Revolution and the Republic
Page 53
chamber. The result was an ‘ill-fated constitution’, ‘good in its foundation’ but ‘bad
in its superstructure’, and one incapable of protecting ‘the blessings of civil
liberty’.48 How could this be explained? According to Madame de Staël, the
National Assembly had been seized by ‘philosophical enthusiasm’, by a passion
for abstract thinking at the expense of practical common sense. The deputies had
shown themselves to be vain and cowardly, devoid of a sense of public duty.
Consequently, they had been mistaken in 1791 to believe that the Revolution
was finished and that liberty had been established. Rather, an abyss was about to
open up beneath their feet.
The logic of the next stage of the Revolution was all too clear. Arbitrary power
was given new strength by the Revolution itself. The revolutionaries, in serving the
people, sacrificed the happiness of each in the name of the common interest and the
demands of equality. ‘To the animosity against the nobles and the priests’, Madame
de Staël wrote, ‘succeeded a feeling of irritation against the landowners, next,
47 Considérations sur la Révolution française (1983), 70.
48 Ibid. 249.
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249
against talents, then even against personal beauty; finally against whatever was to be
found of greatness or generosity in human nature.’49 Persecution led to the need for
further persecution, the Terror driven forward by a monstrous frenzy of political
fanaticism that, in taking away all restraints from the people, placed them in a
position to commit every crime. It was a mistake, she believed, to imagine that the
Jacobins had reduced government to a state of anarchy. ‘Never’, Madame de Staël
observed, ‘has a stronger authority reigned over France, but it was a strange sort of
power; springing from popular fanaticism it inspired dread in the very persons who
commanded in its name, for they always feared being proscribed in turn by men
who would go further than they in the daring boldness of persecution.’50 Not even
Robespierre—whom Madame de Staël portrayed as a hypocrite interested only in
power—felt entirely secure. It was ‘the most horrible period’ in French history.
How had such violent behaviour been possible? How could the people of France
have been so depraved? The answer, in Madame de Staël’s opinion, was to be found
in centuries of superstition and arbitrary power. The French were what bad
government had made them. They had acquired few ideas of justice and still
believed that an enemy was not entitled to the protection of the law. Nevertheless,
she argued, all countries and all peoples, including France and the French, were fit
for liberty, and all, she believed, would attain it in their own way.
This was where England figured in Madame de Staël’s argument, for, as she
wrote, ‘we cannot believe that Providence should have placed this fine monument
of social order so near to France merely to inspire in us the regret of never being able
to equal it’.51 If she added little to the familiar litany of praise for English
institutions and morals, the depth of Madame de Staël’s admiration for England
needs to be recognized. It drew upon her father’s Anglophilia, her visits to England,
her reading, and her conversations with many English friends. Above all, she
believed that England’s power, prosperity, and tranquillity derived from its long-
established freedoms, its commercial spirit, its Protestantism, and its political
institutions. Needless to say, she turned a blind eye to many, although not all, of
England’s faults, singling out for praise the rule of law, a decentralized administra-
tion, an exemplary public spirit, and a vigorous, open aristocracy. Her point was
that the England of today could be the France of tomorrow.
Yet France had not pursued the course taken by England and, as a consequence,
she languished in a state of despotism. For Madame de Staël, Napoleon Bonaparte
had arisen naturally and almost inevitably out of the chaos of the Revolution. The
two principal causes of his power, she observed, were that he had given France
military glory rather than liberty and had restored order without attacking selfish
passions. From personal experience she knew that he was no ordinary man, that he
had a desire to astonish the human race, but not content with being a master he had
49 Ibid. 303.
50 Ibid. 305.
51 Ibid. 530. See Robert Escarpit, L’Angleterre dans l’œuvre de Madame de Staël (1954) and V. de
Pange, ‘Le Rêve anglais de Madame de Staël’, in Colloque de Coppet, Madame de Staël et l’Europe
(1970), 173–92.
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wished to be a tyrant. In words that echoed those of Montesquieu, she described a
regime based upon corruption and immorality, where the will of a single man
decided everything, where all liberties were suppressed, where opponents were
banished without trial, and which daily displayed contempt for humanity. Napo-
leon’s despotism was one of conquest and of continuous wars. No one dared to tell
him the truth.
Madame de Staël recorded that she met the emperor’s fall with mixed emotions.
It seemed, she wrote, as if Burke’s prediction had been accomplished: France had
fallen into the abyss. However, she was not eager to see a return of the Bourbon
monarchy. Nor, unlike Benjamin Constant, was she fooled by the returning
Napoleon’s conversion to constitutional government. The friends of liberty, she
observed, needed to separate their cause entirely from his and should never confuse
the principles of the Revolution with those of imperial government. Indeed, this
stance embodied the fundamental political message of her text: liberty could only
ever be attained through liberty and never through coercion. And nothing but
liberty could arouse the soul and ennoble our character. This was a lesson that
French liberals were to seek to build upon during the nineteenth century.
In historiographical terms, Madame de Staël’s legacy was no less important. Not
only was she the first to examine the course and aftermath of the Revolution in any
detail, but her lasting contribution lay in her characterization of the Revolution as
the culmination of a thousand-year struggle for liberty by the people of France.
Moreover, that this aspiration had been betrayed by the leaders of the Revolution
did not, for her, diminish the achievement of overturning centuries of injustice and
oppression. She thereby established the distinction between 1789 and 1793. The
Terror was not the logical consequence of the principles of 1789 and Napoleon was
not the necessary solution.
Published in the early years of the Restoration period, Considérations sur les
principaux évènemens de la Révolution française evoked a series of immediate and
varied responses.52 Many simply asserted that Madame de Staël’s affection for her
father had blinded her to the true nature of the Revolution. Others saw her book as
anti-French and unpatriotic. Three commentaries merit particular attention. The
first was penned by royalist Louis de Bonald.53 It disputed the virtues attributed to
Jacques Necker. It denied that the Revolution had been inevitable and that its cause
lay in the misery of the people. It challenged the description of absolute monarchy
as arbitrary government, contending that France had had a constitution and that it
had resided in her ‘religion, royalty, and justice’.54 It contradicted the claim that
England was a free polity, placing little or no value in its much-vaunted liberties
such as freedom of the press or trial by jury and characterizing the English as
52 See G. E. Gwynne, Madame de Staël et la Révolution française (1969), 262–71, and Ezio
Cappadocia, ‘The Liberals and Madame de Staël in 1818’, in Richard Herr and Harold T. Parker
(eds.), Ideas in History: Essays Presented to Louis Gottschalk by his Former Students (Durham, NC, 1965),
182–97.
53 Observations sur l’ouvrage de Mme la Baronne de Staël, ayant pour titre: Considérations sur les
principaux évenéments de la révolution française (1818).
54 Ibid. 37.
History, Revolution, and Terror
251
‘morose, irritable, unhappy, selfish’.55 It suggested that liberals such as Madame de
Staël despised Napoleon not because he had oppressed France but because he had
oppressed the Revolution. Finally, it argued that the veracity of Madame de Staël’s
entire account was undermined by her Protestantism. The royalist and theocratic
reply, in short, remained that the Revolution was misconceived from the outset and
that its ‘inevitable’ and ‘natural’ quality was crime.56 In the decades that followed,
conservative writers were to seek to remind the French of this reality.57
The second commentary, published in 1818, amounted to a two-volume,
chapter-by-chapter, refutation of Madame de Staël’s argument running to over
900 pages. Its author was Jacques-Charles Bailleul.58 He was a former Girondin
and member of the Convention who had narrowly escaped death thanks to the fall
of Robespierre. He too had fallen foul of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet he viewed the
Revolution in an entirely different light from Madame de Staël. Naturally, Bailleul
disparaged Madame de Staël’s eulogy of her father and was thoroughly dismissive of
her praise of England, suggesting that it was the French and not the English who
were made for liberty. More substantively, Bailleul characterized the period of
French history from Richelieu onwards not in terms of a loss of liberty but as the
time when it was possible to speak of the deliverance of the people, the setting free
of the nation. By the nation, Bailleul clearly intended the Third Estate and thus, on
this account, 1789 was the moment when, for the first time, the nation came fully
into existence, when, equal before the same laws, Gascons and Normans became
French. Crucially, he then suggested that the derailing of the Revolution arose not
from anything intrinsic to the Revolution itself but as a consequence of the actions
of an ‘antinational party’ composed of the forces of privilege and, all importantly,
from the exigencies of a foreign-imposed war. In other words, it was the opponents
of the Revolution who were responsible for the chaos and external threats that made
resort to Terror into a political and military necessity. ‘The Jacobin party’, Bailleul
wrote, ‘did not wish to exercise despotism; it wished only to defend the homeland
and liberty.’59 Robespierre was not a hypocrite but a principled man seeking to
bring about the reign of virtue. Forced by events to push the logic of virtue to its
extreme, he became a ‘monster’ and France under the Jacobins lapsed into arbitrary
government, but the fault for this lay unambiguously with the ‘conspiracy of the
privileged’. In brief, it was circumstances, rather than revolutionary doctrine, that
explained the Terror. Here were powerful arguments that later historians of the
Revolution were to deploy with great effectiveness.
A far kinder assessment of Madame de Staël’s achievement came from Benjamin
Constant.60 Her book, he wrote, was more than a simple apology for Jacques
55 Ibid. 26.
56 Ibid. 129–31.
57 See Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History (Stanford, Calif., 1958), 58–100.
58 Examen Critique des Considérations de Mme la Baronne de Staël sur les principaux événements de la
Révolution française, 2 vols. (1822).
59 Ibid. ii. 215.
60 ‘Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française’, in Ephraïm Harpaz
(ed.), Benjamin Constant: Receuil d’Articles. Le Mercure de France et la Rénommée (1972), i. 407–12,
450–9, 469–78.
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Necker. In it, he continued, were to be observed all the principles that had inspired
Madame de Staël throughout her life: an attachment to liberty, a profound sense of
the dignity of the human race, a respect for the application of morality to politics,
and, he insisted, a love of France. Moreover, it was ‘the best history of our
revolution that has appeared so far’.
Liberalism in Restoration France was an amorphous doctrine.61 All the same, the
liberals had three main political tasks: to preserve the civil acquisitions of 1789, to
deny their responsibility for the Terror, and to outline a political programme for
power. As Stanley Mellon observed: ‘The Revolution was lurking beneath every
political issue: it had to be explained and defended, right up to the day that the
revolution of 1830 successfully enshrined it.’62 Madame de Staël provided some of
the armoury required for these tasks but more would be needed if liberals were to
win their bitter political battles with their royalist opponents. In the first instance, a
response had to be made to the thesis expounded by the Comte de Montlosier in
his De la monarchie française.63
Montlosier’s text had a curious history, the count having been asked by Napoleon
Bonaparte to write a history of France which would establish the legitimacy of the
Empire by establishing its continuity with the monarchy of the ancien régime.
When no such book was forthcoming, it was sent back to its author, only to be
published in 1814, at the very moment when the restored Bourbon monarchy itself
was impatient to re-establish its own historical credentials. At the core of Montlosier’s
account was a reworking of what had become a familiar theme of eighteenth-century
polemic: namely, that the history of France could be summarized as a struggle
between two races, the Franks and the Gauls.64 In its most famous formulation,
Henri de Boulainvilliers had retold the history of the victory of the noble Franks over
the Gauls in order, first, to celebrate an ideal of feudal liberty and, second, to reassert
the ancient right of the Franks to participate in government. On this account, by
excluding the nobility, the rise of royal absolutism had destroyed feudal liberty. Just
as importantly, Boulainvilliers affirmed that the subject Gauls had been excluded
from government. Montlosier recast this argument in terms of the gradual under-
mining of aristocracy of the Franks by the Gauls of the Third Estate, a process
which culminated in the Revolution of 1789. Read in the context of the Restoration,
&nbs
p; Montlosier not only seemed to be suggesting that the struggle between these two
races was never ending but also that the returning émigré aristocracy had good
grounds for affirming its supremacy anew. For those of a liberal disposition wishing
to establish that the Charte granted to the French people in 1814 had an altogether
61 See Laurence Jacobs, ‘Le Moment Libéral: The Distinctive Character of Restoration Liberalism’,
Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 479–92.
62 Mellon, Political Uses, 193.
63 See Furet, Revolutionary France, 307–8, and Sarah Maza, The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 150–2. The argument developed in the next section of the text draws upon
Shirley M. Gruner, ‘Political Historiography in Restoration France’, History and Theory, 8 (1969),
346–65.
64 See Claude Nicolet, La Fabrique d’une nation: La France entre Rome et les Germains (2006),
107–37.
History, Revolution, and Terror
253
different message, the stakes could hardly have been higher. They had to show that
history was on the side of the Third Estate. In brief, the bourgeoisie needed to get a
history, and it needed to get one quickly.
By general agreement this history was largely provided by Augustin Thierry in
his Lettres sur l’histoire de France of 182065 and by François Guizot in his Essais sur
l’histoire de France of 1823. Although different in tone and substance, each turned
Montlosier’s argument on its head in order not only to describe the Third Estate as
the driving force of French history, but also to portray its role in a positive light.
The claim was that the facts of French history had been ‘perverted’ by a series of
‘arbitrary’ accounts intended to reduce ‘a free people’ to mere ‘subjects standing
before a master who alone speaks and who no one could contradict’. It was not in
the recent past, Thierry countered, but seven hundred years before that France had
first seen men deploy their courage and their convictions ‘to create for themselves
and for their children an existence that was at once free and benign’. This, he
affirmed, could be clearly seen among those former serfs who had ‘built the walls
and the civilization of the ancient Gallic cities’. According to Thierry, therefore, the
‘difficult’ but ‘glorious’ task of writing a ‘truthful history’ of France would restore