. In his paper the Révolutions de France et du Brabant, Camille Desmoulins celebrated the propagation of “the great tree planted by the Bretons at the Jacobins,” whose branches spread ever outward with clubs meeting throughout France, most linked via circular letters with the “mother club” in Paris.25 In 1789, the National Assembly explicitly recognized the right of active citizens “to meet peacefully without arms in assemblies to draft addresses and petitions.”26 The Société des Amis de la Constitution (Society of friends of the constitution) originally drew deputies from the National Assembly, “animated by an ardent zeal for the rights of man,” to their meetings in the church formerly owned by the Jacobin order. Regulations adopted by the Parisian Société in February 1790 explicitly encouraged participation by “ordinary people.” Perhaps inspired by the fictional account of Jacques in the Révolutions de Paris, an increasing number of artisans and small shopkeepers joined.
The Jacobins’ powerful oratory in this alternative public space eclipsed meetings of the official Legislative Assembly. One of the main attractions at meetings was the reading of excerpts from the press, but lectures were also given on such subjects as “man’s nature and his duties to his fellow men.”27 Listeners reported that speeches overflowing with the rhetoric of the Enlightenment moved them to tears and the club to ovations. That earned the Jacobins substantial coverage in the press, disseminating their influence yet more widely and defining them as a monitor on the elected bodies. Politics was not just the government anymore.
Jacobin clubs opened up a public sociability unknown under the Old Regime. In Montpellier, they boasted they “were never divided, their hearts always confiding in each other, they all belonged to one family.”28 Citizens, most of whom had been elected to no formal assembly, gathered to discuss the political future of the world. They replaced the formal “vous” with the informal “tu” in meetings. In keeping with this revolutionary sociability, Jacobins visited sick club members with food and newspapers, and organized celebrations that gathered everyone together. On Sundays, most clubs opened their doors to the public.
FIGURE 4.2
Jacobin meeting in Paris, January 1792. The crowded assembly hears the declaration of war. With permission from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la photographie
Revolutionary political sociability spread throughout the provinces as if spontaneously, engaging the French in their revolution. “Organized around the shared enthusiasm for the public good,” the Jacobin societies encouraged “political discussions that are among the chief delights of a free people.” Around France, “associations of zealous patriots” met three or four evenings a week in former monasteries, taverns, small theaters, or offices decorated with the busts of Rousseau, Mirabeau, or Benjamin Franklin, with speaking platforms poised under copies of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.29 French clubs grew from twenty-one to three hundred in 1790, to eleven hundred in 1791, to fifty-five hundred in Year II of the French Revolution.30 The network, linked by correspondence, extended to the colonies, with clubs in Pointe-à-Pitre, Sainte-Rose, and Moule in Guadeloupe, Cayenne in Guiana, and Saint-Louis in Mauritius. “By their very union,” the Genevan Étienne Dumont noted, the Jacobins exercised considerable power.31
Revolutionary travelers from abroad routinely attended Jacobin club meetings in Paris and throughout the provinces. The Prussian-born Dutch revolutionary refugee Jean Baptiste—better known as Anacharsis Cloots—introduced a motion at the Jacobins in Paris in March 1790, speaking as “Cloots du Val-de-Grace, Baron in Germany, citizen in France.”32 The Jacobins celebrated the success of other revolutions, flying the flags of America and Geneva. Robespierre proclaimed that “different peoples must come to one another’s assistance according to their ability, like the citizens of the same State. He who oppresses a single nation declares himself the enemy of all.”33 Their gaze extended beyond France.
The Jacobins had no monopoly over this alternative political sphere. Other clubs, most notably the Cordeliers, coalesced the popular classes unable to pay the membership dues of the Jacobins. At meetings of the Cordeliers, newspapers were read aloud, the enemies of the revolution denounced, and images of a just new world unfettered by economic distinctions pronounced. One English visitor complained about the rowdies in attendance, whose “dress was so filthy and unkempt that one would have taken them for a gathering of beggars.”34 He did not think they belonged in a political discussion. Women as well as wage earners attended the Cercle Social.
In December 1790, Etta Palm d’Aelders from Groningen, in the north of the United Provinces, mounted the speakers’ platform at the Palais Royale to address a crowd of four thousand members of the Cercle Social’s Conféderation des Amis de la Vérité (Confederation of the friends of truth). It was unprecedented for a woman to speak at all, yet she was asking the French Revolution to defend the rights not only of men but of women as well. “You have restored to man the dignity of his being in recognizing his rights,” she began, so why “allow women to groan beneath an arbitrary authority?”35 D’Aelders, an outsider in Paris, appealed to “all individuals, without differentiation for sex,” to recognize “the equality of rights without discrimination of sex.”36 Explaining that French women “burn to show all Europe … they are the model of civic virtues,” d’Aelders established the first women’s club in Paris, the Conféderation des Amies de la Vérité (Confederation of the female friends of truth).37 The founding members set dues at three livres per month, a sum that effectively excluded women without substantial means.
Even if, as the Girondin Madame Roland remembered, “the Jacobins, like the Assembly, suffered convulsions at the very mention of the word,” the king’s flight to Varennes in June 1791 energized these more popular clubs and journalists on the left alike to agitate for a “republic.”38 In their campaign to promote American liberty in France, Brissot, Thomas Paine, the Genevan revolutionary Étienne Clavière, and the marquis de Cordorcet and his wife Sophie de Grouchy organized the Société des Républicains (Republican club). Meeting at the home of the American Revolutionary War veteran Achille du Chastellet, they resolved to publish a newspaper, Le Républicain (The republican). On 1 July 1791, deputies to the French National Assembly found a declaration signed by du Chastellet affixed to their door. Paine, alleged to be the actual author of the address, informed the French that it was their responsibility as revolutionaries to build a nation where every individual was subject to the same laws and where equality would assure the preservation of liberty. They rejoiced that while the rest of Europe was still bound by aristocratic privilege, at least in Paris, “public opinion is formed in the clubs.”39
Many of these clubs, including the Cercle Social and the Cordeliers, coalesced under a central coordinating committee in the summer of 1791. They drew up a petition calling for abdication of the king and the declaration of a republic.40 Thirty thousand citizens arrived en masse at the Champs de Mars on 17 July bearing the signed petitions. The National Guard under Lafayette’s command opened fire, killing or wounding sixty petitioners, and the government ordered the arrest of a number of club leaders.
Newspaper editors had “at their command all the loudest trumpets,” one of Brissot’s enemies complained, noting how easily the rabble was roused.41 The informal transfer of power from elite institutions to the more popular press and clubs did not go uncontested. In drafting the moderate French Constitution of 1791, Isaac le Chapelier moved that political power be vested in elected bodies and their constituted governments only. Groups of friends could meet, but their debates could not be open to the public. Thereafter, Jacobins could sign their addresses as free citizens, but not as members of an organized group.
Nor was the presence of women on the political stage universally welcomed. When a journalist writing for the Gazette de la Haye (The Hague gazette) died, Etta Palm d’Aelders asked to replace him. The editor refused on the grounds that “she was only a woman with politics for a hobby.”42 Women were apparently not included in his ideal of equality. In the new republic of equal brothers, women were relegated to club galleries to observe and listen, and not allowed to participate in the debate. Writing to a friend, d’Aelders protested the French revolutionaries who “desire the liberation of the slaves in America and uphold the despotism of the husband.”43
The Société des Républicaines Révolutionnaires (Society of revolutionary republican women) defended their right to participate in politics, arguing “that one must recognize one’s social duties in order to fulfill one’s domestic duties adequately.” They pledged “to instruct themselves, to learn well the Constitution and laws of the Republic, to attend to public affairs, [and] to succor suffering humanity.”44 Together with the Cordeliers, they called on Jacobins to mobilize the sans culottes and arm them with weapons forged in public workshops.
In September 1793, a detractor denounced the Société des Républicaines Révolutionnaries, now several hundred strong, to the Jacobins for inciting disorder among the stalls of the marketplace. Members had tried to compel market women to wear the revolutionary cockade. Their leader, Claire Lacombe, “meddles everywhere” the critic complained, just as Lacombe herself entered the gallery. The president of the Jacobins pointed to her unwelcome appearance as “proof of the declarations that have just been made against her.” He chided other women in attendance that their true duties were at home. Lacombe was hauled before the Committee of General Security for questioning.45
Tensions escalated. Market women invaded the next meeting of the Société des Républicains Révolutionnaires shouting “Down with red bonnets! Down with Jacobin women! Down with Jacobin women and the cockades! They are all scoundrels who have brought misfortune upon France!” The chair “tried in vain to bring people back to their senses using the arms of reason,” but soldiers had to intervene to restore order.46 The Jacobins seized the occasion to close the women’s clubs as a threat to public order in October 1793. Theirs remained open.
With the decisive victory of the “Mountain” or Jacobins in the National Convention in the summer of 1793, the Jacobin clubs not only came back to life but were officially recognized as an auxiliary arm of the government. This formidable presence when all of Europe was to be “jacobinized” has endured as the image of the Jacobin clubs, overshadowing the more informal institutions that claimed the allegiance of Frenchmen in the first four years of the revolution.
British Sans Culottes: “Manufacturers, Tradesmen and other inhabitants”
Newspaper-reading, pamphlet-writing societies in England predated the French Revolution.47 What changed under the influence of the French was the involvement of artisans and tradesmen in politics. Their participation in this alternative political sphere alarmed the government as it built up the bulwarks against revolution from across the Channel.
In 1790, a coterie of peers, knights, aldermen, and a few doctors in 1780 organized the London Society for Constitutional Information “to convince men of all ranks, that it is in their interest as well as their duty, to support a free constitution, and to maintain and assert these common rights which are essential to the dignity and to the happiness of human nature.”48 In its first three years, the London Society for Constitutional Information disseminated more than eighty-eight thousand copies of thirty-three pamphlets calling for reform: broader parliamentary representation, fair elections, just taxation, and the abolition of the slave trade.
In December 1791, a quite different set of men in Sheffield, mostly tradesmen, drawing inspiration not only from the Society for Constitutional Information but from the French Jacobins as well, organized a society to answer “the want of knowledge and information in the general class of People.”49 By mid-March 1792, more than two thousand members, divided into sections, were meeting in Sheffield taverns. The Sheffield Constitutional Society published a cheap edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man to summon still more artisans to the cause of parliamentary reform. Paine offered to donate the profits from the sale to the popular societies.
A Scottish cobbler in Piccadilly, Thomas Hardy, gathered a similar circle of eight London tradesmen at the Bell Tavern on Fleet Street in March 1792. Hardy recalled later in his memoirs: “They had finished their daily labour, and met there by appointment. After having their bread and cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some conversation on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life, which they, in common with their fellow citizens, felt to their sorrow, the business for which they had met was brought forward—parliamentary reform—an important subject to be deliberated upon and dealt with by such a class of men.”50 Each of the eight members of the London Corresponding Society contributed a penny to the kitty, far less than the dues of the London Constitutional Society. The second meeting drew sixteen members; within a month more than one hundred members had split into divisions, each meeting in a separate London tavern.
The two societies reached out to industrial Britain, encouraging societies in Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich, and Stockport. The political awakening of the “large and respectable manufacturing towns,” John Horne Tooke, a London barrister and leader of the London Society for Constitutional Information, explained, would offset “the aristocratic interests of the country” that had long dominated British politics.51 The London Corresponding Society pointedly identified its struggle with that of black slaves who had been stripped of their rights, appropriating the term “slavery” to describe members’ own condition as British laborers. Olaudah Equiano, the leader of London’s free black community, revised his widely read narrative in the home of his friends Thomas and Lydia Hardy.52
The communication among the rapidly growing membership of the radical societies and their alliance with abolitionists and freed slaves alarmed William Pitt’s government. Why, government agents wondered, would the members of the Constitutional Society, propertied and educated at Eton and Oxford, who gathered at Tooke’s solicitor’s quarters in Chancery Lane for meetings, correspond regularly with tradesmen like Thomas Hardy? More to the point, why would barristers invited to the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street for “Dinner at Four. Ticket Seven Shillings and Sixpence” defend the right of “the people necessarily separated for the purpose of following their several occupations and attending to their domestic concerns … to meet, associate, and communicate together, upon all matters relative to their common good”?53 Why did the disparate associations consider cooperation not only a right but “a duty they reciprocally owe to each other so to do”?54 Edmund Burke, author of Reflections on the Revolution in France, identified the growing crowds assembled in London taverns as “the mother of the mischief” and a threat to Britain’s tradition of peaceful reform.55
Thomas Paine toasted the “Revolution of all the world” at the Revolution Society in London, as reported by American journalist Thomas Greenleaf in the New York Journal.56 Peoples were joining together and rising above national prejudices “to assert the unalienable rights of mankind, and thereby to introduce a general reformation in the governments of Europe,” speakers at the London assembly proclaimed. Together they would “make the world free and happy.”57
Even though the London Corresponding Society openly declared “their abhorrence of tumult and violence,” the government was determined to find a Jacobin conspiracy.58 Their fears were not completely misplaced. Tooke wanted “to bind all our fellow citizens with us in the strong tyes of mutual interest and general good,” building a movement across Europe and America that would join all the people in a vast democracy.59 An admirer of the tracts of Joel Barlow appealing to a “class of men that cannot write, and in a great measure … cannot read,” Tooke nominated the American poet for honorary membership in the Society for Constitutional Information.60 Unanimously welcomed into the Society, Barlow was appointed a steward to plan the April celebration of Thomas Paine in London.61 Correspondents from the British societies also wrote regularly to their counterparts on the Continent, looking “forward to the day when the two nations, united by Nature, but divided for ages by the intrigues of Courts and the pride of Princes,” would “be reunited by the love of peace, and by the reciprocal advantages of a Commerce.”62 Some of these letters were intercepted and ended up in the hands of the government.
A government spy who had been accustomed to follow the “ragamuffins” of the London Corresponding Society was dispatched to monitor the Society for Constitutional Information; he reported his surprise at “the decent and respectable appearance of the persons assembled together.”63 Shadowed by this same spy, Tooke decided to play along and, within hearing of the man, exaggerated the number of Society for Constitutional Information members, spoke of plots for revolution, and boasted of collections of arms and ammunition. When the spy intercepted a letter to Tooke asking, “Is it possible to get ready by Thursday?”—in fact, a dinner invitation—the spy assumed a militia was on the march, and dispatched police. They surprised the impeccably dressed dinner guests at Tooke’s Wimbledon estate.64 This alliance of middle-class reformers with mechanics and artisans new to politics was especially worrisome to the government, given the success of the American War for Independence and the progress of the revolution across the Channel.
In April 1792, James Watt, son of the inventor of the steam engine, and Thomas Cooper, representing the Manchester Constitutional Society, traveled to France to address the Jacobins. As observers of the French Revolution, they witnessed firsthand what “the American Republics have taught us experimentally, that nations may flourish and be happy who have no Bishops, no Nobles, no kings. No reflecting Man,” Cooper added, “can look back at the last half Century, or consider the probabilities of the next, without seeing clearly that the Revolution of Europe is at hand.” From London, Burke denounced Watt and Cooper for exposing Britain to Jacobinism. Is it a crime to enlighten the people upon the subject of politics? Cooper asked. “Why this dread the People (the Swinish multitude as their friend, Mr. Burke, calls them) should think too much and reason too much on their own rights and their own Interests?”65 Others derided Watt and Cooper as British Jacobins intent on reducing Britain to “a general confusion and scramble, in which all orders, ranks, and properties are to be confounded.”66 Property aside, that was not far from their goal.
Tensions escalated the next autumn when Joel Barlow and a British lawyer, John Frost, self-identified as “respectable cosmopolitans” representing the London Corresponding Society, addressed the French National Convention. “Frenchmen, you are already free and Britons are preparing to become so,” they proclaimed.67 Carried away by the enthusiasm of the convention, they ventured beyond their prepared text. “Like the faint glimmerings of an aurora borealis, the spark of liberty, [was] nurtured in England during the course of several centuries.” In 1776, “a more intense light, similar to that of the true dawn blazed forth from the heart of the American Republic, but at too great a distance to illuminate our hemisphere.” The Europeans watched, inspired from afar, but unsure how to apply the new principles in the Old World, Barlow and Frost explained. “The French Revolution, shining with all the intensity of the sun at its zenith,” reintroduced revolution to Europe. “Everywhere, its influence is dispelling the clouds,” they concluded before presenting one thousand pairs of shoes to the assembly for French soldiers.68 French Jacobins wrote back to thank the British, pledging that together they would fight and defeat the “league of tyrants,” a coalition that many thought included the British government.69
In December 1792, Scottish radicals summoned their English associates to Edinburgh for a “convention,” a term purposefully chosen to echo the French. Two hundred sixty delegates from eighty committees represented the British people at this alternative body to the House of Commons. Although the delegates rejected the most incendiary proposals put forward by the United Irish and swore their allegiance to the king, the convention closed with the French oath “to live free or die.”70
In 1793, the London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional Information together organized a massive petition drive to protest their government’s rush to join the Austrians and Prussians in their war against the French. They held out little hope of succeeding, but as Prussian troops approached Paris, they wanted to “assure the French that we entertain the most friendly dispositions … towards them.”71 Modeled after the abolitionist petition campaigns, the British societies’ drive gathered more signatures from “the Manufacturers, Tradesmen and other Inhabitants” than the number of enfranchised citizens who had voted for the sitting Parliament.72 Their success in enlarging the political community was obvious. Ten thousand signed the London Corresponding Society petition opposing war with France, eight thousand the antiwar petition in Sheffield, and Edinburgh’s petition stretched the length of Parliament itself. The British government monitored the petitioners but ignored the petitions.
The London Corresponding Society also organized a mass meeting to rally support for France in its war against its counterrevolutionary neighbors. Seven hundred ticket holders assembled in the Crown and Anchor Tavern to hear spirited orators denounce the “British gold” that “subsidizes armies of Continental slaves” while “the starving labourer is compelled to sell his life and liberty for bread!”73 So many people came to a third mass meeting that organizers had to move the crowd out of doors, where bystanders gawked and cried out, “Tom Paine was come to plant the tree of liberty. … The French Jacobins were come.”74 (Paine had, in fact, fled to France to avoid arrest.)
In the fall, despite threats of arrest by Scottish authorities, English societies sent delegates “who really wish for a radical Reform in Parliament and the Preservation of the Constitutional Rights” back to Edinburgh to a second British convention.75 Delegates deliberately echoed the rhetoric of the French Convention. William Pitt’s government dispatched the police to disperse the convention and arrest the leaders.
The rhetoric of the London Corresponding Society’s final public meeting in the early spring of 1794 at Chalk Farm just north of London eclipsed that of the French Jacobins. John Thelwell, a firebrand who had been addressing gatherings across London, lamented the poverty of British laborers and told them “in plain terms I am a Republican, a down right sans culotte.”76 He spoke of reform, not revolution, but advocated the destruction of the regime of privilege in Britain that allowed the rich to swell their incomes “by monopolising the necessities of life” while laborers paid heavy taxes and languished, untaught, in poverty.77 Many of the leaders of the London Corresponding Society were not afraid to call themselves Jacobins. The reformer William Fox said he was proud to be associated with the French Jacobins, “if Jacobinism be the progress of human knowledge subverting ancient systems founded on ignorance and superstition.”78 The inflammatory declaration provoked a response.
The government arrested twelve leaders of the British radical societies, including John Horne Tooke, John Thelwell, and Thomas Hardy, and seized their papers. They were accused of organizing a convention “directly tending to the Introduction of that System of Anarchy and Confusion which has fatally prevailed in France.”79 Club members who escaped the first round of arrests fled Britain, some traveling to the Continent, others taking refuge in America. The society leaders were acquitted after long and well-publicized trials, but few British radicals dared to continue their struggle for revolutionary change in Britain. Pointing to the contagion of revolution throughout continental Europe, members of Parliament encouraged the government to prosecute radicals under the terms of the Two Acts, the so-called “Gagging Acts.”
The government drove the radical movement in Britain, including the abolitionists, underground, a casualty of the alleged connection to the French Jacobins. Even though many of these British radicals were actually more outspoken in their populism and abolitionism than the French Jacobins, it was in their alleged association with the French that they were seen as posing the biggest threat to the British government.
The “revolutionary wave” of the Polish Jacobins
The enlightened Polish monarch King Stanislas worried—with good reason, it turned out—that reformers throughout Europe would be tainted by their friendship with the Parisian Jacobins. He had heard that in Italy and Germany foreign radicals said to be “emissaries of the Jacobin Club … are distributing profusely thousands of copies of all kinds of pamphlets in French and German best designed to stir up people’s minds.”80 This threat of French radical contagion put nervous absolutist governments everywhere on guard, a particular problem for the Polish ruler, lodged as he was between Prussia and Russia. Association with the French revolutionaries could give his powerful neighbors an excuse to invade. A known reformer himself, he was no Jacobin.
The king ruled from Warsaw, the only large city in Poland. His power was limited. Most of the Polish peasants owed their allegiance as serfs to their local lords. These lords, each representing one of the fifty regional assemblies in the national parliament or Diet, could block legislation they opposed. That obviously included reforms eliminating this Liberum Veto. In 1789, after a decade of discussion, 141 Polish towns petitioned the king for the right to representation in the Diet alongside the gentry. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic followed “the progress of the Spirit of Liberty in Poland.”81 When debate in the Diet stalled, reformers initiated secret meetings with the king to draft a new constitution outside the parliamentary sessions.
In the spring of 1791, eighty Polish citizens calling themselves the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, after the French Jacobins, assembled at the empty Warsaw’s Radziwill Palace to encourage ratification of this new constitution by the Diet.82 Urged on by an Italian expatriate active in the Society of the Friends, Scipione Piattoli, King Stanislas convened an emergency meeting of the Diet, scheduled for the Easter holiday, when members of the gentry were away at their country estates. Reformers gathered in Stanislas’s chamber at three in the morning. Together they vowed, as had the French National Assembly, not to adjourn until they ratified a new constitution. The club’s tactic succeeded. The Diet approved a new constitution.
Stanisław Małachowski, marshal of the Diet, championed the Polish Constitution of 1791 that guaranteed “liberty, security, and all freedoms,” rooted as it was in English and American constitutional principles.83 The Constitution eliminated the Liberum Veto, strengthened the powers of the king, and separated the three branches of government. It did not free the serfs but did recognize the rights of burghers, the urban middle class, and open their path into the gentry. King Stanislas, well “aware of its considerable shortcomings,” conceded that the Poles had accomplished what was possible.84 All the while, he endeavored to assure his neighbors that the Polish revolution was neither democratic nor Jacobin.
Outside observers and the press did not help his cause. The Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw gazette) linked the French and the Poles as two people “sharing a common goal. Both countries want to be free and to know no other laws than those they have given themselves.”85 Jacobin clubs in France that had followed the progress of Polish reform efforts hailed the new constitution that extended liberty to “millions of men in one day.”86 Filippo Mazzei, a Tuscan merchant hired as the Polish king’s agent, informed the king from Paris, “Here now there is hardly any talk other than of Poland and her magnanimous, divine Stanislas Augustus.”87 French newspapers heralded the reforms in Poland as the beginnings of revolution in central Europe. The Moniteur and Révolutions de Pariswarned that if other European monarchs did not follow the example of Stanislas, their people might rebel like the French.
Acclaim came from all of the expected quarters, and from others as well. Anacharsis Cloots proclaimed: “The trumpet announcing the resurrection of a great people has sounded to the four corners of the earth, and the cries of joy from a chorus of twenty-five million free men will awaken the peoples long asleep in slavery.”88 Thomas Paine inquired about the possibility of claiming Polish citizenship. His rival, Edmund Burke, who had condemned the French Revolution in his influential Reflections on the French Revolution, modestly took credit himself for the Polish constitution. Meanwhile, the American Joel Barlow, who had sent King Stanislas a copy of his recently published Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, praised the new constitution as “if not the best law that you could frame, at least the best that circumstances would admit.”89 The Pennsylvania Gazette congratulated the Polish king, whom it recognized as an avid reader of all things American.90 From London, the Public Advertiser warned that “if the new Revolution in Poland is suffered to be permanent, … and if the flames should spread, the conflagration, in all human probability, would become general.”91
The Society of Friends of the Constitution meeting in Warsaw fanned the flames. They pledged to assure the respect due the Constitution in the Diet, the army, the schools, newspapers, and churches. The Society organized public festivals in May 1792 to commemorate the first anniversary of the Constitution before threats from neighboring emperors forced them into secrecy. Just as Stanislas had predicted, the arrival of the French ambassador and his attendance at meetings of the Society of Friends stoked Russian and Prussian fears of a secret revolutionary alliance between the French and the Poles.
Polish newspapers, unlike their French counterparts, devoted the little attention they gave to Polish politics to parliamentary decisions of the Diet, not to the debates of the clubs. There was no exponential growth in the number of newspapers, either, as in Paris. Perhaps the two factors were related. Instead, the Gazeta Narodowa I Obca (National and international gazette), published by reformers in the Polish Diet, reprinted documents from the Parisian Jacobins. Their twenty-four-year-old correspondent, Thadée Mostowski, documented “the passage of the people from oppression to liberty” in France.92 It was said that Ignacy Potocki, the king’s cousin and a representative of the Polish reformers, was late to a session of the Diet because he was waiting for the latest news from France.93
The visit of a Polish deputy to the French Convention in December 1792, reportedly on mission from Poland to affirm the fraternal brotherhood of the two republics, confirmed Russian suspicions. Russian empress Catherine II assured the Prussians that she would put an end to “this pernicious epidemic.”94 That was just what Stanislas had feared all along. In May 1792, Russian troops invaded Poland and called for the dissolution of the Diet. They justified their intervention with the Act of Targowica, an aristocratic denunciation of the Polish Constitution of 1791.
King Stanislas capitulated as Austria, Prussia, and Russia occupied and partitioned the country. Newspapers around Europe got this news from the Gazeta Warszawska. British editors applauded the courage of the Polish people and their king. “The Revolutions of Poland differed essentially from the Revolution in France,” the Public Advertiser clarified for its readers to elicit their sympathy. “The change in Poland was not from a state of slavery to that of licentious liberty [as in France]. No! It was the united struggle of a brave, of a free people to rescue themselves from the insulting overbearance of a despotic neighbor.”95 Although many Polish revolutionaries fled to Dresden, Leipzig, and Paris, a Polish resistance movement mobilized within Poland. They told the French foreign minister that they intended to drive out Russia and Prussia and to restore an independent government guaranteeing the freedom of the common people of Poland. Their first revolution had demonstrated to them “how unsatisfactory moderately employed means are when enemies of humanity impose ever-present barriers against their freedom.”96 They chose Thaddeus Kościuszko, the Polish hero of the American Revolution, as their leader.
Kościuszko, now an honorary French citizen, visited Paris in January 1794. He left the French capital with vague assurances of French support for a second Polish revolution. French foreign minister Pierre Lebrun envisioned “squadrons of battleships on the Baltic Sea” as Sweden and Turkey joined France in liberating Poland.97 Kościuszko traveled to Italy to divert attention from plans afoot in Poland. In Italy, Kościuszko encountered the seemingly ever-present Mazzei, who offered to arrange his transport to America. Kościuszko feigned interest, another ploy to confuse his enemies, but returned secretly to Poland. There he pledged, “in the face of heaven and before all the human race, and especially before all the nations that know how to value liberty above all the blessings of the universe … to deliver the land of our fathers from a ferocious oppression, and from the galling yoke of the ignominious bondage.”98 He began to prepare a coordinated assault against the Russians.
Forced by events to attack before they were ready, Kościuszko’s troops defeated the Russians at the village of Racławice after an uprising at Cracow. That signaled the beginning of the insurrection that spread throughout the country in April 1794. It was not clear whether the Poles were fighting only to secure independence from the Russians or had launched a second revolution. Kościuszko realized that a revolution that pushed beyond the reforms of 1791 would alienate moderate reformers, whose support he would need to govern. However, to mobilize the Polish peasants on whom he relied in battle, their scythes converted to pikes, Kościuszko had to promise equality. The Polaniec Proclamation of May 1794 was a compromise document. It proclaimed the peasants free, but required them to report their movements to public authorities. Even if Kościuszko sympathized with the Jacobins instead of the moderates, circumstances in Poland forced him to bend toward the middle class to counter the power of the gentry.
After the 1794 uprising in Warsaw, a new club explicitly following the model of the French Jacobins, Citizens Offering Aid and Service to the National Magistrates for the Welfare of the Country, pledged to democratize this second Polish revolution. Meeting in the former Jesuit colleges and in the cloisters of the Capuchins, the club drew its members predominantly from the intelligentsia of Warsaw. Shopkeepers and tradesmen gathered in clubs of their own in popular cafés on Mostowa Street in Warsaw, on Szewska and Florianska streets in Cracow, and in Vilno. The British ambassador in Warsaw anxiously reported seeing club members emerge from their gatherings fully attired in Jacobin clothing and insignia, inspiring massive crowds in demonstrations staged before the palace to demand equality. King Stanislas asked Kościuszko to disband the incendiary clubs, but the Polish revolutionary leader refused. Revolutionary clubs were needed, he asserted, wherever “the people were not respected by the government or when the excessive moderation of the government towards evil doers and the slowness of justice chilled them.”99 In defiance of the king, Polish Jacobins continued to build altars to the fatherland, to wear Phyrgian caps, and to sing civic hymns from the French Revolution. Catherine vigorously denounced “the wanton Warsaw horde established by French tyrants.”100
The Poles fought the Russians and the Prussians through the summer, casting themselves as heirs to earlier revolutions. No foreign aid materialized, not from the French or anyone else. That left the Poles, closely watched by Americans and Europeans, on their own. Even though clearly overpowered, the optimistic Polish Jacobins still aspired to launch “a revolutionary wave that would flood all the countries from the Don to the Oder rivers.”101 The Polish army dispatched “several hundred apostles of liberty” into Russia to foment revolution.102 In October 1794, the Poles lost the battle of Maciejowice, and that sealed their fate. Kościuszko was captured by the Russians, who marched on, massacring between ten thousand and fifteen thousand citizens in the suburb of Praga alone before the Poles capitulated for a second time. The Russians, the Austrians, and the Prussians once again partitioned Poland, dismantling the embryonic reforms instituted by the revolutionaries and their king.
Revolutionaries throughout the Atlantic world once again heralded the martyrs to the cause of liberty. A Dutch poet dubbed Kościuszko the Polish George Washington, “the son of freedom,” for freeing the serfs.103 The Jacobins in Paris announced that Kościuszko’s time in Paris and his visit to the National Convention in particular had inspired in the Polish patriot “this sacred fire of liberty, this hatred of tyranny and this love of the people, without which an insurrectionary chief is nothing but a tyrant.”104 Few of them doubted that revolution would return to central Europe, led, they expected, by a new hero inspired by their revolution.
“The party from which the mischief is expected to arise”
French journalists had cause to describe Paris as the fount of liberty after 1789. Their revolution not only outlasted all the others, except the American, but inspired imitations. The idiosyncratic editor of the Annales politiques, civiles, et littéraires (Political, civil, and literary annals), Simon-Nicolas Linguet, who had spent time in Poland, Britain, the United Provinces, and the Austrian Netherlands, foresaw the imminent defeat of “tyranny, this monster, who under so many different names crushed enslaved Europe” and celebrated the liberation of the people who would govern themselves “without Pope, without Kings & without Queens.”105 Camille Desmoulins dedicated his Parisian newspaper to the “fraternity that must unite all free peoples.”106 He linked the preeminent French Revolution to the Portuguese who were awakening from their slumber, to revolutionary movements stirring in Spain, and to the “Philosophy and the spirit of liberty scaling the Alps.”107 The Courrier de l’Europe reported in 1791 that “the yet undefined watchwordliberty has electrified everyone.”108 That was before the second defeat of the Polish revolutionaries and the suppression of the British radicals. Even those setbacks, though, would do little to dull their optimism.
The press and the clubs together transformed politics in the revolutionary age. Citizenship required a free press and voluntary associations. They invited the people, not just deputies elected by a limited franchise or officials appointed by a monarch, into politics. These new citizens did not just vote; they expected to be integrally involved in the governing of their society. This was the public sphere more broadly defined by clubs, based in the popular sovereignty of an expanded citizenry that read or listened, and joined in a revolution. The political community had ceased to be the privileged domain of “some,” of the elites.
André Chénier, editor of the Journal de Paris (Journal of Paris), charged that the French Jacobins, with “more zeal than enlightenment,” had forgotten “that in a well-administered state all of the citizens do not control public affairs.” Vesting their trust in “the sovereignty of the people,” the Jacobins in their clubs and newspapers incited mobs, “brazenly called the people,” to claim a role in running the state.109
“Experience shows us that the people are not the terrible monster that the supporters of despotism portray,” the editor of a Dutch newspaper countered.110 Joel Barlow more maliciously suggested in his Advice to the Privileged Orders that it was pointless for “some” to worry about the dissemination of revolutionary news to “the party from which the mischief is expected to arise,” because that party had “knowledge of them already.”111
The experience of French revolutionaries had solidified the conviction that there was only one truth. Writers on the left especially, but also the right, shared an optimistic faith with the leaders of the clubs that if the truth was published, it would convince. “If only the liberty of thinking and writing was given to everyone, errors would collapse of their own weight, and the truth and the general interest alone would float on the ocean of public thought,” the editor of La Cocarde nationale (The national cockade) suggested.112
The revolution transformed the press. It was not just the staggering increase in the volume of newsprint. Before 1789, journalists covered political events in sparse prose, often from a safe distance. The French Revolution enlisted journalists as political participants; they in turn demanded engagement from their readers. Partisan newspapers read by like-minded people hardened political divisions not only in a revolution with a guillotine, but in ones surrounded by imperial armies.
This political opening attracted admiration and imitation among France’s neighbors, from London to Krakow. The London Corresponding Society foresaw an alliance “not of crowns, but of the people of America, France, and Britain.”113 Jean-Paul Marat, happy to imagine himself “the father of the clubs,” envisioned these popular clubs as an educational forum for “men well versed in politics who are vigilant day and night watching over their interests and defending their rights.”114 Their revolution would become more contagious as the public sphere opened. Politics would travel across national borders through the press, linking one popular association to another.
The threat of conflagration in the volatile age of upheaval meant that connections with the French Jacobins, whether real or imagined, was sufficient to alarm the powers interested in preserving the established order. Burke dedicated himself to keeping “the French infection from this country; their principles from our minds and their daggers from our hearts.” He warned his “countrymen to beware of these execrable philosophers, whose only object is to destroy every thing that is good here, and to establish immorality and murder by precept and example.”115 In Poland, as in England, suspicion of alliances triggered by revolutionary club members’ travel to Paris roused the forces of order to quell the revolutionary tide. The French Revolution that inspired neighboring revolutions also caused their demise.
With the Prussians and the Russians on the move in central Europe, the Republican Society of South Carolina worried that “the European potentates” threatened “nothing less than American vassalage, in some form or other.”116 United by their common interests, American clubs up and down the Atlantic Coast called on revolutionary people everywhere to fight against “Aristocracy and Despotism” and for “the lasting improvement and happiness of the human race as they are founded in the equal rights of man.”117When the French consul gave the society in South Carolina a stone from the Bastille, members promised to engrave on it the infamous French cap of liberty.
They did not anticipate that citizenship, redefined by revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic, would be more dramatically expanded by the revolution in the Caribbean. That wave of revolutions shaking the institution of slavery and disrupting the slave trade would challenge many of the very revolutionaries who had redefined the public sphere in America and Europe.