The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  The first sign that France had been internationally weakened by domestic crisis came in September 1787, when she failed to keep her promises to the Dutch patriots and allowed the Prussians to march into the Republic and crush their movement. The chanceries of Europe registered the change instantly, and not without some gloating. ‘If God’, wrote the British ambassador to the Hague, ‘wished to punish them in the way they have sinned, how I should admire divine justice.’1 Apparently God did. For the next four years the French became ever more preoccupied with their internal problems, and their international power withered away. Diplomatic relations were conducted, for the first time in centuries, without regard for what the French might think or do. Their apparent inability to restore financial or practical stability amazed and amused the rest of Europe, at least down to the summer of 1789. Until then, few onlookers knew what to make of it all. But with the fall of the Bastille, suddenly and simultaneously throughout the continent the meaning of what was going on in France seemed to fall into place. The Bastille was a state prison. Its storming marked the overthrow of despotism by subjects who until now had known no liberty under kingly rule.

  The news was romantic and thrilling. All over Europe people thronged bookshops and reading rooms, clamouring for the latest information. ‘I do not know where to turn,’ wrote a German lady, ‘for the papers contain such great and splendid news that I am hot from reading.’2 The leaders of German literary life were almost unanimous in welcoming the events in France. Philosophers like Kant and Herder, poets like Klopstock, Hölderlin, and Wieland were enraptured by what they heard. Even those, like Goethe and Schiller, who were more sceptical right from the start followed the news avidly. Richer and more adventurous Germans took the road to Paris to observe the new liberty at first hand, and one at least became notorious there. Jean-Baptiste Clootz was a wealthy Prussian nobleman who had left France in 1785 vowing never to return until the Bastille had fallen. He was in Sicily when it did, and hurried back to throw himself into the democratic politics he had hitherto only dreamed of. The impact was similar among the intellectuals of Italy, who rejoiced to see what had seemed the most well established of states shattered by popular uprising and then rededicating itself to national reform. Wholesale reform was not, after all, just for dreamers, or for Americans free to start again in virgin territory: it could take place in the heart of Europe, in the continent’s very intellectual capital. That meant it could take place anywhere. As far away as Stockholm the news from France was the talk of the salons and cafés. ‘Tell me,’ wrote the young Swedish poet Kellgren to his brother, ‘was there ever anything more sublime in History, even in Rome or Greece? I wept like a child, like a man, at the story of this great victory.’3 In St Petersburg, there was jubilation in the streets and a vast expansion in the circulation of news-sheets. Russians were present at the fall of the Bastille, in fact. ‘The cry of freedom rings in my ears’, rhapsodized one of them, Count Stroganov, ‘and the best day of my life will be that when I see Russia regenerated by such a Revolution.’4

  One country in Europe felt no such need. In 1788 there were widespread celebrations in Great Britain to mark the centenary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ which had thwarted Stuart despotism and finally established parliamentary government and the rule of law. Englishmen revelled in their freedom, and had traditionally regarded the French as slaves to tyranny, superstition, and poverty. They were now benevolently interested to see their neighbour catching up. Fox, leader of the Whig opposition, proclaimed the fall of the Bastille the greatest and best event in history; and while not all British observers went so far, there was little initial hostility. ‘It will perhaps surprise you,’ one Member of Parliament wrote to a correspondent in France on 28 July 1789, ‘but it is certainly true, that the Revolution … produced a very sincere and very general joy here. It is the subject of all conversations; and even all the newspapers, without one exception, though they are not conducted by the most liberal or most philosophical of men, join in sounding forth the praises of the Parisians, and in rejoicing at an event so important for mankind.’5 And meanwhile those who had seen more recent attempts at revolution suppressed or aborted took comfort and encouragement. Many of them were already refugees in France anyway. Genevan democrats, whose attempts to widen the circles of political power in the city-state had been crushed by armed intervention by a league of neighbouring powers, led by France, in 1782, hoped the new regime in Paris would abandon its oligarchic puppets. Shamed at its failure to help the Dutch patriots more tangibly in 1787, the dying absolute monarchy in France had at least extended hospitality to refugees from Orangist and Prussian vengeance. By the end of 1788 perhaps 1,500 Dutch families had been granted residence and small pensions by Louis XVI. When power in France fell into the hands of men who also called themselves patriots and sought to share power more widely, the Dutch exiles were delighted. Largely concentrated in a handful of towns in French Flanders, by 1790 they were forming clubs and setting up National Guard units. The National Assembly, recognizing spiritual allies, continued to subsidize them, too; although its pacific professions and military weakness offered them scant hope at this stage of reversing their defeat of 1787 with French help.

  Most of the Dutch exiles, however, did not penetrate as far as France. The vast majority of the 40,000 or so fugitives from the Orangist reaction ended up nearer home, in the Austrian Netherlands or the ecclesiastical principality of Liège. Belgian resistance to Joseph II’s rationalizing policies in Church and State was gathering momentum by the time of the Dutch political exodus. The refugees found the atmosphere of defiance, as well as linguistic affinities, congenial; but the issues at stake in Belgium were very different from those preoccupying Dutch patriots. The opponents of William V had sought to change the way things were done. In Belgium it was the distant Emperor who sought change: his Flemish and Walloon subjects merely wanted to be left alone. In 1787 and 1788 that brought them closer to the French than to the Dutch; but whereas, by 1789, the French had moved on, and were looking to create a whole new order based on liberty, the Belgian rebels remained largely wedded to protecting existing liberties, that whole complex of customs and prescriptive rights which French patriots were now beginning to denounce as unjust and meaningless privileges. Both conflicts came to a head in the first half of 1789, however, and during the excitement of the struggle few noticed the increasing divergence between the French and what they called the Brabant Revolution. The day after the third estate in Versailles proclaimed themselves the National Assembly and claimed the sole right to authorize taxation, Joseph II demanded that the estates of Brabant grant him a limitless right to tax and legislate (18 June 1789). When they refused, he dissolved them, and renounced the ‘Joyous Entry’, the charter of liberties which he like all preceding sovereigns had sworn to uphold on his accession. The grain shortage that was so important in France at this moment also affected the crowded cities of the low countries, and as in Paris the hungry populace threw its weight behind the opponents of authority. ‘Here as in Paris’ in fact became the popular cry in Brussels, and a secret revolutionary society was established to tap anti-Austrian feeling. Using a slogan already favoured by Irish and Dutch para-military reform organizations earlier in the decade, it called itself Pro Aris et Focis—for altars and hearths—and it was generously funded by the Church, which here as elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire had borne the brunt of Joseph II’s reforms. No popular uprising came, however, until companies of armed exiles intervened in the autumn. The acknowledged leader of resistance to the Emperor, the colourful Brussels lawyer Van der Noot, had been in exile in Holland since August 1788, hoping to interest foreign powers in his compatriots’ plight. Spurned by monarchs well content to see Joseph II mired by chaos in Belgium, eventually he turned to armed self-help. In cooperation with the founder of Pro Aris et Focis, his fellow lawyer Vonck, in October 1789 he organized an invasion which overwhelmed the small, over-confident Austrian garrison. The insurgents came not just from ac
ross the Dutch frontier, but from Liège in the south, where in mid-August opponents of the prince-bishop had seized power, visibly encouraged by the example of France. By December the Belgian rebels, backed by popular uprisings, were in control of the entire country, and in Brussels everyone was wearing national cockades like the French—but here in black, yellow, and red. On 10 January 1790, at the invitation of the estates of Brabant, representatives of all the provinces met and declared themselves an independent United States of Belgium. The chorus of approval from France was unanimous. But almost at once it became clear how little the two revolutions had in common.

  The new ‘statist’ regime sought only to carry on as before, but without a monarch. Power was to remain with the estates of the various provinces, dominated as they were by great nobles and above all the Church in the form of its traditional representatives, the abbots of the greater monasteries. Van der Noot, now installed as first minister, had no sympathy with a France where the lands of the Church had already been confiscated, monasteries were about to be dissolved, and noble power had been broken. Vonck, however, felt that the moment of establishing a new political order was an opportunity for reform. At the end of January he issued an appeal for constitutional change obviously inspired by the French example. He called for the admission of petty nobles and parish priests to the estates, the doubling of third-estate representation, and the creation of a fourth estate representing small towns. Even this was conservative by the standards now reached in France, but it was bitterly denounced by the statists and the Church as a formula for Frenchified levelling. When Vonck’s ‘progressives’ petitioned for a modification of the Joyous Entry the people of Brussels attacked the houses of their known leaders. When part of the new federation’s army mutinied in support of Vonck, thousands of peasants poured into Brussels to protect the statists. Isolated, persecuted, and in a tiny minority amid their deeply conservative countrymen, Vonck and most of the leading progressives fled to France—thus confirming all the worst suspicions of their persecutors.

  Yet neither France nor the French example were any real threat to the new Belgian regime. The danger still came from Austria. Joseph II, who had touched off the original revolt, died on 20 February 1790. He was succeeded by his brother Leopold, who initially at least had no despotic ambitions. Grand Duke of Tuscany since 1765, Leopold had sought to rule in Florence with the co-operation and participation of his subjects. He had positively welcomed the first news from France in the spring of 1789. ‘The regeneration of France’, he wrote on 14 June, ‘will be an example which all sovereigns and governments of Europe will be forced, willy-nilly, to copy. Infinite happiness will result from this everywhere, the end of injustice, wars, conflicts and arrests, and it will be one of the most useful fashions introduced by France into Europe.’6 By 1790 he was less sanguine, but he still had no intention of following Joseph’s high-handed policies in Belgium. In fact, in March he offered to confirm the entire new statist regime in return for acknowledgement of his sovereignty. He received no reply. Subsequently he approached Vonck in his French exile, offering to support the progressives if they would work for his restoration. Aware of his liberal reputation, they negotiated for a while; but by now they were being radicalized by the French atmosphere and the contacts lapsed. Only then did Leopold resort to force. First he cleared the diplomatic decks by reaching an accord with Prussia, which had been on the point of war with Joseph when he died. Called in as mediators in the Liège revolution, Prussian troops now straddled the route to Belgium. But when Leopold assured King Frederick William II that his intentions were pacific throughout Europe, Liège was evacuated, and on 27 July 1790 the two German powers concluded the Convention of Reichenbach. Under it Leopold agreed to end Joseph’s war against the Turks, going on since 1787, seeking no substantial territorial gains. Thus reassured, Prussia agreed to stop supporting rebels against the Habsburg Crown, whether in Hungary or Belgium. Peace was duly made with the Turks in September, releasing the necessary troops, and the recovery of Belgium began. The new state’s army was swept aside; so were irregular companies of peasant volunteers raised in what was known as the ‘September Crusade’. By the beginning of December Austrian soldiers had overrun the whole country, and Liège into the bargain, where the bishop returned on their coat-tails. Van der Noot fled once more to Holland. The United States of Belgium had lasted less than a year.

  No friends came to their rescue. The British, traditional protectors of the low countries, had actually helped to engineer the Reichenbach agreement. And the French, who were not consulted, looked on with indifference. They had now recognized how little Van der Noot’s revolution had in common with their own; and besides, only on 22 May, the National Assembly had elevated France’s diplomatic nullity to a point of principle by declaring that the nation renounced offensive warfare. The question arose when a request for diplomatic support arrived from Spain. A year earlier, off Vancouver Island in the far Pacific, Spanish coastguards had tried to arrest British merchantmen in Nootka Sound on the grounds that the entire west coast of America was Spain’s. When news of the incident arrived in Europe, the British refused to accept Spanish claims, and both sides began to mobilize for war. Madrid now invoked the Family Compact, the alliance with France repeatedly renewed over the century since its first conclusion in 1733. Louis XVI and his ministers were inclined to send the help requested, even at the risk of war; but the National Assembly, confronting diplomatic questions for the first time, spurned the Spanish request. A national, representative regime did not recognize family ties between ruling houses as fit bases for international agreements, much less action. And so although much traditional Anglophobia surfaced in the Nootka Sound debates, and there was intermittent talk of readying the fleet, the Spaniards were offered no tangible help, and were forced to back down. The revolutionaries felt proud of the way they had refused to perpetuate dynastic diplomacy. Two months later they raged against another specimen of it when Leopold, still nominally France’s ally, sought permission for Austrian troops to cross French territory on the way to Belgium. Fears now began to be expressed for the first time of an international plot to attack France and destroy the Revolution. Marie-Antoinette and her circle might dream of it, but nothing could have been further from the truth. As the Turkish war in the east came to an end, the great continental powers were more than happy to leave France wallowing in what they saw as helpless chaos while they turned their predatory attentions to Poland.

  In 1772 the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians had combined, in the first partition, to deprive Poland of a third of her territory and population. What was left was little more than a Russian puppet state; but under it many Poles schemed and planned for a national revival when an opportunity should present itself. It did so in 1788, when the Russians became distracted on two fronts by simultaneous war against the Swedes and the Turks. Between October 1788 and January 1789 the Polish diet threw off Russian control and began a massive expansion of the army to protect the country’s recovered independence in the future. The advocates of this programme called themselves patriots, and they warmed to the news by then coming from France. Educated Poles knew that France was their country’s traditional friend, many read and spoke French, and they felt involved in a common struggle against despotism when they read the French news which flooded the Warsaw news-sheets. But as with Belgium, apart from rebellion against established authority, the situations in Poland and France had nothing in common. Political life in Poland was a noble monopoly, and the diet was outraged when, in November 1789, 141 towns subscribed to a petition calling for non-noble representation. Liberty in Poland meant ‘Golden Liberty’: the anarchical old constitution in which the king was elected and exercised no real power, legislation could be blocked by a single contrary vote (liberum veto), and dissatisfied elements enjoyed a legalized right to rebel. The Russians, for their own reasons, favoured these arrangements, and styled themselves guarantors of the Polish constitution. Patriots, on the contrary, be
came identified in the course of 1790 with a stronger executive including a hereditary monarchy, majority votes in the diet, and an end to legalized rebellion. Only modernization on this scale, they thought, could give Poland the strength to resist Russia in the future; and with the Convention of Reichenbach signalling the imminent end of the Turkish war the matter became urgent. On 3 May 1791 the king and the patriots combined to push a new constitution through a thinly attended diet surrounded by troops. The phraseology of the 3 May constitution contained many echoes of that being elaborated in France at the same time; and its supporters organized themselves into a club called the Friends of the Constitution. Again the parallel was superficial, but so was the perception of the Polish magnates who had been the mainstay of the old constitution; and so, above all, was that of Catherine II of Russia. The new Polish constitution was in her eyes plainly Jacobinical. Catherine had been determined to recover control in Poland from the moment it was lost. The echoes of France she discerned there made her all the more determined. Paradoxically it would be the actions of the French revolutionaries in 1792 which would enable her finally to do so.

  Meanwhile, however, western Europe seemed to be adjusting to the new order in France. Much of the initial enthusiasm had cooled when the fall of the Bastille was followed by continued upheavals. The October Days in particular dismayed many observers of orderly disposition, and hardly anybody outside France thought the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille worth celebrating. But the full extent of the Revolution’s quarrel with the Church to which the vast majority of Europeans belonged was not evident until the spring of 1791; and pity and puzzlement rather than alarm were the predominant attitudes in 1790. People were no longer sure what to think. In November of that year, however, a powerful and persuasive voice began to tell them, with extraordinary success. In that month, Edmund Burke published his Reflexions on the Revolution in France.