Divine Fury (25 page)

Or so it was claimed. Franklin’s actual role in precipitating the French Revolution was minimal, at best, and the same might even be said of his role in the American Revolution. “He has done very little,” John Adams observed dryly in a diary entry of 1779, lamenting the fact that “it is universally believed in France, England, and all Europe that [Franklin’s] electric wand has accomplished all this [American] revolution” on his own. Franklin was a “great genius,” Adams conceded, a fine philosopher, a man of science, a man of affairs. But of the Europeans’ belief, “nothing” could be more “groundless.”
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Colored by envy and exaggerated by pique, Adams’s remarks nonetheless capture nicely an evolving myth that was of a piece with the evolving cult of genius: that the single individual could make history on his own. Once, not long before, the gods and Fate had been held to rule the world. And in the future, complex social forces and iron laws would be invoked to replace God’s providence. But in Europe, at the time of the French Revolution and for many decades thereafter, history was well imagined as the work of great men. Even in a country whose people stormed the Bastille en masse and marched to Versailles to remove the king and queen, the many revered the one.

Such reverence gave new impetus to the cult of genius that had developed in Europe for close to a century, allowing it to burst forth in spectacular new ways. The scale of the revolutionary celebrations was impressive, their claims about genius bold. And in their repeated insistence that exceptional individuals were the true motors of history, who had ushered in the glorious dawn of 1789, the revolutionaries worked to drown out the doubts of skeptics like Adams. Consolidating a myth of the genius’s political power that even their opponents would come
to share, the revolutionaries elaborated a belief that would long outlive them. The genius could be a maker of revolutions, a leader of the people, a revolutionary man.

The timing of Franklin’s death, in this respect, was propitious, coinciding not only with an amenable theory of history, but also with the emergence in France of a revolutionary cult of
grands hommes
(great men), men who were singled out for their service to humanity in preparing the glorious dawn of 1789. “Genius” and
grand homme
were not, strictly speaking, synonymous terms, but genius’s presence amid the pantheon of greats was conspicuous all the same. Both French and foreign, the luminaries included Voltaire, Franklin’s friend, that “immortal Genius, who prepared the Revolution in advance,” as the French journal the
Mercure de France
proudly declared in 1790. There was Mirabeau, another of Franklin’s acquaintances, the orator, writer, and statesman of genius, who led the Revolution in its early days. And there was the “divine” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Franklin’s admirer, though the two never met, who was hailed as both an architect of the Revolution and an archetype of genius. In temperament and belief, the three men could not have been more different, but they were frequently represented together with their American counterpart in the French Revolution’s early years, reconciled in print and harmonized in death. Voltaire, Mirabeau, and Rousseau shared a common fate: each was interred by the revolutionaries in the Panthéon in Paris, the hallowed resting place of the Revolution’s great men.
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Formerly the Church of Saint Geneviève, built by Louis XV to house the relics of his patron saint, the sprawling neoclassical edifice was transformed by the revolutionaries in 1791 to honor a different kind of protector. Its namesake was the Pantheon of Rome, completed during the reign of Augustus as an offering to the immortal gods. But those who were interred in the temple of the French Revolution would be men, great men, to displace the saints and guardians of old. Mirabeau went first in the spring of 1791, and he was followed shortly thereafter by Voltaire. The
philosophe
’s heart and brain had been removed at his death in 1778 and were lovingly preserved apart. But Voltaire’s other relics lay at his estate near Geneva. They were disinterred and carried back to Paris in a procession that self-consciously imitated the translation of a saint. No miracles were reported, and no demons fled screaming from their hosts, though the genius was accompanied by his
genius
along the way. There could be no better symbol of the Revolution’s transfer of sacrality and of its consecration of a new type of man. Part hero, part
grand homme
, part guardian, part saint, the genius was
a composite of the old and a creation of the new who would bear the weight of the nation on his remains. A patron of the fatherland, he was also a father of humanity who reflected the aspirations of men and women far beyond France, reconciling the universal and the particular. As the mathematician-cum-politician Condorcet observed, in seeking to secure a place for another genius—Descartes—in the Panthéon’s hallowed ground, the man who had dispelled the
genii
had not only “brought philosophy back to reason,” liberating the human mind, but also prepared “the eternal destruction of political oppression.” He was, as Condorcet’s friend d’Alembert declared, among the “small number of great geniuses whose works have helped spread enlightenment among men.”
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In attributing such power to the thought and action of extraordinary individuals, Condorcet and his contemporaries necessarily built upon articles of faith put forth by commentators in the preceding decades. But whereas Chamfort had maintained wishfully in the 1760s that geniuses were “masters of humanity” who imposed their sovereignty on the people, revolutionaries found evidence for that assertion all around them. Were not the true fathers of the Revolution men like Franklin, Descartes, Rousseau, and Voltaire? The revolutionary upheaval was itself an illustration of a point made by the writer Antoine-Léonard Thomas before the Académie Française in 1767. “The man of genius,” he declared, “has become the arbiter of the thoughts, of the opinions, and of the prejudices of the public.”
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Yet if the Revolution’s cult of genius was in this respect a natural continuation of the cult that had flourished in the Old Regime, it was also a new departure, in large part because the open attack on the church and the monarchy that accompanied it removed barriers to its full and free expression. Without priests to frown at excessive claims and warn of the dangers of blasphemy, without kings to trumpet their sovereignty and to posture as God’s representatives on earth, geniuses could be hailed like never before. The contrasts are revealing. In the Old Regime, Voltaire had been denied a Christian burial; in the Revolution, he was made a saint in a church transformed. In the Old Regime, time was punctuated by the rhythms of the Christian calendar and the commemoration of its martyrs, saints, and kings. In the Revolution, men made haste to conceive time as marked solely by the interventions of human beings. An early revolutionary almanac reflected this change well, proposing to replace the saints of the liturgical year with “universal” figures, such as Leonardo, Descartes, Racine, Molière, and Voltaire. In 1793, when the revolutionaries abolished the Christian calendar
altogether, they vowed to devote a day at the end of the revolutionary year to a “festival of the genius” (
fête du génie
). The
fête du génie
—one of five supplementary holidays established to conclude the revolutionary calendar—would recognize those who had benefited the nation. As the former actor Fabre d’Églantine explained in submitting the proposal to the revolutionary legislature, the National Convention, the “festival of the genius” would honor the “most precious and lofty attribute of humanity—intelligence—which sets us apart from the rest of creation.” The “greatest conceptions, and those most useful to the nation,” would be celebrated on this day, along with “all that relates to invention or the creative operations of the human mind,” whether in “the arts, sciences, trades, or in legislative, philosophic, or moral matters.” The proposal passed, though the
fête du génie
seems not to have been celebrated amid the turmoil of war and bloody factional strife.
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The genius did not lack for honors or indemnities, however. While defending legislation designed to secure the intellectual property of authors, the revolutionary deputy Joseph Lakanal proclaimed “the declaration of the rights of genius.” And in a substitution that is wonderfully symbolic of the genius’s newly exalted status, “Genius” took the place of kings on revolutionary playing cards, and “Genius” and the “genius of France” graced revolutionary coins, just as the
genius
of the emperors had once sealed the specie of Rome. Symbolically, the genius was usurping the place of sovereigns and claiming the right of kings.
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That belief, that myth—whether celebrated in the Panthéon or bemoaned in counterrevolutionary phrases, such as “the Revolution is the fault of Voltaire”—highlights a related way in which the revolutionary experience gave a new inflection to the cult of genius. By linking geniuses emphatically to politics and political change, the revolutionaries highlighted the capacity of extraordinary individuals not just to understand the world, but to change it. Only with the Revolution could a myth of revolutionary genius emerge, and with the propagation of that myth was born a possibility, still fledgling, but soon to be fulfilled: that genius might be used as the
basis
of political power, celebrated not only in death but in life, employed to justify an extraordinary privilege and license. The very possibility raised a question: What was the place of the genius in a free nation? To a regime that had declared liberty, equality, and fraternity as its founding ideals, it was not an idle concern.

In the early, heady days of the Revolution, the answer to the question seemed straightforward enough. “Nature has formed an intimate union between liberty and genius,” the playwright, poet, and politician Marie-Joseph Chénier observed in his report recommending the transfer
of Descartes’s remains to the Panthéon. In Chénier’s view, Descartes’s exile and death in Sweden was a measure of the despotism of the Old Regime, a failure of recognition that he would later describe as a “crime against genius” requiring expiation and atonement. It was only natural to Chénier that a man whose “very existence marked out an extraordinary epoch in the history of the genius of men” should be honored as a friend of revolutions. Genius and liberty were one. The connection had long been implicit in the understanding of genius as a force that refused to bow to convention, to slavishly acquiesce to established rules, and already in the early eighteenth century, English commentators were making the connection explicit. Enlisting Longinus as an apologist for the Glorious Revolution that overthrew the despotism of the Stuarts in 1688, they cited with relish a line that the ancient himself had implied was already well established—the view that “democracy is the nurse-maid of genius,” and that freedom alone “has the power to foster noble minds.” Later in the century, the French
Encyclopédie
agreed, observing in its article on “genius” (
génie
) that “rules and laws of taste will only be obstacles to genius,” which “breaks them to steal from the sublime.” Before the sublime spectacle of the French Revolution, it was easy enough to conflate aesthetics and politics, envisioning genius as a revolutionary force for freedom that was capable of throwing off the shackles of tired formula and overturning arbitrary laws.
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But genius was not only a liberator and breaker of rules, genius was also a legislator. As Kant famously claimed in the
Critique of Judgment
, it “gives the rule to art.” To conflate aesthetics and politics once again, was it not evident that genius might lay down the law? Just like the sublime force that moved it, genius could induce the spirit of liberty or impose the awe of authority, eliciting reverence, terror, and the fear of death. And, as Diderot had speculated, giving new articulation to a venerable concern, duplicity, domination, evil, and crime might be the genius’s lot. Seen in this light, the “intimate union” between liberty and genius was not so clear. When it was revealed, after his remains had been safely laid to rest in the Panthéon, that Mirabeau was in truth a traitor who had entered into secret negotiations with the king, such thoughts were no longer mere conjecture. Mirabeau’s spirit was exorcised and his relics were removed, translated to a cemetery for criminals. The example of the fallen saint prompted suspicion and fear: Was not genius always a temptation? And what prevented those who possessed it from abusing its power? As none other than Maximilien Robespierre pointed out in the National Convention in answer to Fabre d’Églantine’s proposal to institute a festival of the genius as the
first
of the Revolution’s supplementary
holidays, “Caesar was a man of genius,” but “Caesar was nothing but a tyrant.” Cato, by contrast, possessed virtue, and Cato was of “greater worth than Caesar.” Genius was no guarantee of justice or right conduct, Robespierre made clear, and for that reason, a “day of virtue should take precedence over the festival of the genius.”
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Robespierre’s motion passed, and though it proved in the end to be moot, it did succeed in registering a concern about the place of genius in a republic, raising the specter of what one legislator described in the ensuing debates as an “aristocracy of the genius” (
l’aristocratie du génie
). Some might claim wishfully that “true genius” was always of the people. But those who sided with Robespierre feared otherwise, seeing in the consecration of a hierarchy of the intellect the prospect of a dangerous new form of inequality. At a moment when France had abolished the aristocracy of blood, would republicans and democrats really genuflect before a natural force that set men so dramatically apart? The question was pointed, and it forced other republicans to confront it, too. Condorcet, for one, took the question seriously. And though he could not dispense altogether with a belief that nature distributed her talents in unequal parcels, he nonetheless hewed much closer to the position of the eighteenth-century
philosophes
Helvétius, Turgot, and Condillac in his attempt to overcome the apparent conflict between genius and equality. Seeing in education the best means to mitigate natural difference, he looked forward to a day in the future when the “space that separates the two extremes of genius and stupidity” would be effaced by equal access to knowledge and the means to its cultivation. In the meantime, a genius like Descartes or Newton served as a beacon and an image of what all men—and in Condorcet’s advanced opinion, all women, too—might one day strive to become.
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