by Tom Anderson
The French infantry benefited rather less from Louis’ reforms, although Louis was persuaded to adopt the rifle on an experimental basis. Unlike Britain and the Empire of North America, no dedicated Rifle regiments were formed, but some elite skirmishers of conventional musket regiments were trained in the longer-ranged, more accurate weapon. This would be considered both a blessing and a curse by many in Europe, later on.
Unfortunately for Louis, the one war into which he led France into was something of a disaster. The Second Platinean War was, necessarily, fought mainly at sea, and he had neglected the French Navy. Nonetheless, thanks to some excellent officers, mistakes by the British and the assistance of the Spanish fleet, victories were won at sea, most notably Trafalgar. However, the French army in Platinea was cut off from resupply and eventually was forced into a humiliating surrender. Many French soldiers deserted and joined the new Platinean republic, later to become the UPSA, while others brought back new radical ideas, sowing the seeds for what was to follow.
Another contributor to this atmosphere of radical thinking was the acquisition of Corsica in the last years of Louis XV’s reign. France might have obtained a strategically important island and gained more influence over Genoa, but the revolutionary ideas of the Corsican republic also filtered back to France.
There was no coherent popular response to Bourbon Enlightenment absolutism, despite what many historians like to pretend. History is rarely so neat. Cartier (1959) has described the undercurrent of popular feeling in the early stages of the Revolution as a simple, unanimous, animalistic “NON!” The key difference to the former revolts, all the way back to the Jacquerie, was that political ideology was finally beginning to make itself known, albeit in a disjointed fashion. The Enlightenment ideals of Voltaire and the ‘scientific Racialism’ of Linnaeus’ imitators were intermixed with more radical republican notions from Platinea and, especially, Corsica. Great Britain was viewed variously, and sometimes simultaneously, as an inspirational liberal democracy and a perfidious reactionary tyranny. The same was true of the Empire of North America, though even revolutionary France suffered a certain chauvinism that suggested that any ideas from the New World were inferior, notwithstanding the clear influence of the Platinean revolt on French thinking.
Some Diversitarian philosophers of the Vitebsk school have described the notion that an initial, pure, proletarian rebellion must inevitably fall prey to what they describe as ‘ideological poisoning’. The starving man in the street wants only to gorge himself, take back what he believes to be rightfully his, punish those who took it from him, and perhaps destroy the signs of the former state of affairs, taking delight in the animalistic notion of pure destruction. However, the inevitable question must be asked: “then what?” The rule, throughout history, is that the rebellion peters out into confusion and disarray and the ancien régime returns to power, savagely extinguishing any signs of the rebels. But the introduction of the printing press and rising popular literacy slowly began to change this pattern over the centuries, and the Enlightenment sealed the shift. Suddenly there were educated men who did not identify with the royal establishment, and wanted more. Men who could ride the crest of a rebellion and steer it into a true revolution, remaking an entire state in their own image.
The most dangerous men in the world.
There is a question often asked of the schoolroom tutor, to the extent that he stereotypically finds it rather tiresome. “Why did the French people support a revolution that would end up producing a state far more cruel to them than the ancien régime it replaced?” The tutor might be tempted simply to point out that such comments are easy to make with the benefit of hindsight, and the French people had no such notion of what the future would hold, indeed how could they possibly have had one? The truth is, of course, somewhat more complex. The Revolution in France, more so than any of the great revolts to shake the world since that time, is a clear example of a series of transformative phases. Each phase seemed reasonable enough at the time, and yet when our schoolroom pupil considers making the leap from the first to the last, it seems inconceivable that any sane man would choose to do so.
A humorous exercise in logic from England is illustrative. A piece of paper is an ink-lined plane; an inclined plane is a slope up; a slow pup is a lazy dog; Therefore: a piece of paper is a lazy dog. A deliberately absurd leap, yet each step makes logical sense. So too the Revolution.
Early Revolutionary leaders were idealists, the exemplar being the man who gave the early Revolution its other name of the Second Jacquerie: Jacques Tisserant, known reverentially as “Le Diamant” (The Diamond) for his image of incorruptibility. Tisserant was a labourer who worked variously for Parisian opticians and Flemish cartographers, but he gained an education of sorts and worked his way into a position of power. The skills he had learned resulted in the publication of the most celebrated document of the Revolution, though original copies are now very rare thanks to the later phases ordering them to be burnt or carefully edited. This was La Carte de la France.
Despite what the name suggests, it was not simply a map of France, not in a strict geographic sense. Rather, it was a symbolic map, not unlike the humorous maps popular in the eighteenth century—the “Drunkard’s Atlas”, containing only those countries producing wine, and the “Map of Matrimony”, describing the journey of man and woman through the lands of Happiness while avoiding the dark vistas of Loneliness.[132] It was the latter that most inspired Tisserant. Instead of the paths of lovers through time, he showed the path of France, describing that France under the ancien régime would eventually, inevitably, decline to the shadowy countries of Irrelevance and Tyranny. He presented a second path, a path of Reform and of Equity, which would restore France to its place as a proud nation and a happy people.
La Carte was banned by Louis XVI’s ministers, probably their first wrongfooted step. Matters were not assisted by the Great Famine of 1789 and the rumours that a comet would strike France in 1791, which threw the peasantry into a panic. The Royal French East India Company continued to bring riches to the home country from its trading possessions in southern India, but these inevitably failed to trickle down to the lower classes. Revolution was in the air.
Le Diamant created a proletarian movement known as the Sans-Culottes, the ‘Men Without Trousers’, so called because they scorned the use of the fashionable knee-breeches of the upper classes. Sans-Culottes wore long pants instead, but Le Diamant was supposedly rumoured to give speeches wearing nothing below the waist at all, allegedly due to his commitment to equal treatment for all classes rather than simple revenge on the aristocrats. In truth, of course, this may be a piece of vulgar slander by his political enemies: with the aforementioned issues we face with the destruction of records, we cannot be certain. Such a move, though it may seem vulgar to us, was not out of character for the kinds of behaviour seen in the heady days of the early Revolution. And, after all, Equity! was always the battle cry of the Sans-Culottes.
Things came to a head in February 1794. Having had their petitions continuously rejected by the Estates-Provincial and the Parlements, the Sans-Culottes marched on the Palais de Versailles and demanded the restoration of the Estates-General, with a dramatic expansion of both the Estates’ powers and the size of the Third Estate, making it more representative of the population of a whole of France.[133] The march caught the palace guard by surprise, and many of the lower-born infantry sympathised with the Sans-Culottes. Le Diamant famously walked forward, alone, into their midst, and made a speech of which no full record survives, but is believed to contain the phrase “Will one man who grew up in a gutter shoot another on the whim of a man who cares not one jot for either of them?” According to more spurious sources, it may also have featured the phrase “You wouldn’t shoot a man not wearing pants, would you?”
It was not, as many feared across the capitals of Europe, a bloody revolt. Louis XVI had been, deliberately to some extent, isolated by his ministers from the news of the tid
e of popular feeling sweeping France. He was shocked at what he saw, and willingly heard Le Diamant’s grievances, agreeing to recall the Estates-General.
That was the beginning. It seemed so hopeful, and that is what the tutors must tell their schoolboys with their awkward question. It was the dashing of that hope that makes the whole story so poignant, so terrible, so tragic.
The Tragedy of France.
Chapter #18: The Betrayal of the Revolution
From: “FRANCE’S TRAGEDY: A History of the Revolution” by A.J. Galtier (originally published 1973, English translation 1984)—
How often has the question been asked! Who would have thought that such an auspicious beginning of the Reform of France—as it was, at first, so innocuously dubbed—could have ended in our history books being written in blood?
In a tragic irony, the Revolution could never have got as far as it did without its charismatic, popular leader Jacques Tisserant, Le Diamant, and yet it was that popular support that was used to destroy everything Le Diamant stood for.
Le Diamant had persuaded King Louis XVI to recall, for the first time in centuries, the Estates-General in February 1794. It was also at this time that, recognising the vast gulf between the portion of society the Third Estate represented (around 25 million peasants and bourgeoisie) and the few hundred clergy and nobles represented by the Second and First, the number of representatives of the Third Estate were tripled. However, the Second and First Estates used every political trick they could find to reduce the impact of this.
Louis wished the Estates-General to focus on the tax reforms that his father had always failed to implement, but this turned out to be a forlorn hope. The Third Estate, revelling in its newfound power, sought to reorganise and strictly define its powers, a Constitutionalist group growing as the factions in the Estates began to form the nuclei of true political parties. The British Houses of Parliament—and often their more modernised counterpart in the Empire of North America—were initial inspirations in this period, and the Third Estate renamed itself the Communes (House of Commons).
While the Second and First Estates looked upon this development with some alarm, they nonetheless generally participated in and encouraged the Communes’ internal debates, not least because it meant that Louis’ tax plans were shelved, and it was the members of the Second and First Estates that would have the most to lose from those.
By July 1794, a consensus was reached that the existing system of government was inadequate, still in many ways stuck in the Middle Ages. France had changed, and its governance would have to change with it. Louis XVI had some misgivings about this strident proclamation by the Estates, but Le Diamant’s moderating influence again resulted in a compromise. The National Constitutional Convention of August-December 1794, somewhat inspired by that of the United Provinces of South America a few years earlier, abolished the Estates-General and created a new National Legislative Assembly to replace it. This was a unicameral chamber in which the First and Second Estate representatives were appointed, as were one-third of the Third Estate (Communes), but the other two-thirds would be elected by universal householder suffrage. Louis XVI’s title was altered from “King of France and Navarre” to “King of the French People of the Latin Race”. This was an early sign of the Linnaean Racialist policies, long ideologically debated by the French bourgeois intelligentsia, which would later characterise the Revolutionary state.
The Constitution was unpopular with both supporters of Bourbon absolutism and with those in some of the regional Estates-Provincial (most notably Brittany, but also in généralities[134] to the southeast such as Burgundy). The new centralised state took away a lot of the autonomy that these so-called Pays d’État had formerly enjoyed, and laid the foundations for many of the the later counter-revolutionary insurrections.
Nevertheless, the Constitution was implemented, with the first elections to the NLA due to take place in 1799 and further elections held on a five-year term basis. At this point, it is worth examining foreign reactions to the Revolution thus far. Britain, North America and the UPSA all saw nothing but positive events—Charles James Fox went so far as to openly praise the Revolution as a repeat of Britain’s Glorious Revolution of a century before. In fact, what criticism did exist in Britain was largely that of those who combined patriotism with intellectual musings on political systems—if constitutional parliamentary monarchy was really the motor that had driven Britain to successes in America and, to a much lesser extent, India—then the last thing they wanted was the French getting hold of it!
The more reactionary nations of Europe, on the other hand—in particular absolutist and Catholic Austria and Spain—viewed these events with alarm. Spain, after all, also had a Bourbon king, and the last thing Philip VI[135] wanted was for his own “mob” to get any funny ideas—particularly considering that his predecessor, Charles III, had already been forced to temporarily flee into exile by popular uprisings twice, and the third time might prove to be permanent. It turned out that this worry was largely unfounded: the Spanish people remained reasonably francophobic and this would only intensify as time went on. An imaginary Spanish imitation of the Revolution would turn out to be the least of Philip’s worries.
Back in Paris, the Comte de Mirabeau, a moderate member of the First Estate, became chief minister and struggled to implement the new constitutional monarchy amid sniping from all sides. Reactionary absolutists, allied to the provincial interests, attacked the constitution, while on the other side a new radical force was growing. Aside and apart from Le Diamant’s Sans-Culottes, a new faction was created. They would eventually be known as the Jacobins, after the name of the Paris club in which they held their meetings. These men were on the whole not proletarians with legitimate grievances as the Sans-Culottes were; for the most part, they were members of the bourgeois intelligentsia more interested in applying abstract idealistic Enlightenment concepts to the government of the state than they were in solving any of the real immediate problems that faced France and its poor. In that respect, they were no different from any of the great Enlightenment statesmen who had served in Iberia and indeed France itself throughout the past century—but now that the old system of royal power had been overturned, there were nothing to prevent them gaining absolute power in turn.
Things came to a head on April 2nd 1795, when the death of Mirabeau of natural causes paralysed the NLA and allowed the Jacobin faction, putting out the loudest and most coherent message to the people, to gain momentum. The moderates, led by the Marquis de Condorcet, advocated that Louis XVI’s Swiss-born finance minister Jacques Necker should replace Mirabeau as chief minister, while the Jacobins put forward the relatively unknown lawyer Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, of the Généralite of Lille.[136] This was accompanied by savage propaganda attacks on Necker by the Linnaean Racialist political faction that would soon become synonymous with the Jacobins. The Jacobins had begun to combine the existing French Enlightenment view of the superiority of the Latin race with a narrower sense of French nationalism as embodied in the French language. Either way, foreign-born officials were suspect. This was backed by an undercurrent of feeling in the more proletarian Sans-Culotte faction, though there are no surviving records that Le Diamant ever definitively spoke on the subject—and thus his admirers have argued over it ever since. It was particularly ironic given that one of the Jacobins’ own leaders, Jean-Paul Marat, was also Swiss-born, though he took some pains to conceal this.
As the legitimate political debate degenerated into ever more savage verbal—and not just verbal—attacks, with rival political gangs fighting in the streets of Paris, a nervous Louis XVI ordered regiments to be recalled from the frontiers to Paris in an attempt to keep the peace. In practice this only resulted in the regiments being seen as tools of the king against the people and resulted in numerous attacks on soldiers by the fierier political radicals. This rarely succeeded in accomplishing any immediate goal, but in the longer term significantly reduced the popularity of both
the king and the army as reprisals were mounted and often misfired, with innocents being caught in the crossfire.
The atmosphere in Paris, indeed throughout much of France, was tense. Everyone knew that, metaphorically speaking, one dropped matchstick could ignite the smouldering country into the inferno of full-blown civil war. Even Charles James Fox began to moderate his praise of the revolution as reports of intense political violence in the cities of France crept out.
Despite being somewhat insulated from the events on the streets by what remained of the royal trappings, Louis XVI decided something must be done to relieve the tensions. A figure that everyone could agree on must be made chief minister...a man who had become the national hero of France.
Jacques Tisserant.
It was after a month of unrest that, on the May 3rd 1795, Louis XVI summoned Le Diamant into his presence to discuss the possibility. Precisely what happened next remains unclear due to the lack of surviving records, many of them deliberately destroyed by the later regime for revisionist reasons. Attempts at establishing a historical record from eyewitness accounts years after the fact must inevitably be flawed, but this is what most historians accept as the rough sequence of events:
It would seem that the King was still just insulated enough from events for one fatal mistake to be made. Le Diamant arrived with four loyal Sans-Culottes armed with muskets as bodyguards, a common sight by now and a sensible precaution on the wartorn streets of Paris. The captain of the royal guard asked Louis if he wanted Le Diamant’s guards to be disarmed, and Louis, not realising how dangerous his capital had become and how social norms had changed in response, replied “Of course!”