The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Only Great Britain was now left fighting, and long before Leoben she too had been exploring the possibilities of peace. There were no victories in 1796, merely mounting difficulties met by rising war taxation and over-extending impressment and conscription. In October, after months of provocation from both sides, Spain joined France and declared war on the tyrant of the seas; Catherine of Russia, a stalwart anti-Jacobin even if an inactive one beyond eastern Europe, died in November; and the defeat of Austria was now acknowledged even by Pitt and George III to be merely a matter of time. An official peace mission was sent to Paris. The Directory strung it along, but by now France was putting together a plan even bolder than the thrust into Italy. Jealous of Bonaparte’s meteoric success, another young military prodigy, Lazare Hoche, who had pacified the Vendée and destroyed the Quiberon invasion force, was desperate for some further triumph to sustain his own prestige. He was thus ready to be persuaded by Wolfe Tone’s repeated assurances that Ireland would rise against British rule if the French invaded in reasonable force. The Directory, too, particularly Carnot, relished the idea of stirring up domestic subversion in the British Isles in the way the British had done in the rebellious French west. Accordingly, in December 1796, peace overtures were suddenly rebuffed and a major expedition of 46 ships and almost 15,000 men set sail for Ireland. By the time they sighted their destination, however, Hoche’s ship had been blown far out into the Atlantic, and they limped back to France without making a landing. Nor was it likely that, despite feverish preparations by the now underground organization of the United Irishmen, the sort of mass rising the French had been led to hope for on landing would have occurred. They arrived too soon, and at the wrong end of the country. Nevertheless the landlords of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy were terrified, as was the government in London. February 1797 saw a serious run on the Bank of England, reflecting market anxieties about years of lending huge sums to unsuccessful allies like the Austrians, but triggered by an emergency loan to Dublin for the strengthening of Irish defences. With the combined naval strength of Spain and the Dutch to support them, it seemed certain that the French would soon be back. The panic subsided—although payments from the Bank in gold remained suspended—with the news at the end of the month that the Spanish fleet had been crippled at St Vincent. But only a few weeks later the country was faced with the ultimate catastrophe: mutiny in the Royal Navy. Between March and June the fleets at Spithead and the Nore were immobilized by sailors demanding better pay, conditions, and rations. The Nore mutineers even blockaded the mouth of the Thames. They swore that should the French put to sea they would happily put aside their dispute to fight them, and indeed no serious evidence of subversion in the fleet has ever been found. As soon as the government conceded the sailors’ main demands the trouble subsided, and less than two dozen ringleaders were hanged. But many suspected the influence of French agents or—worse—United Irishmen; and faith in the willingness and ability of the navy to protect the country was only fully restored in October, when the Dutch fleet was destroyed at Camperdown, largely by vessels and crews involved in the mutinies.

  But long before that happened the setbacks and narrow escapes of the spring had led Pitt to renew peace proposals to the French. Britannia might more or less rule the waves, but the Republic, however Godless and Jacobinical, undoubtedly dominated the land. The war was plainly stalemated. Subversion might be under control in England, but Ireland, where the appearance of the French boosted United Irish hopes and recruitment, was a different matter; and everywhere there was obvious war-weariness. Accordingly, in June 1797 plenipotentiaries from the two sides began peace talks in Lille. Pitt was agreeably surprised by the polite welcome his approaches received; but the spring elections in France had returned many royalists, who hoped an equitable settlement with the Bourbons’ most determined supporters might smooth the way to a restoration. They pressed for similar give-and-take in the negotiations for a final settlement with the Austrians. Carnot, never a believer in immoderate gains, was prepared to go along with them. Bonaparte, however, was not; and he willingly co-operated in a plot to purge the ruling councils (and the Directory) of royalists and moderates. On 4 September troops commanded by Bonaparte’s envoy Augereau stood by while Carnot and the leaders of the new batch of deputies were expelled from public life in the coup of Fructidor.* The French stance in negotiations with both Austria and Great Britain immediately hardened. The Austrians recognized that there was little point now in prolonging discussions about the finer points of their capitulation. By the peace of Campo Formio, therefore (18 October), the war begun in 1792 was at last brought to an end. The terms were roughly those of Leoben, and as then Bonaparte largely dictated them. Venice disappeared, partitioned between the Austrians and the Cisalpine Republic. France took her Ionian islands: the general was already dreaming of imperial schemes in the eastern Mediterranean. Austria now also explicitly recognized France’s Rhine frontier, but pointed out that this action could not commit the Holy Roman Empire, at whose expense most of the Rhineland conquests had been made. To secure agreement there, there would have to be massive compensatory redistributions of territory, and the complexities were left to a later congress fixed to meet in Rastadt. The ‘sister republics’ of Italy (the Cisalpine had now been joined by the Ligurian, formerly Genoa) were also recognized, and the loss of Belgium once more acknowledged.

  Belgium had brought Great Britain into the war: but so hopeless did the continental situation now appear that she, too, was prepared to acknowledge it as part of France. In fact Pitt was ready to recognize all France’s conquests in Europe, and to secure peace he was even willing to surrender gains made from France overseas. But the French demanded that he also restore overseas territories won from their Dutch and Spanish allies, including that key to India, the Cape. No compensations whatsoever were offered. The Directors, masters of the Continent, wanted nothing less than total surrender; but Pitt, desperate as he was for peace, was not yet that desperate. Negotiations were broken off, and a few weeks later Camperdown emphasized continuing British strength. The ink was not yet dry on the treaty of Campo Formio, in fact, before Thugut was investigating the possibilities of a second coalition based on Austro-British cooperation. But for the moment, the Continent was at peace for the first time in five years, and Great Britain was left to fight on alone.

  The main aim of the French politicians who had launched this great struggle in 1792 had been to force their compatriots to come out clearly for or against the Revolution. In this they succeeded far more thoroughly than they could ever have calculated. But the war also forced that choice on the rest of Europe, belligerent or not, especially after the French began to achieve victories. The withdrawal of the Republic’s open-ended offer of fraternity and help to all sympathizers only four months after it was made passed unnoticed, or unbelieved, abroad. The French seemed intent on revolutionizing and republicanizing all Europe, if necessary by force of arms. Whatever their government said, Frenchmen abroad who were not émigrés openly encouraged their hosts to follow French examples. The ostentatious contempt of French residents in Spain for Church and king throughout 1792, for instance, did much to predispose the government in Madrid towards the war that broke out early the next year; and Jacobins in Naples only came to the surface after a French fleet docked for repairs in the early days of 1793. They advertised their sympathies by founding a club, as did the few Mainzers around Forster who had welcomed the French invaders of the Rhineland several weeks earlier, or the Poles of Warsaw and Vilno who defied the Russians in 1794, or the patriots of the Dutch ‘reading societies’ who eagerly assembled to greet the oncoming liberators the following winter. By 1797, in fact, the year Burke died, still railing against the perils of a ‘regicide peace’, clubs had become the key to a new denunciation of the Revolution that was to become every bit as influential as his great tract of 1790. It was embodied in the Memoirs to Serve for the History of Jacobinism by the ex-Jesuit Augustin de Barruel. An opponent of the an
ti-clerical Enlightenment since long before 1789, Barruel argued that the whole Revolution had been a conspiracy of anti-Christian, anti-royal, and anti-social freemasons bent on reducing civilization to chaos. The Bavarian Illuminati plot had merely been a rehearsal for the greater conspiracy that followed. Had not the masonic slogan always been Liberty, Equality? The clubs now plaguing Europe were obviously masonic lodges at last openly proclaiming their true purpose. In this way Burke’s hints about philosophic machinations were expanded to cover not just the origins of the Revolution, but its whole, ever more radical course down to the very moment of Barruel’s publication. Those who were hitherto baffled in understanding the bewildering rush of events since 1789 found deep satisfaction in seeing it thus so comprehensively explained. The popularity of Barruel’s ideas proved ominous for all freemasons. They had already been under suspicion everywhere since the upheavals had begun, and the fact that masons were to be found among the leading revolutionaries in France, and among the clubists who welcomed French successes abroad, now seemed more than the coincidence it actually was. Barruel’s allegations never won widespread acceptance in England, where freemasonry had begun; but elsewhere they led to determined repression of masonic activity, and panicky abandonment of the lodges by the respectable, educated members of society who had flocked to join them in the quieter days of the ancien régime.

  If masonry was the cause of the French Revolution, that was bad enough. If it was also responsible for its course, even worse. For not only had the revolutionaries visited war and destruction on their neighbours; they had also fought and persecuted each other with vindictive savagery, and allowed the Parisian mob to dictate to the rest of the country, and set about the systematic elimination of everybody who stood in their way through the cold machinery of the guillotine. The prospect of all this drove kings and queens, particularly, to distraction: ‘I should like this infamous nation to be cut to pieces,’ raved Maria Carolina of Naples, the sister of Marie-Antoinette, ‘annihilated, dishonoured, reduced to nothing for at least fifty years. I hope that divine chastisement will fall visibly on France.’10 Some argued that it already had. But the scenes which so shocked the rest of Europe in 1793 and 1794 were not the result of a masonic conspiracy, or indeed any other sort. Very largely they were the consequence of the war so thoughtlessly launched in 1792, at a time when the triumphs of 1797 could never have been foreseen.

  * See below, pp. 224–6.

  * See below, pp. 312–14.

  * i.e. south of the Po. See below, pp. 360–1.

  * See below, pp. 331–3.

  10

  The Revolt of the Provinces

  Although many provincial fédérés had taken part in the storming of the Tuileries, the fall of the French monarchy had very largely been the work of the insurrectionary commune of Paris. The very idea of a national Convention to give France a republican constitution also originated in the Paris sections. It was therefore understandable that the sansculottes should regard themselves as the guardians and watchdogs of the new republic, and the arbiters of what it should stand for. And of course they were very well placed to enforce their will. The Convention sat in Paris and had no forces to defend itself from popular pressure. All available troops in 1792 and 1793 were occupied at the front, and the Paris National Guard was no longer the force that had shot down republican petitioners on the Champ de Mars. Since the end of July it had been open to all citizens and was little more than a sansculotte militia, commanded from 10 August by Santerre, a rich brewer but long a popular activist in the city’s east end. The Legislative Assembly had been forced to recognize its own helplessness in the face of Parisian power during its last weeks. Its only attempt to assert itself, the decree dissolving the commune and ordering new elections on 30 August, was ostentatiously ignored and rapidly rescinded. And the deputies had had to sit powerless while the same sansculottes who claimed to be the nation’s conscience massacred half the capital’s prison population during the following week. The nation’s representatives seemed to be in the clutches of a capricious and bloodthirsty mob, and in this respect the Convention was no more secure than its predecessor. ‘Never forget’, the ex-monk Chabot warned his fellow deputies, ‘that you were sent here by the sansculottes.’1 None of them was likely to; but they were deeply divided over whether that committed them to continue to do Paris’s bidding. The role of the capital in national affairs was to be the most persistently debated issue during the first nine months of the Convention’s existence.

  Leading the attack on Paris were those who had sought to avert the insurrection of 10 August, and whom Robespierre had tried to have arrested by the commune just as the prison massacres were beginning—men like Brissot, Vergniaud, and the ‘faction of the Gironde’. They had been deputies in the previous assembly, but they were supported by a number of newcomers, too. They were not a party, and never would be, except in the wishful imagination of their opponents; but they all sat for provincial constituencies, and the more prominent among them had grown used to informal co-operation with each other throughout the Legislative. They tended to meet, as they had then, at the house of Roland, still minister of the interior. There his pretty and ambitious wife, though a Parisienne herself, railed constantly against Marat, Danton, Robespierre, and the whole Parisian delegation in the Convention. These men, the Girondins were convinced, had been deeply implicated in the September Massacres, and intended to use their Parisian support to seize national power. Within days of the Convention’s first meeting the challenge was thrown down. The ex-constituent Buzot, soon to become Mme Roland’s (platonic) lover, proposed the establishment of a ‘departmental guard’ recruited outside Paris, to protect the Convention. ‘Do you suppose’, he asked,2 ‘we are to be enslaved by certain deputies of Paris?’ The Montagnard response was to denounce the idea as ‘Federalism’—an attempt to dissipate the unity of the nation. They proposed, and carried, a declaration that the Republic was one and indivisible. Most deputies were happy to vote for both proposals, reluctant as they were to become involved in the faction fights of extremists whose antagonisms seemed as much personal as principled. But the uncommitted deputies of the ‘Plain’, as they soon became known from their tendency to sit in the middle of the house, between Montagnards on the left of the chair and Girondins on the right, were quickly to find that the antagonism between the two factions coloured every issue. For much of October the object of Girondin attack was Marat, and the shame Paris had brought upon itself by electing one who had constantly advocated massacres. He had also regularly called for a dictator, and to the Girondins it seemed obvious whom he had in mind: Robespierre. On 29 October Louvet openly accused this ‘insolent demagogue’ of aspiring to dictatorship. On 4 December the attack was turned on Philippe-Égalité, when Buzot moved that anybody advocating a restoration of monarchy should suffer the death penalty. The inference was that the Montagnards planned to make this former prince of notorious ambition king once Louis XVI was dead. Everything to do with the king’s fate, in fact, drove the factions even wider apart. The Montagnards suspected their opponents of seeking reconciliation with him before 10 August. They were right, but they had no proof. When Roland announced the discovery of the armoire de fer, they accused him of removing documents from it that implicated his friends, just as those it did contain revealed the earlier treachery of Mirabeau. On 3 January, amid the voting on the king’s trial, they again insisted on debating rumours of secret correspondence between the Bordeaux deputies and the Tuileries the previous July. The aim now was to discredit the Girondin-sponsored idea of an appeal to the people over the death sentence. This in its turn was designed to thwart the obvious determination of Paris and its sections that the king should be executed without delay. Montagnards argued that the appeal would be a call to civil war; Girondins responded that not to allow the departments to pronounce on the king’s fate would in itself provoke such a war. The Girondin idea of clemency was debated in similar terms. And the way a deputy had voted in these
two contentious divisions was to mark him politically for ever, both in the subsequent public affairs of revolutionary France and in the analyses of its historians.

  All these clashes had taken place at a time of victory in the war, but even foreign policy was not unmarked by them. Dumouriez had always been associated with those now called Girondins, and they revelled in his successes. It was they who proposed offering fraternity and assistance to foreign sympathizers, but Robespierre who warned of the futility of trying to establish liberty in foreign countries by force. Yet when Brissot quite uncharacteristically became the advocate of caution, and argued for reprieving the king so as not to antagonize more foreign powers, the Montagnards scorned his cowardice and were in the van of the movement to declare war on Great Britain, Holland, and Spain. Then, having dispatched the king and challenged most of Europe to a fight to the death, the factions returned to their vendetta. The Montagnards now had a martyr to their cause: on 20 January the former nobleman and judge in the Paris parlement Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau was assassinated by a fellow noble who blamed him for voting for the king’s execution. His remains were placed in the Pantheon, the mausoleum for national heroes established in the former church of Ste Geneviève in 1791, even as men began to talk of removing those of Mirabeau, the first to be placed there after Voltaire. The Jacobin Club also now became a Montagnard monopoly: Brissot had been expelled from this scene of his former triumphs as early as October; and on 1 March all deputies who had voted for the appeal to the people on the king’s execution were likewise excluded. The Montagnards failed to capture the ministry of the interior when Roland, wearied by their repeated attacks, resigned on 22 January; but they did defeat a renewed proposal for a departmental guard, and they tore to pieces a projected constitution brought forward by Condorcet, also identified as a Girondin, on 15 February on the grounds that it was a charter for Federalism and executive paralysis.