Mourning Glory

CRITICAL AUTHORS & ISSUES

Josué Harari, Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

Mourning Glory

The Will of the

French Revolution

Marie-Hélène Huet

Copyright © 1997 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Huet, Marie Hélène.

Mourning glory : the will of the French Revolution /

Marie-Hélène Huet.

p.        cm. — (Critical authors & issues)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8122-3414-6 (cloth : alk. paper). —

ISBN 0-8122-1617-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799.   2. Enlightenment—France—Influence.   3. Robespierre, Maximilien, 1758–1794—Philosophy.   4. Political science—Philosophy—History—18th century.   5. France—History—Reign of Terror, 1793–1794—Influence. I. Title.   II. Series.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Revolutionary Will

Part I. Intents and Purposes

1. Political Science

2. The End of Representation

3. The Revolutionary Sublime

4. Against the Law

Part II. Last Will and Testament

5. Around Midnight: Closing Time

6. Graveyard Shift

7. The Legacy of History

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with an electric kite.

2. Portrait of Franklin, Labadye.

3. Festival of the Supreme Being, Bure

4. Reception of the Decree of 18 Floréal, Legrand

5. Revolutionary festival, watercolor

6. Veiling of symbols of Monarchy

7. Saint-Just, eighteenth-century school

8. Robespierre’s unfinished signature, 9 Thermidor

9. Portrait of Robespierrein

10. The French People or the Robespierre Regime, engraving

11. Church and cemetery of the Holy Innocents

12. Fountain of the Innocents, 1794, engraving

13. Robespierre, oil, eighteenth-century school

14. Miniature, possibly of Robespierre

15. Danton, engraving

16. Danton, David

17. Act of Justice, engraving after Viller

18. Robespierre executing the executioner, engraving

19. Maximilien Robespierre known as the modern Catilina, wood engraving

20. Allegory of Terror

Acknowledgments

WHEN SOME PARISIAN MUSEUMS were still poorly-lit repositories for sacred and dusty relics, the Musée Carnavalet had a room designated with the words The Terror. This room offered two antithetical images of the French Revolution. In the back of the room, one could see a life-size replica of the Temple cell where the royal family had spent their last days. The reconstruction of the dismal jail, a powerful evocation of the Monarchy’s downfall and martyrdom, was meant to appeal to the visitor’s emotions. In sharp contrast to this staging of royal adversity, an old glass case displayed an odd assortment of objects and papers. Among them, unidentified, was one of the most extraordinary documents of the Revolution: the call to arms that, according to some historians, could have saved Robespierre’s life had he agreed to sign it on the night of 9 Thermidor.

There was no visible identification and no legend to explain the document. Only visitors who had read historical accounts of the fall of Robespierre would have recognized, at the bottom of the yellowed piece of paper, his unfinished signature.

These two exhibits appealed to entirely different sensibilities; they also presented the public with different approaches to the past. The Temple cell was a rather crude reproduction, not unlike some of Madame Tussaud’s exhibits, but its impact on the spectator was immediate. In its own way, it was as powerful as the 1935 Hollywood conclusion to A Tale of Two Cities, when the guillotine consummates Sidney Carton’s sacrifice and the audience shudders at the sound of the falling knife. By contrast, the document dated 9 Thermidor, a fragment of revolutionary history, left most visitors indifferent, unaware that in 1794 this scrap of paper had carried so much weight and generated so much controversy.

The Musée Carnavalet has recently undergone a major renovation. Gone are the dubious artifacts unworthy of a museum. The royal cell has been dismantled and Robespierre’s last unfinished signature now hangs, framed and under glass, with a dry identification. Somehow, this old sheet of paper has also lost some of the power it held when I first saw it, quite by chance, in the spring of 1983. That is when this book started taking shape.

A Fellowship at the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Studies gave me released time and support for this project. Research in France was also funded by a Faculty Fellowship from Amherst College and research funds from the University of Michigan. Versions or parts of certain chapters appeared in the following: an early version of chapter 1 was published in The French Revolution, 1789–1989: Two Hundred Years of Rethinking, edited by Sandy Petrey (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989); parts of chapters 2 and 5 were incorporated in essays that appeared in Modern Language Notes (1985 and 1988) and Representing the French Revolution: Literature, Historiography, and Art, edited by James A. W. Heffernan (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992); an early version of chapter 3 was published in Eighteenth-Century Studies (1994); and parts of chapter 5 were published in Rhétoriques fin de siècle, edited by François Cornilliat and Mary Shaw (Paris: Bourgois, 1992.)

Introduction: Revolutionary Will

Intents and Purposes

IN A NOTE TO HIMSELF Saint-Just once wrote that the revolution must culminate in the perfection of happiness.¹ We all know that the French Revolution’s pursuit of happiness degenerated into violence and death, the glorious ideals of the Declaration of Rights and the conquest of liberty compromised forever by war, civil strife, mob violence, and the specter of the guillotine. History has explored at great length the reasons the dreams of 1789 became the nightmare of 1793. Multiple causes, of a social, economic, and political nature, have been cited to explain the dramatic downfall of the Republic. Strikingly, the undoing of the revolutionary ideal has never been explicitly related to the ideal itself.² Philosophically and ideologically, 1789 and 1793 stand as two unrelated events, two revolutions: one a celebration of happiness and freedom inherited from the Enlightenment ("a perfectly pious vision of the Revolution," as Jean Baudrillard puts it);³ the other a largely unfathomable nightmare of blood and violence that historians prefer to erase or else dramatize to emphasize the illegitimacy of the revolutionary project.

Yet the philosophical ideals so brilliantly at work in the events of 1789 also inspired the darker days leading to the end of the Revolution.⁴ On 10 May 1793, during the period known as the Terror, Robespierre began his speech on the Constitution with these words:

Man is born for happiness and liberty, and everywhere he is a slave and unhappy. The goal of society is the conservation of his rights and the perfection of his being; and everywhere society degrades and oppresses him. The time has come to recall him to his true destinies; the progress of human reason has prepared the way for this great revolution, and to you especially falls the duty of pressing it forward.⁵

Better than any others perhaps, these few lines offer a privileged example of revolutionary rhetoric, the expression of an uncompromised ideal confronted with the demands of an increasingly tragic reality. A declaration of rights and principles is followed by a call for immediate action. These words spell out the revolutionaries’ primary duty in these troubled times: to give new impetus to the revolutionary movement.

As for the program Robespierre is about to delineate in great detail, he introduces it in lapidary fashion: To fulfill your mission, he continues, you must do exactly the contrary of what existed before you (p. 495). With this sentence, Robespierre declares in his forceful manner that the Revolution is more than a radical break with the past: it is a complete reversal of everything the past has represented. The present does more than erase the past, it revokes it. This is a Revolution.

In this eloquent opening, however, Robespierre himself does not entirely repudiate his own debts to the years before the Revolution. They are acknowledged by his reference to the progress of human reason,⁶ which made possible the Great Revolution. Moreover, Robespierre’s opening lines (man is born for happiness and liberty, and everywhere he is a slave and unhappy) are a direct echo of the words that begin the first book of Rousseau’s On the Social Contract, Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.⁷ Thus, even in times of political urgency, when an absolute reversal of the past is called for, the past is recalled and reappropriated as a guide and model for future political pursuits.

A few paragraphs later, Robespierre addresses another pressing matter, what he calls the disease of political bodies: the anarchy that seemed to have wrecked Paris and the country since 10 August 1792, when the Tuileries palace was stormed and the king put under arrest. But true anarchy, Robespierre argues, is not the social disorder that followed the August Revolution, it is despotism itself: What is anarchy, if not tyranny that makes nature and law step down from the throne to put men in their place! (p. 496). Anarchy is not a social state but the reign of a conceptual fraud. To insist that all events be understood in terms of their intellectual and philosophical foundations is also characteristic of revolutionary rhetoric.

The relationship between events and ideas, nature and the law, the throne and the people, or between the present and the complex legacy of the past, shapes what I have called revolutionary will. The word will has to be taken not just as resolve, but as a reasoned declaration of intent and purpose. Revolutionary will means premeditation. Revolutionary will—the will to the perfection of happiness and liberty—strove, to the very end and in the most desperate circumstances, to reconcile intellectual rigor and inexorable actions. What is lacking in the numerous and complacent accounts of the Revolution’s failure, or in the critical examinations of its violence, is an assessment of the active philosophical scrutiny that aimed to secure the Revolution’s ultimate goal against all odds. More specifically, revolutionary will tried to relate the need for political action to a continuing inquiry, a task that confronted the most radical scrutiny with the demands of everyday survival.

In these essays I have examined political and theoretical issues that involved, or created, new and conflicting discourses. More specifically, the continuing debates about the nature of laws—whether they are founded on a natural model or whether all civil laws violate the nature of civil rights—were of particular importance to Robespierre when he defended Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the lightning rod a few years before the Revolution, or to Saint-Just when he contrasted the gentleness of institutions with the violence of corrupted laws.

Terror aroused political passion and outrage. It also precipitated a form of philosophical and linguistic collapse; terror reached an almost unthinkable limit where all words failed, unable to convey the daily horror of the guillotine or the sublime idea of revolutionary virtue. Representation itself in all its forms came under scrutiny. Not only was representation controlled through censorship of plays, images, and the press, but, at a more profound level, the possibility—or impossibility—of representing the political will of the people yielded a surprising meditation on the limits of the political process itself.

This continuing inquiry, this absolute rethinking, is also the reverse of fanaticism, which never makes place for internal contradictions and sweeps away all divisions with ideological fervor. What I intend to explore here is a form of radical will that recognized simultaneously the urgency of its mission and, in the most lucid evaluation of its own limits, the very impossibility of its realization.

Last Will and Testament

Revolutionary will is also a testament, and the same paradoxes that tore apart the revolutionary ideal also divided its heirs apparent. The second part of this book deals with specific instances of confronting the revolutionary past and struggling with its legacy. As Dominick LaCapra has argued, history is an act of mourning: It is not confined to neopositivistic protocols but rather engages, at least discursively, in its own variant of working-through problems represented by mourning.⁸ Of the many histories of the French Revolution that shaped nineteenth-century political thinking, none equals Michelet’s passionate and lyrical account of the tragic events that gave birth to the modern state.⁹ It is ironic that the nascent discipline of history, the systematic evaluation of our past, assigned itself as one of its first tasks to account for the Revolution, an event that had hoped to erase the past, to do away with all legacies. I have focused on what it meant for Michelet to write the end of his Histoire de la Révolution française, to give it a conclusion and thus a meaning.

It is well known that the Revolution left no monuments to commemorate its achievements. In powerful contrast with the Great Projects that have changed the skyline of Paris in recent years, none of the architects’ visions of revolutionary splendor were ever built. Baudrillard describes France’s recent explosion of monumental architectural projects as a veritable ritual of mourning and condolence. And he adds: All our monuments are mausoleums: the Pyramid, the Arch of la Défense, the Musée d’Orsay, that fine Pharaonic chamber, the new National Library, cenotaph of culture.¹⁰ The Revolution, with its natural suspicion of the past, dealt with death in a paradoxical manner. I consider one of the most striking instances of revolutionary mourning: the powerful contrast between the rededication of the Panthéon as monument to the great (dead) men of the Fatherland and the wasteland of the cemeteries of the Terror. On the one hand are a few elaborate tombs, surrounded by architectural splendor and displays of patriotic fervor. The remains buried there were to stay forever, and the memory of the great men forever be honored. On the other hand, victims of the guillotine were thrown in mass graves, covered with quicklime in overflowing cemeteries. They disappeared but could not be forgotten. It is ironic that, in recent years, what Baudrillard calls our culture of mourning and condolence has fashioned an almost unnoticed but lasting mausoleum, not for the glorious insurrection of 1789 but for the sacrificed king of 1793.

Finally, the revolutionary will was torn open and read through the passionately partisan accounts of nineteenth-century historians. The last chapter examines how a durable legend was born, one that portrayed the fatal collapse of the Revolution as an epic battle between two monstrous figures: Danton and Robespierre. The creation of these monstrous images and the fact that they were never repudiated cannot be attributed to historiographical neglect alone. On the contrary, when myth pervades historical accounts, myth unveils what history still withholds.

PART 1

INTENTS AND PURPOSES

1

Political Science

IN 1756, UNDER THE ARTICLE Thunder, Diderot’s Encyclopedia provided the following information on how to protect oneself from thunderbolts:

The thunderbolt can be broken up or turned away by the sound of several large bells or by shooting a cannon; this stimulates in the air a great agitation that disperses the thunderbolt into separate parts; but it is essential to take care not to toll the bells when the cloud is directly overhead, for then the cloud may split and drop its thunderbolt. In 1718, lightning struck twenty-four churches in lower Brittany, in the coastal region extending from Landerneau to Saint-Pol de Léon; it struck precisely those churches where the bells were tolling to drive it away; neighboring churches where bells were not tolling were spared.¹

This text points out the two principles that simultaneously mediate and limit the power conferred by human knowledge: the church, and the essentially whimsical character of nature. The bells that tolled in the hope of turning away the lightning, a modest scientific experiment, brought upon themselves the fire of the gods with uncanny precision and devastating magnitude. The exercise of knowledge—that the sound of bells drives lightning away—is here immediately punished, on an almost divine scale, destroying moreover the very churches humans had constructed for their worship of God. By contrast, the silent steeples remain unscathed, spared by the furious storm, a paradoxical metaphor for a religious and ignorant people, unconcerned with understanding the fire from Heaven, forever resigned and gloriously rewarded for their blind submission.

This article from the Encyclopedia obviously did not take account of the theories on lightning first published by Benjamin Franklin in London in 1751 under the title Experiments and Observations on Electricity.² Preliminary application of Franklin’s theories would come a year later and take various forms, such as the kite or the fulminating bars of François Thomas Dalibard in France. The 1777 Supplement to the Encyclopedia, however, did full justice to Franklin’s invention and ingenuity. A second Thunder article was written, and the text read as follows:

It is a truth now recognized by all physicists that the matter which flames up in clouds, which produces lightning and thunderbolts, is nothing other than electric fire; the famous Franklin assembled the proofs of this in his fifth letter on electricity. . . . M. Franklin proposed as early as 1750 to use these means [electric kites, fulminating bars, and other sorts of apparatus] to protect buildings and ships from lightning; observations have proven so successful that it is now of interest to explain, in a way everyone can understand, how to build these conductors or lightning rods.³

Dismissing the fallen steeples of the Brittany coast, the author gave as examples of enlightened technology an imposing list of individuals and institutions that had successfully installed lightning rods on their roofs. The article’s author was none other than Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau, a distinguished chemist who was later to play an active role in the French Revolution.⁴ However, it would be a long time before the Encyclopedia’s conclusive pronouncements on lightning and thunder would be accepted.

In 1780, Monsieur de Vissery de Bois-Valé, a lawyer from Saint-Omer, a town in northern France, installed a lightning rod on his roof. His frightened neighbors sought redress, convinced that the lightning rod, like the tolling bells of Saint-Pol de Léon, was more likely to attract bolts that would strike them dead than to protect them from the storm. On 14 June 1780, the magistrates of Saint-Omer, siding with the concerned population, ordered the lightning rod removed within twenty-four hours. On 16 June Monsieur de Vissery submitted to the court a petition accompanied by a special report, the object of which was to furnish the judges with a complete demonstration of the electrical machine placed above his house.⁵ Arguments were heard on 21 June, and Monsieur de Vissery’s petition to keep the lightning rod was denied. Two days later, he appealed to the Artois Council, after agreeing in the interval to dismantle the apparatus so distressing to the population. In fact, he did nothing more than remove the sword blade that was the most visible part and substitute a shorter blade. And, so that no one should see even this concession as a signifying abasement of the ruling class symbolized by the sword, Vissery confided to his lawyer, This is how to deal with the ignorant masses.⁶

Figure 1. Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with an electric kite, 1752. Engraving. Collection Viollet.

Monsieur de Vissery entrusted the affair to Antoine-Joseph Buissart,⁷ then a member of the Arras and Dijon Academies, who regularly contributed to the Journal de Physique. Buissart took the affair to heart, and interminable consultations took place throughout France. The man slowest to answer Buissart’s repeated requests for scientific data was Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, who eventually let it be known that, speaking in his capacity as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, he considered the best defense to be a detailed and documented report containing all the scientific arguments in favor of the lightning rod. Buissart went to work and published his report in 1782. The Appeal reached the Council of Artois in May of 1783, when Buissart gave Maximilien Robespierre, then a very young lawyer, the task of representing to the Court the combined interest of science and Monsieur de Vissery.

The trial, which aroused passing but intense interest, is revealing not only because it brought together, some years before the Revolution, the names of Marat, Condorcet, Franklin, and Robespierre, but also because it sparked a debate on Enlightenment and religion, science and human progress, that was to continue until Robespierre’s death, near the close of the Revolution, in July 1794.⁸

The party fiercely opposed to the lightning rod invoked the authority of two learned men, one of whom was none other than Jean-Paul Marat, the future Ami du peuple. The Abbé Bertholon, himself an eminent physicist, wrote Buissart that Marat was a crazy man who thought he could become famous by attacking great men and producing paradoxes that seduced no one. But, undeterred by critics, Marat in his Recherches physiques sur l’électricité had noted: It is obvious that the fluid accumulated in clouds is beyond the sphere of attraction of the highest conductor. He also enumerated eleven cases of conductors blasted by lightning.⁹

In response, Robespierre made two speeches that took their scientific content, their examples, and a part of their logic from the work to which Buissart had devoted two years. Yet the final formulation is that of the young lawyer who published his two discourses under the title Arguments for the Sieur de Vissery de Bois-Valé, appealing a judgement of the magistrates of Saint-Omer, who had ordered that a lightning rod erected on his house be destroyed.¹⁰ Robespierre’s argument was persuasive; the Council of Artois found in favor of his client, Monsieur de Vissery. Emboldened by this success, Robespierre sent a copy of his argument to Franklin himself, along with a letter that, although often quoted, deserves another hearing. It is dated 1 October 1783, four months after its author’s striking success. Robespierre wrote: