The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  In the light of these assurances an expedition was finally launched. The destination chosen was the narrow, rocky Quiberon peninsula in southern Brittany. The British even gave up their insistence on a port, so thoroughly persuaded were they by now that the local chouans could easily take and defend what was almost a natural harbour. In the last days of June, accordingly, 3,000 men were embarked for Quiberon, with arms and supplies for 70,000. No British troops were to land, at least until a firm bridgehead was established, but Pitt’s counter-revolutionary protégés happily accepted that. Too many émigrés were aching for action throughout southern England, and it seemed better all round that the king of France should be restored by loyal Frenchmen. Thus the spearhead of the force was a mixture of exiles and drafted French prisoners. When they landed, 10,000 chouans converged on Quiberon and the local blues were swamped. But the chouans were ill disciplined, and the euphoric émigrés scarcely better; the chain of command was not clear, and the invaders failed to advance from their bridgehead. Hoche was soon on the scene, but he took care to build up strong forces before attacking. When he did so, on 3 July, he had 10,000 regulars under his command, and within a week he had recaptured the peninsula and taken 6,000 prisoners. Over 1,000 of these were émigrés, and they were subjected to the full severity of renewed laws (first passed when the war had begun) concerning émigrés captured with arms in their hands: 640 of them were shot, along with 108 chouans. When the first, optimistic reports of the landing had reached London, the British hurriedly brought Artois from Bremen, where he had been negotiating for months for a passage to England but had been deterred by fears of arrest for unpaid debts incurred there the last time his prospects had seemed bright. The plan now was to send him to take command in Brittany. But by the time he reached Portsmouth early in August the world knew that the Quiberon expedition had failed disastrously, and that the bravest and most loyal of the counter-revolution’s warriors had lost their lives either in the fighting or facing Hoche’s firing squads.

  It was not the end of British attempts to land émigrés in the west in the hope of linking up with guerrillas there. Their efforts now switched southwards, to the Vendée, where Charette as he had promised had taken the field again, and was indicating that he would be there to welcome an allied force ashore. In fact he had shot hundreds of republican prisoners when he heard of the reprisals after Quiberon. As soon as he arrived in Portsmouth, Artois demanded to be taken to join his brother’s loyal subjects, and early in September he duly sailed with a new expedition partly made up of the remnants of the old. On the thirtieth he landed opposite the Vendée on the Île d’Yeu. But by then Hoche had been able to concentrate fresh troops released from the Pyrenean front by peace with Spain. He lined the coast with them, and Charette was unable to break through. In mid-November the British recalled the expedition and Artois returned with them, not to set foot again on French soil until 1814.

  The events of the summer of 1795 traumatized the counter-revolution. Even as the Quiberon expedition was about to set sail, on 8 June, Louis XVII died. The intransigent proclamation issued by his uncle from Verona on assuming the title Louis XVIII not only cut off all hope of co-operation with influential conservatives inside France: it was also a snub to émigré moderates and constitutionalists, and was so intended by those like d’Antraigues who had a hand in its drafting. Most of those who sailed with the expeditions to Quiberon and Yeu were ‘pures’, too: the catastrophe which befell them left those who survived looking for scapegoats, and they were soon blaming everybody but themselves. Puisaye was an obvious target. He had not even been incompetent, argued some of his more extreme critics: the expedition had been designed to fail, and in its failure immolate the finest flower of intransigent counter-revolutionaries, so opening the way for a ‘constitutional’ takeover. With such tales about, Puisaye was wise not to return to England, though he survived the rout. By early in September he was back with his beloved chouans in Brittany—only to find that there too his reputation and authority had been irreparably damaged. If chouannerie had anyone who could be called a leader, it was now one of the chiefs who had spurned the treaty of La Mabilais, and waited in vain for Artois to arrive at Quiberon with reinforcements—the redoubtable, inflexible Georges Cadoudal. The one party all shades of French counter-revolutionary could agree on blaming was the British. Ancestral suspicion of perfidious Albion had always anyway been as deep among royalists as among their republican opponents, although more recent grievances differed. Britain had been late to join the war, had not recognized Provence as regent, had taken Toulon only to pillage it. Then she had used the war as an excuse to seize French territories in Corsica and the West Indies rather than establish legitimate government there. Finally she had under-equipped and then let down the Quiberon expedition and its ‘pure’ participants. Nobody was therefore surprised when in 1796 Pitt once more began to concentrate his efforts in the Caribbean. And yet the counter-revolutionaries needed Great Britain more than ever as the coalition fell apart. More and more émigrés found that the island state was their only safe refuge—even if Artois himself had to be accommodated in Scotland to avoid his still insistent English creditors. And where else could the chouans and Vendéans hope to be supplied from?

  Few supplies, however, reached them as the winter drew on. And meanwhile Hoche, his ‘Army of the Ocean Coasts’ reinforced by yet more regulars from victorious fronts, saturated Catholic and royal territory on both sides of the Loire with search and destroy missions. In February 1796 he captured Stofflet and executed him. A month later he caught Charette, too, and treated him similarly. This, combined with religious toleration and strict control over the depredations of ‘blue’ troops, reduced the Vendée at last to a precarious peace. By midsummer, Hoche was able to declare the insurrection finally at an end, and be proclaimed ‘Pacifier of the Vendée’ by a grateful Directory. By then, too, so many troops had been drafted into Brittany that the chouans could scarcely make a move. Puisaye was reduced to hiding in underground dugouts, like some hunted fox.

  Indeed, by then Louis XVIII himself was in full flight from those he regarded as his subjects. As soon as Bonaparte’s army of Italy crossed the Alps the terrified Venetian authorities ordered the hapless pretender to leave Verona. He made his way, unauthorized, across Switzerland to join the Prince de Condé’s forces in Austrian service along the Rhine. Much had been hoped of Condé’s thousand or so émigrés the previous spring. As the White Terror swept along the Rhône and scores of Jacobins were massacred in Lyons there were plans for the Austrians, spearheaded by Condé’s émigrés, to make a lightning strike into Franche Comté and then south to link up with the Lyonnais royalists. The British provided money to retain agents throughout the region, and both they and the Austrians were intrigued to hear that the French commander on the Rhine, Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland and the avenger of the Prairial uprising in Paris, was considered susceptible to royalist advances. In the end he was, but in the summer of 1795 attempts to win him paralysed any further action. The year concluded with a formal truce along the Rhine and no help for the plotters in Lyons. With the resumption of campaigning in the spring of 1796 Condé hoped to reactivate the plan, and the arrival of the king himself (who donned uniform and reviewed the troops) was greeted with enthusiasm. But not in Vienna, where the presence of the pretender was viewed as inviting a French attack. The Emperor, who like most other rulers had not yet even recognized him as Louis XVIII, ordered him to leave. Shortly afterwards an unidentified gunman tried to shoot him. Was nowhere safe? The only host he could find for the moment was a grudging Duke of Brunswick, whose army in 1792 had failed to rescue his brother. So it was from Blankenburg, ‘in a nasty little town, in a nasty house, tiny, badly furnished, if at all’,10 that he watched the French Republic’s armies sweep to victory over their last continental enemy during the ensuing months.

  Counter-revolution, therefore, in the sense of the armed overthrow of the French Republic and many of the innovations i
t stood for, was defeated by the time the land war came to an end at Leoben in April 1797. Three days after those preliminaries were signed, French troops arrested d’Antraigues as he fled from Venice. Under questioning, on one occasion by Bonaparte himself, he revealed a good deal about his spy network, including information that damned Pichegru. Subsequently he was allowed to escape, but the effect of what remains an exceedingly murky episode was to ruin his credit with Louis XVIII and his fellow émigrés. But what was one more quarrel among so many others? Counter-revolution was bedevilled from start to finish by vicious feuding and factionalism between groups who hated and mistrusted one another—often, it seemed, more than the Revolution itself. By their own efforts, the bickering émigrés never had any chance of arresting or moderating, much less reversing, the march of events in France. All they sometimes succeeded in doing, by their antics, was to help push things to greater extremes—which only the more crass among them expected to advance their cause. They needed help: but neither of the sources they looked to was necessarily much interested in seeing them succeed.

  The great powers sought at first simply the weakening of France, and only went to war when it became clear that she had not achieved that for herself. Most émigrés, however, dreamed of recovering power over a strong kingdom, with intact resources. Only the Revolution itself, in their eyes, had brought weakness, and they deeply resented the rumours they heard about victorious powers partitioning France, like Poland, not to mention the use of British sea power to capture French overseas possessions. Subsequently the powers concluded that a stable France was more desirable than a weak one; but even then they remained open-minded about the sort of regime most likely to restore and maintain order. Their commitment to monarchy, of whatever type, was never more than conditional, and even in 1797 Louis XVIII was only recognized by Russia and Sweden. Only sporadically did the great powers, always pursuing their own interests, regard French counter-revolutionaries as more than a nuisance, a complication, or at best a catspaw.

  As to internal counter-revolutionaries, most of them sought little more than to be left alone. Their quarrel was with a Revolution that had disrupted their communities and their religious and social certainties, and brought outside interference in every aspect of their lives, without producing enough compensatory benefits. Men in power in Paris, and those who sought to implement their orders in the localities, were too inclined to call any resistance counter-revolutionary. Much of it, however, like the so-called ‘Federalist’ revolt of 1793, merely sought to stop the Revolution going further. It was only in the Gard, the Vendée, and rural Brittany that mass movements developed, fighting openly for the Church and king they remembered from before 1789. Even then their resistance had no national dimension. It was significant that what triggered the revolts in the west was conscription, which threatened to take young men away to distant frontiers to fight unknown enemies. Popular counter-revolutionaries infinitely preferred to fight patriots, constitutional priests, and Protestants on their own doorstep. Their one sortie outside home territory, the Vendéans’ march to Granville, was a desperate bid to attract foreign help as the tide began to turn against them. Resistance would probably not have continued after Savenay without the unrelieved brutality of republican reprisals over the spring of 1794. Leaving aside the bungling, misunderstandings, and plain bad luck which blighted the one major attempt of émigrés, foreign powers, and royalist rebels to act together in the summer of 1795, and even if, as the popular leaders constantly urged, Artois had come to the mainland and raised his standard, it seems doubtful whether the peasant counter-revolutionaries of the west, however numerous on their own ground, would have willingly set out to march as far as Paris. And if they had, they would surely have been stopped on the way by the most seasoned and successful soldiers in Europe.

  Nor would they have made many converts to their nostalgic creed of restoring a golden past if they had broken out. As Mallet du Pan, most clear-eyed of royalists, wrote to Louis XVIII after the Declaration of Verona, ‘The great majority of the French will never willingly give in to the former authority and those who wielded it’.11 That did not mean there was no support for a limited, constitutional monarchy, repugnant though the new king and his entourage might find it. The Verona Declaration might have killed the prospect for the legislators of the Convention; but in the country at large, in the aftermath of the last sansculotte convulsions in Germinal and Prairial, monarchy seemed increasingly to offer the best prospects for stability. And with the approaching end of the Convention it might even hope to triumph: not through foreign invasion or internal insurrection, but through the normal political process of elections.

  14

  The Directory, 1795–1799

  The problem facing the Convention in the summer of 1795 was now very clear. Having routed the forces of both terrorism and royalism, it had to devise a constitution for the country which would prevent the recovery of either. All the deputies agreed that what France needed most was stability. But they also believed that stability could and should be achieved without sacrificing the principles of 1789, the ideals which their countrymen had endured so many years of torment and turmoil to establish and preserve. The principles of 1789 were not to be confused with those of 1793. The constitution of that year, declared Boissy d’Anglas, introducing the report of the drafting committee on 23 June,1 had been ‘Drafted by schemers, dictated by tyranny, and accepted through terror … nothing other than the organization of anarchy’. It had no redeeming features.

  Civil equality, in fact [he went on], is all that a reasonable man can claim. Absolute equality is a chimera; for it to exist, there would have to be absolute equality in intelligence, virtue, physical strength, education and fortune for all men … We must be governed by the best; the best are those who are best educated and most interested in the maintenance of the laws: yet, with very few exceptions, you find such men only among those who, owning a piece of property, are devoted to the country that contains it, to the laws that protect it, to the tranquillity that maintains it, and who owe to this property and to the economic security it provides the education that has made them capable of discussing with wisdom and exactitude the advantages and inconveniences of the laws that determine the fate of their native land. The man without property, on the other hand, requires a constant exercise of virtue to interest himself in a social order that preserves nothing for him, and to resist actions and movements that hold out hope to him … A country governed by non-proprietors is in a state of nature.

  These principles underlay the new constitution finally approved by the Convention on 22 August. It was headed by a declaration of rights, like its predecessors; but there was no mention of equality of birth or entitlement to social services, and the 22 rights enunciated were balanced by 9 specific duties. All male taxpayers over 21 were declared citizens, with voting rights. But deputies would be chosen by electoral assemblies to which only citizens owning or renting (according to constituency size) property worth between 100 and 200 days’ labour were eligible. This produced a notional pool of around a million (a third of that of 1789) from which to choose about 30,000 electoral college members. Elections would be annual, renewing a third of the deputies each time; but the legislature, for the first time, would be bicameral. Experience since 1789 had borne out all the warnings of the monarchiens, so heedlessly brushed aside then, about the dangers of a single chamber. A constitution of elaborate checks and balances was now the aim. Thus there would be two ‘Councils’. The lower, or Council of Five Hundred, would initiate all legislation. The upper, the Council of Elders (Anciens), with 250 members, married or widowed, over 40, could merely pass or reject legislation coming from the Five Hundred. Executive power, now that the restoration of a king was out of the question, would be vested in five Directors chosen by the Elders from a list presented by the Five Hundred. One of them would retire each year, by lot. Neither they nor the ministers they appointed could sit in the legislature: here was a principle of 1789
that the experience of the Year II seemed to underline the wisdom of. Finally, the constitution of the Year III was deliberately made very difficult to change. The procedures envisaged could not take less than nine years. The aim, again, was to maximize the stability of the new regime, and make any changes in the direction of either extreme ipso facto illegal. But even this was not enough entirely to reassure the members of the Convention that their intentions would be observed. The transition to the new order needed some continuity. They looked back on the self-denying ordinance of 1791 (moved, of course, by Robespierre) as one of the Constituent Assembly’s crowning mistakes. They therefore accompanied the Constitution with decrees stipulating that two-thirds of the members of the first Councils to be elected under it should be drawn from their own ranks.

  The Two Thirds Law came as a shock to public opinion. By now there was a general weariness with the Convention and its posturings. Shortages of basic commodities and inflation of the assignats continued throughout the summer, and the deputies were (not entirely unreasonably) blamed. When on 10 August a festival was held to commemorate the third anniversary of the overthrow of the monarchy, it was coldly received. ‘Market women’, noted a police spy,2 ‘said it would have been better to do something about bringing down the price of things instead of holding useless and expensive festivals.’ But at least the drafting of a constitution meant that the country would soon be rid of the Convention. The Two Thirds Law, although explicitly entitled a ‘decree on the means to put an end to the Revolution’, blighted these hopes. It also deprived monarchists, who hoped to show their strength in the elections, of the prospect of an early victory. The extent of the disappointment was shown when, early in September, the constitution and the Two Thirds Law were submitted for ratification to the primary electoral assemblies. The constitution was accepted by an official 1,057,390 votes to 49,978, although perhaps 200,000 more actually voted. The turnout was three quarters of a million lower than in 1793, but still respectable enough. There was enormous confusion about the Two Thirds Law, however. It was widely unpopular, when it was considered at all by the electoral assemblies, and even the almost meaningless official result could not conjure up much more than 200,000 votes in favour out of a mere 315,061 recorded as cast. Almost a quarter of departments opposed it, and in Paris all but one of the 48 sections were against. Metropolitan hostility reflected the thorough purging of the sections that had gone on since Prairial, in which all suspected ‘terrorists’ had been arrested, leaving conservatives in uncontested control. The vote against the law followed a noisy campaign by right-wing newspapers which alerted the Convention to the danger: and early in September it began to take countervailing action by releasing Jacobin suspects and summoning troops to Paris. These moves were taken as evidence that the constitution was to be imposed by force, and possibly with terrorist support. The hostile clamour only increased. When the results of the votes were announced on 23 September (1 Vendémiaire) a number of unanimous Parisian returns were discounted on the grounds that precise figures had not been stated. After that several of the city’s western sections began to organize for an insurrection, their primary assemblies refusing the Convention’s instructions to disband, and concerting defiant denunciations of its ballot-rigging.