The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Initially Burke had been no more sure than anybody else what to make of French events, although he was never swept along by the enthusiasm of some of his fellow Whigs. But what outraged him was the inspiration the Revolution had clearly given to the movement in Great Britain for parliamentary reform. Originating in the late 1760s, agitation for the redistribution of parliamentary seats, shorter parliaments, and extension of the franchise had flagged in the mid-1780s after a ministerial reform bill introduced by Pitt had failed to pass. The centenary celebrations in 1788 revived interest in reform, particularly among dissenters excluded from the franchise by religion. Dissenters proved one of the mainstays of a ‘Revolution Society’ established to perpetuate these revived aspirations, and it was a leading dissenting minister, Dr Richard Price, who stung Burke into action with a sermon preached under the auspices of the Revolution Society in 1789 on 4 November (birthday of William III, the hero of 1688). France, Price implied, had now overtaken Great Britain in the pursuit of liberty. Its religious laws were more liberal, its system of government more representative. And, with news of the October Days still the topic of every conversation, he thanked God that ‘I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects.’7

  Burke’s indignation at this interpretation of French events knew no bounds. It triggered an impassioned denunciation of the Revolution in Parliament in February 1790 which left his fellow Whigs dumbfounded. And in the following November it produced his great pamphlet. What had happened in 1688, he protested, was not revolution in the new, French sense, but rather the preservation of hallowed English liberties from the attacks of a monarch bent on subverting them. Reverence for ancient institutions and established practices was the true English way: in fact it was the only way for any self-respecting nation. Yet the French had spurned this principle. Repudiating the wisdom of their ancestors, and heedless of the consequences for their posterity, they were now in the process of renouncing their entire heritage. ‘You had’, he told them, ‘the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished … ; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.’ The mildest of monarchs, and the most beautiful of queens, had ruled over a spirited, honourable, and cultivated nobility, a respectable clergy and an independent judiciary. The monarchy had been ‘a despotism rather in appearance than in reality’, and with a little modest adaptation the Estates-General might have become a body as representative as the British Parliament of the nation’s true interests. But the elections of 1789 had brought to power not ‘the natural landed interest of the country’, but ‘country curates’ and ‘obscure provincial advocates … stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country attorneys, notarys, and the whole train of the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation … Was it to be expected that they would attend to the stability of property, whose existence had always depended upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous and insecure?’ It was not; and in fact an Assembly dominated by such men had embarked on a confiscation of property unparalleled in history. By the time Burke finished the Reflexions the lands of the Church had been nationalized in what he saw as a ‘momentum of ignorance, rashness, presumption and lust of plunder, which nothing has been able to resist’. This expropriation had been used to launch a fraudulent paper currency with no possible stable future, and had necessitated a civil constitution which no honourable cleric could submit himself to. ‘It seems to me,’ he concluded, ‘that this new ecclesiastical establishment is intended only to be temporary, and preparatory to the utter abolition, under any of its forms, of the Christian religion.’

  These thoughts brought Burke to the causes of the Revolution. Convinced that nothing was fundamentally wrong with the old order, he attributed its subversion to a conspiracy. On the one hand were the ‘moneyed interest’, resentful at their lack of esteem and greedy for new profits; on the other, and even more important, were the so-called philosophers of the Enlightenment, a ‘literary cabal’ committed to the destruction of Christianity by any and every available means. The idea of a philosophic conspiracy was not new. It went back to the only one ever conclusively proved to have existed, the plot of the self-styled Illuminati to undermine the Church-dominated government of Bavaria. The Bavarian government published a sensational collection of documents to illustrate its gravity, and Burke had read it. Although he was not the first to attribute events in France to conspiracy of the sort thwarted in Bavaria, the way he included the idea in the most comprehensive denunciation of the Revolution yet to appear lent it unprecedented authority. Nor was the destruction of Christianity and the triumph of atheism the only catastrophe he predicted. Disgusted by the way the ‘Republic of Paris’ and its ‘swinish multitude’ held the government captive, the provinces would eventually cut loose and France would fall apart. The assignats would drive out sound coinage and hasten, rather than avert, bankruptcy. The only possible end to France’s self-induced anarchy would come when ‘some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account … the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master.’

  Burke’s determination in the Reflexions was to persuade his countrymen that the French example was not one to follow. And undoubtedly he articulated what many conservative Englishmen were vaguely feeling about cross-Channel events. But the fury and venom of his attack also focused the minds of France’s British admirers, and in so doing paradoxically breathed new life into a domestic reform movement that was once again flagging as Pitt registered yet another victory in the general election of 1790. Burke’s intemperate diatribe, reformers felt, must be answered, and several cogent responses appeared in the early months of 1791. All were outshone, however, by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which was published in February and at once hailed as the definitive reply. An advocate of republican revolution since he had first urged the common sense of it on the American rebels in 1776, Paine had returned to Europe in 1787 and had been looking for an opportunity to announce his views on the French Revolution since visiting Paris over the winter of 1789–90. Burke’s outburst provided it.

  He began by pouring scorn on Burke’s reverence for the past. ‘Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations which preceded it. The variety and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.’ He then went on to a detailed refutation of Burke’s picture of French affairs, denouncing him as an admirer of power, not principles, and one who, pitying the plumage of the old order, forgot the dying bird. He sought to correct lurid allusions to popular savagery by detailed accounts of the fall of the Bastille (scarcely mentioned by Burke) and the October Days. The overriding purpose of these movements, Paine argued, was to establish the Rights of Man; and he printed a full translated text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, glossing it at length as a way of refuting Burke’s ‘pathless wilderness of rhapsodies … a sort of descant upon Governments, in which he asserts whatever he pleases’. The French were now in the process of giving themselves a rational, equitable, established constitution, whereas that of Great Britain, so vaunted by Burke, was nothing but a random and arbitrary collection of unjust customs going back to no better title than conquest by a Norman adventurer. Now was the time for all peoples to follow the French example by abolishing nobility and titles, destroying tithes, and proclaiming the regeneration of man. Paine even urged the British to go further, and abandon monarchy itself. ‘From what we now see,’ he concluded, ‘nothing of reform in the
political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.’

  Thus began a great debate which polarized British public life for the rest of the decade. Burke’s Reflexions were a best-seller (30,000 in two years) but were easily outstripped by sales totalling perhaps 200,000 for Rights of Man as hitherto moribund reform societies revitalized themselves to promote its diffusion in London, the provinces, and Scotland and Ireland too. It was, reported the radical young Dublin lawyer Wolfe Tone on his first visit to Ulster in October 1791, the Bible of Belfast. The second anniversary of the Bastille’s fall, in contrast to the previous year, was marked with banquets in major provincial towns throughout the British Isles. In London they drank to Burke—for having provoked the debate. Paine by then was in Paris, where he helped to draft the republican petition of the Champ de Mars; but he was back in London by November, bringing Pétion as a guest of honour to the Revolution Society. By then it had become fashionable for radical clubs to exchange fraternal addresses with the Jacobins, and as 1791 closed there was evidence that the debate was awakening groups hitherto dormant politically. December saw the foundation by ‘five or six mechanics’ of the Sheffield Constitutional Society to press for manhood suffrage and annual parliaments. By March 1792 it had 2,000 members. In January a Scottish shoemaker, Thomas Hardy, founded the London Corresponding Society with similar aims. The appearance of a second part of Rights of Man that spring, full less of general principles than of practical British radicalism, provoked the foundation during the year of corresponding societies in most leading provincial cities to promote its distribution. But not all of England was radicalized. In Birmingham a ‘Bastille dinner’ in July 1791 led to a riot against the dissenters who had been its leading attenders. Crowds cheering for Church and King sacked chapels, meeting houses, and the home of the unitarian scientist Joseph Priestley, while local magistrates stood obligingly aside. Decades of fruitless effort to launch ‘God Save the King’ as a national song were suddenly crowned with success as respectable people reflected on the flight to Varennes; and in May 1792 the government issued a proclamation against seditious writings and opened proceedings against Paine.

  Nor did the British debate begun by Burke go unnoticed elsewhere. The major works in the controversy were soon reprinted in the English-speaking United States. Paine, an American citizen and one of the heroes of the struggle for independence, found a much readier audience there than Burke, and for several years there was widespread popular enthusiasm for events in France, which many Americans were convinced had been inspired by their own Revolution. In Europe, as soon as Burke’s Reflexions appeared they were translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Within four months the French edition had sold 16,000, and sales of the three German editions eventually far exceeded that. Even those who disagreed with Burke’s analysis, like his Prussian translator Friedrich Gentz, were profoundly influenced by the comprehensive vigour of his denunciation. Paine struck nothing like the same echoes; for by 1791 most Germans, even those who had been carried away by enthusiasm two years previously, viewed the continuing upheaval in France with mounting horror, and found Paine’s faith in the rationality of what the French were doing quite incomprehensible. Subjects of benign, unwarlike prince-bishops were shocked by the pillage of the French Church; the teeming bureaucrats well schooled in public law who kept the hundreds of German states going were repelled by the disorder the Revolution seemed to have produced. They therefore took little persuading by Burke, his disciples, and translators that peoples were unwise to abandon their own heritage and traditions in order to start again from scratch. And the attitude of Germany’s rulers could be taken completely for granted. The National Assembly, after all, had voted in the course of its attack on feudalism in August 1789 to deprive a number of them of valuable rights under the French crown guaranteed to them for ever by the peace of Westphalia. No compensation had been offered. Germany, therefore, was an obvious place for the French émigrés to converge on when Artois decided to move his court from Turin in January 1791. After some wandering he settled in Koblenz, the capital of his uncle the prince-archbishop of Trier, a matter of days before the flight to Varennes. There he was joined a few weeks later by his brother Provence, and there the thousands of new émigrés who left France after Varennes now gathered, if they did not prefer to join the Prince de Condé further up the Rhine in the territories of another prince-bishop, the elector of Mainz. And as soon as they arrived they organized for war, subsidized by grants from the Emperor and the rulers of Prussia, Russia, and Spain, as well as a number of German princelings. The disruption caused by their preparations, and the general arrogance of their behaviour, scarcely endeared them to the ordinary Rhinelanders; but even this did not create much German sympathy for the Revolution they had turned their backs on. It was one more reason for blaming it.

  Yet the war which the Rhinelanders dreaded and the émigrés ached for was slow to come. Even after the Declaration of Pillnitz, the only monarch who burned to cross swords with what he called the ‘Orang-Outangs of Europe’ was Gustavus III of Sweden, who had authorized his subject Fersen to organize the flight to Varennes, and travelled to Aachen in June 1791 in the hope of welcoming Louis XVI to freedom. Disappointed in this, he nevertheless cleared the decks for an attack by offering peace in his three-year war with Russia. Catherine II was delighted, but not because of the opportunity of joining an anti-French crusade. She wanted to fight Jacobinism—but in Poland. While her diplomats were instructed to keep urging the Emperor and the king of Prussia to move against France, she made peace with enemies on both her own flanks: with Sweden in October, with the Ottomans at the end of December. But Leopold II chose to regard Louis XVI’s acceptance of the constitution as rendering any follow-up to Pillnitz unnecessary: the king and the Revolution were reconciled. So the empress had to bide her time, concentrating her energies meanwhile on suppressing subversion at home.

  It is remarkable how slow most governments were to recognize material emanating from France as subversive. Only in Spain, where the Inquisition had retained close control over all expressions of opinion, was French influence combated from the start. As early as May 1789 the official press stopped reporting French events. In September the Holy Office was authorized by the minister Floridablanca, hitherto famous for his enlightened attitudes, to clamp down on all writings which, directly or indirectly, promoted insubordination. In 1791 troops sealed the frontiers and all foreign residents were required to register with local authorities. So successful were these efforts that French émigrés in 1792 found villages in Spain where the Revolution had still not been heard of. Few other parts of Europe managed to be so insulated; but by 1791 most governments were beginning to regret earlier openness. Press censorship in Sweden began in 1790, culminating in 1792 in the banning of all imports of written material from France, and prohibition of all reference to French affairs. April 1790 also saw the Russian police authorized to watch out for French propaganda and suspicious-sounding meetings; and two months later the empress herself was thrown into a rage on reading Alexander Radischev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, whose attacks on serfdom and paeans to liberty she regarded as a French-inspired call to overthrow the established order. Radischev was a well-educated civil servant, a dreamer rather than a revolutionary, but his book earned him a death sentence, subsequently commuted. His trial brought his book more fame than it would probably have won by itself, even though most copies were destroyed; but from then on the censorship (which had passed it) became increasingly vigilant.

  There can be little doubt that the intellectual debate which first exploded in England was responsible for some of this heightened awareness of the dangerous potency of French principles. But even more important in this process was the flight to Varennes and the subsequent indignities suffered by Louis XVI. Monarchs everywhere saw it as an awful and perhaps portentous example. Their fears were certainly exaggerated, as the subsequent feebl
eness of non-French revolutionaries, even when everything was in their favour, showed. But they were not to know this, having witnessed the most glorious monarchy in Europe reduced to ignominy by its own subjects. Nor were they reassured by the defiant noises increasingly being heard from Paris in the aftermath of Varennes. In spite of their peaceable professions, the French revolutionaries had always believed that they stood for principles of universal validity. At a famous session on 19 June 1790 the National Assembly had allowed Clootz (soon to change his forename to the philosophical Anacharsis) to bring a self-styled international delegation to its bar to proclaim that the trumpet-call now heard in France was awakening peoples from slavery everywhere. Actors in fancy-dress were among them, occasioning much scorn among more detached observers. But there were also representatives of thousands of genuine political exiles, from Geneva, from Holland, and from Belgium, who hoped that French help might yet enable them to return home to power. The Varennes crisis encouraged them, and they were prominent in urging the French to defy the despots of Europe, whose power they claimed could never survive contact with armed apostles of French liberty. Nobody in the dying Constituent Assembly believed it, and nor did the royal family. The army was visibly falling to pieces as its officers decamped in their thousands to join the émigrés. Fortunately troops were not required to annex Avignon, so the Constituent Assembly’s final defiant gesture came cheap. But the days when Europe could observe events in France with detachment were now over. Increasingly, the revolutionaries would seek to solve their problems by inflicting them on their neighbours.