Revolution and the Republic

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by Jeremy Jennings

of the Revolution. Nor did legitimists necessarily agree about the political implica-

  tions of this satanic event. Not all royalists were prepared to lay all the blame upon

  20 Ibid. 31.

  21 Ibid. 39.

  22 Ibid. 36.

  23 Ibid. 37.

  24 Ibid. 39.

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  History, Revolution, and Terror

  the philosophes and many were not convinced of either the desirability or

  practicality of a restored theocratic state and society. One such was François-

  René de Chateaubriand.25 Chateaubriand’s reaction to the unfolding of revolu-

  tionary events was vividly recounted in his justly famous Mémoires d’outre-tombe.

  A native of Saint-Malo, it was from Brittany that, not without an element of

  sympathy, he witnessed the first stirrings of discontent, only later to return to Paris

  and there observe the storming of the Bastille and other equally horrific ‘cannibal

  feasts’. These events, he recalled, ‘changed my political frame of mind’.26 He soon

  departed to America and upon his return in January 1792 quickly perceived that

  ‘the sovereign people’ was becoming a universal tyrant, a ‘universal Tiberius’. Paris

  in 1792, he wrote, ‘no longer had the same physiognomy as in 1789 and 1790; this

  was no longer the Revolution at its birth but a people marching drunkenly to its

  destiny’.27 Variety of dress, he noticed, was a thing of the past. He joined the

  émigré army of the princes in Coblenz and later, having been seriously injured in

  battle, went into exile in England. It was there that he wrote and published his first

  book: the Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions considerées dans leur

  rapports avec la Révolution française.28

  Dedicated ‘to all the parties’, it was a book that pleased almost no one, least of all

  his family. Chateaubriand himself felt that it ‘offered a compendium of his

  existence as poet, moralist, writer, and politician’.29 It was quite definitely not a

  book with a clear, ordered structure, but its central premise was simple enough: the

  course of the French Revolution could best be understood if one studied all the

  other revolutions that had taken place in the world. By revolution, Chateaubriand

  explained at the outset, he understood ‘a total change in the government of a

  people, be it monarchical to republican or republican to monarchical’,30 and by this

  definition it was possible to identify five revolutions in antiquity and seven in

  modern Europe. Thus Chateaubriand’s argument proceeded by way of constant

  comparison between the ancient and modern worlds but still, he admitted, he had

  difficulty grasping ‘the efficient cause of all revolutions’. This had its source, he

  believed, in that ‘vague restlessness’ and dissatisfaction with our lot which itself

  ‘perhaps’ derived from our consciousness of another life or even ‘our secret aspira-

  tion towards divinity’. Whatever its origin, Chateaubriand declared, it existed

  among all peoples. Moreover, it received ‘striking confirmation’ when the causes

  of the Revolution in France were examined.31

  Everywhere that a small group of people held power and wealth for a long time,

  Chateaubriand explained, there would be corruption. Every man had his vices, plus

  the vices of those who had preceded him. This was true of the court of France,

  where ‘a weak king’ had been easily misled by ‘incapable and wicked ministers’ and

  25 See Jean-Paul Clement, Chateaubriand: Biographie morale et intellectuelle (1998) and Marc

  Fumaroli, Chateaubriand, Poésie et Terreur (2003).

  26 Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe (1973), i. 220.

  27 Ibid. 344–5.

  28 Essai historique, politique, et moral sur les révolutions considerées dans leur rapports avec la Révolution

  française (1797): references to Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand (1861), i.

  29 Ibid. 442.

  30 Ibid. 275.

  31 Ibid. 461.

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  245

  their ‘host of half-starved servants, lackeys, flatterers, actors, and mistresses’. The

  ‘follies’ and ‘imbecilities’ of government had in turn engendered moral disorder in

  society. In this situation of baneful emptiness and isolation where France enjoyed

  only the appearance of wealth, was it any surprise, Chateaubriand ventured, that

  the French were prepared ‘to embrace the first phantom which showed them a new

  universe’? And so it was, as corruption devoured the State and as society fell into

  ‘general dissolution’, that ‘a race of men’ suddenly rose up and announced the hour

  of Sparta and Athens. ‘The total overturning that the French and, above all, the

  Jacobins had sought to bring about in the morals of the nation’, Chateaubriand

  wrote, ‘was only an imitation of what Lycurgus did in his homeland.’32 The

  ambition had been to attain a purity of morals as a prelude to the inauguration

  of democracy and to that end France had been ‘flooded in blood, covered in ruins,

  her king led to the scaffold, her ministers proscribed or murdered’.33

  Chateaubriand did not doubt that the philosophes were here at fault. Their

  methods and their aims were those of destruction. They displayed a ‘rage’ against

  established political institutions and undermined religious faith, putting nothing in

  their place but a ‘torrent of new ideas’ preaching innovation and change.34

  However, it was central to Chateaubriand’s argument that, if the philosophes had

  been a cause of the Revolution, they had not been the sole cause. ‘The French

  Revolution’, he wrote, ‘did not come from this or that man, from this or that

  book.’35 Rather, it had been inevitable, arising from the march of civilization

  towards both enlightenment and corruption. That explained the ‘incomprehensible

  combination of crimes grafted onto a philosophical trunk’.

  The mistake, then, had been to believe that everything could become virtuous

  because the corrupt French had wished it so, to imagine that a country of 25

  million inhabitants could imitate an ancient realm. To act as if republics could be

  created anywhere, regardless of the obstacles, Chateaubriand wrote, was both

  absurd and wicked. What political recommendations followed from this? Chateau-

  briand was honest enough to admit that he did not properly know. All governments

  were an evil, he observed, but from this we should not conclude that they should all

  be destroyed. ‘Since it is our lot only to be slaves’, Chateaubriand argued, ‘let us

  endure our chains without complaint.’36 No matter what was published to the

  contrary, it was always better to be ruled by one of our ‘rich and enlightened

  compatriots’ than by the ‘ignorant multitude’. Happiness, in short, would return to

  France only when she had been returned to the monarchy.37

  Would this fill the ‘interior void’ and ‘unknown desire’ that so tormented us and

  drove our discontent? Ultimately, it was Chateaubriand’s view that all political,

  indeed all human, institutions were a mass of putrefied corruption and that all the

  trappings of art and civilization were as nothing compared to the simplicity and

  32 Ibid. 301.

  33 Ibid. 364.

  34 Ibid. 548.

 
; 35 Ibid. 548 n. 2.

  36 Ibid. 466.

  37 When the Essai historique was republ. in 1826, Chateaubriand nuanced this position, explaining

  that he had only in the mind the model of ancient republics and that ‘the discovery of the

  representative republic had completely changed the question’.

  246

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  beauty of nature. Only this could quell our spiritual hunger and only through

  nature would we be truly free. Such a liberty, he told his readers, could be painted

  only with difficulty, but it could be glimpsed if they were to spend a night with him

  amongst ‘the savages of Canada’ before the falls of Niagara. ‘Freed from the

  tyrannical yoke of society, I there understood’, he wrote, ‘the spell of the indepen-

  dence of nature which far surpasses all the pleasures of which a civil man can have

  an idea.’38 Five years later, and to instant acclaim, Chateaubriand was to provide a

  more sophisticated and compelling response to his own ‘doubt and sorrow’ in the

  form of Le Génie du Christianisme.

  Following the fall of the Directory, Chateaubriand returned to France in

  May 1800, initially enjoying a good relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte.

  But following the unlawful arrest and execution of the Duc d’Enghien, ordered

  by Napoleon in 1804, he joined the opposition to imperial despotism and quickly

  found himself exiled from Paris. He continued to write and was elected to the

  Académie Française.39 In 1814 he penned a damning portrait of Napoleon and

  the First Empire and not only welcomed the return of Louis XVIII but also the

  parliamentary monarchy instituted by the Charte. To that extent, Chateaubriand

  shared much with Germaine de Staël. Yet, as François Furet has written, the two

  ‘were not breathing the same air’.40 If both wished to secure the Bourbon monarchy

  upon a solid foundation and if both knew that this could only be done by resolving

  the question of the heritage of the revolutionary past, they belonged to two separate

  and deeply antagonistic worlds: those of ultra-royalism and of liberalism. If Chateau-

  briand felt a mournful nostalgia for the past, Madame de Staël had no cause to regret

  its passing. His Revolution was not hers, as the Considérations sur les principaux

  évènemens de la Révolution française made abundantly clear.

  As we know, Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Louis XVI’s much-abused

  finance minister, Jacques Necker.41 She was Swiss and she was Protestant.42

  She also witnessed the opening events of the French Revolution at first hand, her

  salon in the rue de Bac subsequently becoming a meeting place for political

  moderates. Exile to England soon followed and when, later, she came to doubt

  that the Directory would be able to provide the stable republic required by France,

  she rallied to the Consulate headed by Napoleon Bonaparte. Much has been

  written about Madame de Staël’s personal relationship with Napoleon—much of

  it entirely speculative—but there can be no doubt that their political positions

  quickly diverged and that the emperor increasingly found her to be an irritating

  and troublesome presence. As a consequence she spent the greater part of the years

  of the First Empire either in hiding, at her Swiss family home in Coppet, or

  38 Œuvres complètes de Chateaubriand (1861), i, 622.

  39 Chateaubriand did not take up his seat until after the Restoration.

  40 Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880 (Oxford, 1992), 286.

  41 See Jean-Denis Bredin, Une singulière famille: Jacques Necker, Suzanne Necker et Germaine de

  Staël (1999).

  42 See J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (New York: 1958) and

  Maria Fairweather, Madame de Staël (London: 2005).

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  247

  travelling across Europe with a variety of distinguished intellectual and emotional

  companions.43

  Despite this life spent in almost permanent exile, Madame de Staël’s literary

  output was never less than brilliantly original and influential. In 1800 she published

  De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, a ground-

  breaking work whose purpose was ‘to examine the influence of religion, custom,

  and law upon literature, and the influence of literature upon religion, custom, and

  law’. This was followed by two novels, Delphine in 1802 and Corinne in 1807: both

  enjoyed enormous international success. Then, in 1810 came the publication of De

  l’Allemagne. Ostensibly the study of the spirit and character of a people, it was

  immediately seized and then pulped upon Napoleon’s direct orders, the implicit

  criticism of the latter’s person and regime being all too clear.44

  Banished from France, it was in Sweden in 1813 that Madame de Staël began the

  writing of Considérations sur les principaux évènemens de la Révolution française.45 It

  existed only in manuscript at the time of her death in 1817 and was published a

  year later. The first edition of 60,000 copies sold out almost immediately. In truth,

  Considérations sur les principaux évènemens de la Révolution française amounted to

  three, if not four, books in one. Since the death of her father in 1804 it had been

  Madame de Staël’s intention to write an account (and defence) of his political

  career. In the process of writing, this became a description of the principal events of

  the Revolution itself and of the manner in which the Terror emerged. To this was

  added a paean to England and English liberty. Finally, in the wake of the emperor’s

  defeat, there was added an anti-Napoleon tract.

  If royalist accounts of the Revolution had already established that it was evidence

  of the workings of divine providence, Madame de Staël similarly believed, although

  for very different reasons, that the Revolution was inevitable. ‘Those who consider

  it an accidental event’, she wrote in her opening paragraph, ‘have not turned their

  attention either to the past or to the future. They have mistaken the actors for the

  play; and, in order to satisfy their passions, they have attributed to transient

  individuals what it took centuries to prepare.’46 To justify this assertion, she

  deployed a three-stage interpretation of European history since the fall of the

  Roman Empire. The first epoch was feudalism; the second was monarchical

  despotism; the third was the age of representative government. Thus far, Madame

  de Staël argued, only England had properly reached this ‘final perfecting of the

  social order’ but, with the gradual spread of intellectual enlightenment and com-

  merce, all of Europe was following the path indicated by the English and French

  Revolutions.

  None of this was to suggest that such progress could not be interrupted by lapses

  into arbitrary government and tyranny. Indeed, it was precisely this that had

  43 See Germaine de Staël, Dix années d’exil (1996).

  44 Selections from De la Littérature and De l’Allemagne can be found in Morroe Berger (ed.),

  Germaine de Staël: Politics, Literature and National Character (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000).

  45 For an English edn. see Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French

  Revolution (Ind
ianapolis, 2008).

  46 Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 63.

  248

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  occurred in France. As Madame de Staël sought to remind her readers, ‘it is liberty

  that is old and despotism which is modern’.47 The four ‘best’ kings of France—

  St Louis, Charles V, Louis XII, and ‘above all’ Henri IV—had striven to establish

  the rule of law, religious toleration, and the rudiments of a representative system

  but this had been subverted from the time of Cardinal Richelieu in the seventeenth

  century onwards. From that moment, the government of France had been char-

  acterized by corruption, intrigue, vanity, privilege, and despotism, and so much so

  that the private virtues of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been hidden

  beneath ‘the vast collection of abuses by which they were surrounded’.

  It was this parlous situation that Jacques Necker had been called upon to rectify.

  The clear and unambiguous message of Madame de Staël’s text was that, if her

  father’s advice had been followed, administrative order and financial stability would

  have been restored to France and thus the horrors of the Revolution and the

  ensuing European war would have been avoided. However, this was not to be so

  and, as a consequence, moderation was replaced by ‘the spirit of faction’ and ‘the

  fever of revolution’.

  Yet Madame de Staël was prepared to accept that, in its early work, the National

  Assembly did much to earn the gratitude of the nation. It established religious

  toleration and freedom of the press. It reformed the judicial system and introduced

  trial by jury. It abolished the privileges of caste and suppressed unfair taxes. It

  created provincial assemblies and removed restraints on industry and trade. In

  short, it cleared away many of the abuses associated with arbitrary power. With

  regard to the institutions it created, however, the National Assembly committed

  ‘the most serious errors’.

  The most grievous of these was to have considered executive power as being

  inimical to liberty. This explained why the king had been stripped of his preroga-

  tives and why he had been reduced to a ‘public functionary’. From a fear of

  supporting conspiracy followed a refusal to contemplate the usefulness of a second

 

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