Europe: A History (143 page)

In Poland-Lithuania, events followed the same progression from constitutional reform to revolutionary terrorism. In the Constitution of 3 May 1791, in one short document of eleven clauses, all the obvious abuses of the old system, including the
liberum veto
, were abolished. The
Rzeczpospolita oboyga narodów
, the ‘commonwealth of two nations’ was established as a modern constitutional state. The monarchy was declared hereditary (though the King was an ageing bachelor). The bourgeoisie was admitted to the franchise previously limited to the nobility. The peasants were brought within the realm of public law, from which they had been excluded. Here was the first concrete success of peaceful reform, the first constitution of its type in Europe, formulated, passed, and published four months before its counterpart in France. It was the sort of advance which liberal reformers had been hoping for far and wide. In London, the enthusiasm of Edmund Burke knew no bounds. The Polish Constitution of Third May, Burke wrote ‘is probably the most pure … public good which has ever been conferred on mankind’:

The means were as striking to the imagination as satisfactory to the reason, and as soothing to the moral sentiments … Everything was kept in its place and order, but… everything was bettered. To add to this unheard-of conjunction of wisdom and fortune, this happy wonder, not one drop of blood was spilled, no treachery, no outrage … Happy people if they know how to proceed as they have begun.
²⁷

Burke’s welcome for the ‘Polish Revolution’ ought to be as well known as his denunciation of events in France. In Holland, the Leyden Gazette wrote: ‘If there are miracles in this century, one has happened in Poland.’

The ‘happy wonder’ lasted for little more than a year. Russia was not prepared to tolerate a constitutional, let alone an independent, Poland on its doorstep. Just as Poland-Lithuania experienced the first round of revolutionary reform, it was also due to experience the first round of revolutionary war. As in France, the Polish reformers were driven from moderation to desperation. After the Constitution of 1791 was suppressed by Russian intervention and the Second Partition (see below), the national rising of 1794 took the field with still more radical proposals, only to see itself disintegrate amidst violence and terror. In France the revolutionary process was contained by its own internal reactions; in Poland it was destroyed by foreign force.

In the second
phase, 1794–1804
, which begins with Thermidor II, the French Revolution visibly halted in its tracks—to take breath and to take stock. Although executive instability continued, the blood-lust stopped. So, too, did the mania for legislation. (The National Convention passed 11,250 decrees in just over three years.) The revolutionaries had found a talent for war, and were absorbed in fighting their enemies. A series of political expedients were tried by politicians united only by the need to maintain order and to stem excess. After Robespierre’s fall the Thermidorians ruled for 16 months. In November 1795, thanks to yet another constitution and yet another, two-tier, assembly, a five-man executive ‘Directory’ came into being. In September 1797 (18 Fructidor V), the Directors muzzled the assembly. In November 1799, thanks to the
coup d’état
of 18 Brumaire VIII by the Directory’s most successful general, a three-man ‘Consulate’ was instituted, and confirmed by nation-wide plebiscite. In May 1802 the most successful general raised himself to the status of first Consul for life; in May 1804, to that of Emperor.

In the third, imperial phase, 1804–15
, the Revolution found stability by locking itself to the cult of that general, the Empire’s creator, Napoleon Bonaparte. The doubts and divisions which still remained in France were submerged under the titanic operations of his mission to conquer the world. Bonapartism turned revolutionary war and conquest into ends in themselves, and military requirements into an absolute priority. A pseudo-monarchy headed pseudo-democratic institutions; and an efficient centralized administration ran on a strange cocktail of legislative leftovers and bold innovation. Success or failure was handed to the gods of the battlefield. ‘Success’, said Napoleon, ‘is the greatest orator in the world.’

Periodization arranged according to executive authority gives a slightly different result. In that case the phase of constitutional monarchy lasts from June 1789 to September 1792; the ‘first Republic’ from 1792 to November 1799; the dictatorship of Napoleon from ‘18 Brumaire’ to 1815 (see Appendix III, pp. 1286–7).
The full range of revolutionary opinion became apparent in the early 1790s through the debates of the National Assembly and through the formation of political clubs.

The original constitutionalists, led by Count Honoré de Mirabeau (1749–91) and other liberal nobles such as General Lafayette, were responsible for the abolition of the absolute monarchy and of noble and clerical privilege. By the time of Mirabeau’s (natural) death in April 1791, they were becoming a hard-pressed minority. They met in the club of the
Feuillants
, and after the King’s flight to Varennes were left with the impossible task of delaying the demise of an unpopular monarchy. At one point Mirabeau had the idea of dedicating a monument to Louis XVI, the ‘founder of French liberty’.

The Girondins took their name from a group of deputies from Bordeaux, capital of the Gironde, headed by the eloquent lawyer Pierre Vergniaud (1753–93), who came together in the Legislative Assembly. They were the centrists of the early years, willing to co-operate with the King’s government but increasingly giving vent to democratic and republican sentiments. Their activities revolved round the salon of Mme Roland, and their influence reached its height in 1792, when they ran the King’s last government and pioneered the transition to the Republic.

The Jacobins, in contrast,
la Société des Amis de la Liberté et l’Égalité
, were advocates of unlimited democracy, of revolutionary dictatorship and violence. They took their name from the site of their Club in a former Dominican convent on the Rue Saint-Honoré. (The Dominicans of Paris were known as ‘Jacobins’ because of their earlier residence on the Rue Saint-Jacques.) They formed a tiny, iron-hard clique—perhaps 3,000 persons who perfected the art of gripping the throats of 20 million. Their members ranged from the Prince de Broglie and a couple of dukes—the Duke d’Aiguillon and the young Due de Chartres (the future King, Louis-Philippe)—to the rough-hewn Breton peasant, ‘Père’ Gérard. Gérard once told them, ‘I had thought myself in Heaven among you, if there were not so many lawyers.’ Their leaders included Georges Danton (1759–94), whom Carlyle called ‘a Man from the great fire-bosom of Nature herself’, Camille Desmoulins (1760–94), a firebrand journalist, who died beside him, Jean Marat (1743–93), the ‘sick physician’, editor of L’Ami
du Peuple
, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve (1756–94), sometime Mayor of Paris, Antoine Saint-Just (1767–94), known as ‘the Archangel of the Terror’ and as ‘St John’ for his servility towards Robespierre, and Robespierre himself.

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–94), the severe, the puritanical, the ‘incorruptible advocate of Arras’, was said to have refused a career as a judge before the Revolution rather than condemn a man to death. His power and influence assumed legendary proportions during the second Committee of Public Safety. He was the hero of the Paris mob, the devil incarnate to his opponents.

The Jacobins first surfaced in 1791, through the King’s risky
politique du pire
, based on the idea of promoting his wildest opponents in the hope of taming the rest. After Pétion was appointed Mayor of Paris with the King’s approval, they took an unshakeable hold on the capital’s municipal government, the Commune.
Thereafter, having systematically eliminated their rivals and tamed the Convention, they decimated their own ranks until Robespierre alone remained alive. Danton’s watchword was ‘De l’audace, encore de Paudace, toujours de l’au-dace’ Saint-Just, attacking the monarchy, declared, ‘One cannot reign innocently.’ In proposing the redistribution of his enemies’ wealth, he said: ‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe.’ Robespierre once asked the Convention, ‘Citoyens, voulez-vous une Révolution sans révolution?’ (Citizens, do you want a Revolution without revolution?) The associated Club of the Cordeliers,
la Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen
, whose membership overlapped with the Jacobins, met in a former Franciscan monastery in the Cordelier district of Paris. Their later leaders, the true
enragés
like J. R. Hébert (1757–94), were marked out for their militant atheism and the cult of reason. Hébert was executed on Robespierre’s orders for ‘extremism’,
[GAUCHE]

If most of the Jacobins were professional lawyers and journalists, the majority of their active supporters were drawn from the anonymous proletarians of the Paris suburbs. These sansculottes contained elements that were still more radical than any of the groups and individuals that actually exercised power. They numbered among them Europe’s very first communists, socialists, feminists. Organized in meeting-houses in each of the Paris ‘sections’, obscure formations such as the
Société Patriotique de la Section du Luxembourg
or the
Société Fraternelle des Deux Sexes du Panthéon-Français
exercised an influence that has not always been properly assessed. Indeed, in terms of revolutionary motive power they may well have been more effective than the bourgeois who are usually given the credit. They supplied many of the revolutionary commissars of the Jacobin period. They forged a lasting tradition which contested established authority in each of the ‘revolutions’ of the nineteenth century.
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Opposition to the Revolution came in many forms and from all quarters. It can be classified as political, social, ideological, and regional. Initially it focused on the royal court, where the ‘ultras’ led by the Count of Provence (later Louis XVIII) aimed to restore the status quo ante. They were joined by the majority of dispossessed nobles, and by the formidable array of
émigrés
, high and low. They opposed not only the republicans and Jacobins but also the constitutionalists: the court’s contempt for General Lafayette, for example, knew no bounds. After 1790, when forbidden by the Pope to swear the oath of loyalty to the civil establishment, the clergy were forced either to submit or to defy. After 1792, when the Revolution took an atheistic and not merely an anticlerical turn, all Roman Catholics, and hence the great majority of the population, stood to be offended. This major source of counter-revolutionary feelings remained active until Bonaparte’s Concordat with the Papacy in 1801. The peasant masses, who were given their freedom in 1789, were long thought to be among the main beneficiaries of revolution. It is now generally recognized, however, that a gulf of non-comprehension separated the peasant ethos from that of the revolutionary leaders in Paris. The
peasantry soon turned against the oppressions of a republican regime which many thought worse than its predecessors.