amounts to the same thing.’ The philosophes, on this view, were all monks: they had
neither affections, nor fathers, nor children.
As previously observed, in the ideas of Antoine de Rivarol (and, as we now see, of
his less famous brother) can be distinguished prefigurations of what were to become
central themes raised by theorists of counter-revolution in France from the early
1790s onwards. From this perspective, there was much to be admired in Burke’s
account of the Revolution. Above all, he had perceived the frightening originality of
the events that were unfolding and, from the outset, had seen the spirit of
innovation and of philosophy that would drive the Revolution forward towards
its cataclysmic and destructive conclusion.
Yet, for all the popularity and commercial success of Burke’s account, there were
limits to the admiration felt by the French counter-revolutionaries for Burke, limits
that were to become most obvious in the writings of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de
Bonald. Despite their agreement on the pernicious influence of the atheistic and
fanatical philosophe sect, they did not share Burke’s appreciation of traditional
English liberties nor his attachment to representative institutions. Least of all
were they prepared to accept the exemplary character and role that Burke attributed
to English history. This position was to be held by France as the eldest daughter of
the Church. So Burke was largely to fade from view in subsequent counter-
revolutionary histories. Indeed, Burke was to be absent from most French histories
of the Revolution written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 The prevail-
ing view was simply that Burke had misunderstood the nature of the French
Revolution. Jules Michelet, for example, referred to ‘his infamous book, wild
with rage, full of lies and cheap insults’.5 Although more measured in tone, Alexis
de Tocqueville was of a similar opinion. Burke, he believed, had been mesmerized
by events and, as a consequence, had failed to see what was before his very eyes. The
monarchy had sealed its own fate. Thus, Burke’s unapologetic defence of the old
order, of its institutions and its manners, could have no purchase upon a French
society long accustomed to the uniformity and administrative centralization of the
absolute monarchy.6
Nevertheless, Burke himself (and not without good cause) clearly felt that his
views chimed with those of some of the Revolution’s very first opponents in France.
In May 1797, for example, he wrote a short letter to the exiled Abbé Augustin
4 Furet, ‘Burke ou la fin d’une seule histoire de l’Europe’, in Furet, La Révolution française (2007),
902.
5 Histoire de la Révolution française (1979), i. 341–2.
6 See Robert T. Gannett, jun., Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and his Sources for the Old Regime
and the Revolution (Chicago, 2003), 57–77.
240
History, Revolution, and Terror
Barruel.7 ‘I cannot easily express to you’, Burke commented, ‘how much I am
instructed and delighted by the first Volume of your History of Jacobinism. The
whole of the wonderful narrative is supported by documents and proofs with
the most juridical regularity and exactness.’ It was admirable in every way, Burke
continued, and, to the extent that he could judge French style, ‘the language is of the
first water’. He also testified from personal experience to the veracity of Barruel’s
argument, reporting that he had known ‘five of your principal conspirators’.
Born in 1741, Barruel was a Jesuit priest and was now serving as chaplain to the
Princess de Conti in England. He had left France in 1792, shortly before the
September massacres, having denounced the Revolution as early as 1789 in a text
entitled Le Patriote véridique, ou Discours sur les vrais causes de la Révolution actuelle.
Whilst in England he had collected material for his Histoire du clergé pendant la
Révolution française, and there attacked the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as
being blasphemous and heretical and as a prelude to the ‘persecution, massacres and
deportation of the French clergy’. In both works could be discerned the lineaments
of an explanation of the Revolution which he was to develop at greater length in the
book referred to by Burke, his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme:8 the
Revolution was the product of a conspiracy led by the philosophes against both
throne and altar.9
The opening paragraphs clearly stated Barruel’s thesis and purpose. It was an
error, he contended, to believe that the Revolution was the result of a set of
unforeseen and unpredictable circumstances. Rather, ‘supported by facts and
armed with proofs’, he believed that it could be shown that ‘everything in this
French Revolution, including its most heinous crimes, was planned, premeditated,
coordinated, resolved, decided upon. Everything was the result of the darkest
villainy, since everything had been prepared and led by men who for long had
hatched conspiracies in secret societies and who knew how to choose and hasten
those moments most propitious for plots’.10 Circumstances had provided a pretext,
as ‘the great cause’ of the Revolution, of its crimes and atrocities, was to be found in
‘plots hatched well beforehand’. Barruel’s intention, therefore, was to unmask this
conspiracy. In broad outline, he believed that it had come in three forms. First, long
before the Revolution, had been the conspiracy of the philosophers against God
and against Christianity in all its forms. It had been a conspiracy led by the ‘sophists
of unbelief and impiety’. Next had come a conspiracy led by ‘the sophists of
rebellion’ directed against all kings. Finally, there had emerged a conspiracy of
anarchy combined against all religion and all government, against society, and
against property. It was, Barruel concluded, ‘this coalition of the adepts of impiety,
7 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. R. B. McDowell and John A. Woods (Cambridge,
1970), ix. 319–20.
8 Barruel’s text was originally publ. in London and Hamburg; references are to the 1973 edn.,
2 vols.
9 See e.g. Le Patriote véridique (1789), 20–1 and Histoire du clergé (London, 1793), 3. For a
refutation of Barruel’s position see J. J. Mounier, De l’Influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux Francs-
maçons et aux Illuminés sur la Révolution de France (Tubingen, 1801).
10 Barruel, Mémoires, i. 42.
History, Revolution, and Terror
241
of the adepts of rebellion, of the adepts of anarchy, which had formed the Jacobin
clubs’.11
The details of Barruel’s account of this philosophical conspiracy are intriguing.
For the philosophes to attain their ends, it had been necessary for public opinion to
be corrupted: only then could the altar fall beneath the axe. This had been achieved
in a series of stages. It began with ‘the most infallible of means’: the Encyclopédie.
Then came the eradication of the Jesuits and, after this, of all religious orders. There
next emerged ‘Voltaire’s colony’, the group of like-minded people who had con-
gregated around Voltaire in exile. More influenti
al still had been the corruption of
France’s literary establishment, paving the way for a ‘general apostasy’. This was
followed by a ‘flood of anti-Christian books’ and the successful attempt to hide the
conspiracy in the ‘name of toleration’. Liberty of the press, Barruel contended, was
especially dangerous in France, as even the simplest bourgeois wished to have his
library. In consequence there appeared a new generation equipped only to mouth
the platitudes of Voltaire and Rousseau and ready to articulate their enthusiasm for
revolution. ‘Men of letters without religion’, Barruel observed, ‘are the most
depraved and dangerous group of citizens.’12
To impiety towards religion was adjoined the spirit of rebellion towards the king.
Here, somewhat unusually, Barruel laid much of the blame at the feet of Mon-
tesquieu. It had been Montesquieu who had taught the French that the guiding
principle of republics was virtue and that monarchies were despotic and arbitrary.
Similarly, he had encouraged the French to admire the constitution of England and
to see France’s own government as a ‘painful and shameful slavery’. His greatest
error, however, was to fail to see that, if the principle of representation could lead in
one country to liberty, in another—as the calling of the Estates-General had
demonstrated—it could produce anarchy and despotism. ‘It is to Montesquieu’,
Barruel concluded, ‘that the French owe the entire system based upon the necessity
of dividing up the sceptre of the king, of making the monarch dependent upon the
multitude’ and therefore of turning Louis XVI into ‘un roi de théâtre’. Rousseau, by
doing away with Montesquieu’s aristocratic intermediaries and by proclaiming the
people to be both sovereign and infallible, had only completed the process,
breaking ‘absolutely’ the sceptre of kings, nobles, and the rich.13 If, Barruel
believed, the consequences of these doctrines were obvious to anyone who took
the trouble to look, it had taken the conspiracy of the philosophes and their followers
to put them into practice.
The final, key ingredient of Barruel’s account focused upon the Freemasons, the
friends and allies of the philosophical sect. With the Revolution of 1789, the
Freemasons had poured out of their lodges and into the revolutionary sections
and committees, determined to deliver the world from the ‘twin plagues’ of
religious credulity and political tyranny. Yet, it had taken the emergence of the
Jacobins—‘this monstrous association’ always insatiable for blood—to bring the
conspiracy to its conclusion and to proclaim its zeal to change the face of the entire
11 Ibid. 47.
12 Ibid. 217.
13 In Histoire du clergé, 139, Barruel refers to Rousseau as ‘the Hercules of the sophists’.
242
History, Revolution, and Terror
universe. From this, Barruel believed, the following lesson should be learnt: the
French Revolution was nothing but the product of a ‘fixed, steadfast, and unshak-
able determination to everywhere overturn altar, throne, and society’.14
A second, important theme underpinned Barruel’s account. Even as the Revolu-
tion got under way there were those prepared to see France’s misfortunes as the
work of a vengeful God and as the punishment of a sinful people.15 Barruel shared
this providential perspective. For all that he recounted in vivid detail the murder
and imprisonment of refractory priests, he readily recognized that the Church had
become subject to abuse and corruption16 and that it had shown itself incapable of
preventing the decline of public morals and of turning back the tide of impious
philosophy. The Church too had its traitors, idlers, intriguers, and hypocrites, and
for this France was being punished by an angry God. Deployed by Barruel (and
others) as a prophetic warning of the calamities to come if France continued her
sinful ways, divine retribution came subsequently to occupy a central place in
explanations of the terrible events that had taken place.
No one gave clearer voice to this fundamental part of the rhetoric of counter-
revolution than Joseph de Maistre. He was born in 1753 in Savoy, then part of the
kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. Despite professing a devout Catholic faith, for
many years he was a Freemason and initially welcomed the Revolution in France as
a partisan of moderate reform. He supported the campaign for the calling of the
Estates-General but from the summer of 1789 came to have growing doubts about
the course taken by events in what he described as the ‘warm mud’ of Paris.
Certainly, the invasion (and subsequent annexation) of Savoy by France in Sep-
tember 1792 convinced him of the need to rally to the royalist cause and it was
from his exile in Switzerland that, with consummate rigour, he began to articulate
the principles of monarchical and religious restoration. Nevertheless, in his first
published writings he did not explore the possibilities of a providential explanation
of the Revolution. In his Lettres d’un royaliste savoisien à ses compatriots,17 for
example, he was content to suggest that the Revolution was not only ‘a unique
event’ but that it was a consequence of the ‘rottenness’ of the monarchy and a
mistaken ‘universal enchantment’ with the possibility of the regeneration of society.
However, by the time Maistre published Considérations sur la France in 1797, he
made no attempt to explain the Revolution in terms of political, social, or economic
causes. ‘Never’, he averred, ‘has the Divinity shown itself so clearly in any human
event.’18 The moral to be learnt was a simple one: since France had ‘used her
influence to contradict her vocation and to demoralize Europe, we should not be
surprised if she is brought back to her mission by terrible means’.19
14 Barruel, Mémoires, ii. 526.
15 Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the
Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 56–8.
16 See Barruel, Le Patriote véridique, 37–89.
17 (Lyons and Paris, 1872): 1st publ. in 1793.
18 Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1980), 34.
19 Ibid.
History, Revolution, and Terror
243
The opening sentence proclaimed a clear doctrine of political theodicy. ‘We are
all’, Maistre announced, ‘attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple
chain which restrains us without enslaving us.’20 Men acted voluntarily and
necessarily at the same time and nothing they did could disturb the ‘general
plans’ of a God whose power was exercised effortlessly and irresistibly. Thus the
most striking thing about the Revolution was that it was not men who led the
Revolution but ‘the Revolution that uses men’. Each of the ‘rascals’ and ‘detestable
tyrants’ who sought to direct its path were merely its ‘simple instruments’, men
swept to power by what Maistre called the ‘revolutionary chariot’, only to be
discarded ‘ignobly’ once they had ‘completed the measure of crime necessary to
that phase of the Revolution’. Remarkably, Maistre extended this argument even to
include the Jacobins, who alone had been able
to save France from dismemberment
and annihilation by her enemies. ‘All life, all wealth, all power’, Maistre exclaimed,
‘was in the hands of the revolutionary authority, and this monstrous power, drunk
with blood and success, the most frightful phenomenon that has ever been seen and
the like of which will never be seen again, was both a horrible punishment for the
French and the sole means of saving France.’21
At no point did Maistre seek to diminish the extent of the sacrificial punishment
that would be entailed by ‘this horrible effusion of human blood’. All those who
willed the Revolution would justly become its victims and few were those who had
not ‘willed all the follies, all the injustices, all the outrages that led up to the
catastrophe [of Louis XVI’s execution] of 21 January [1793]’.22 Never before had
so many people shared in such a sinful deed and each drop of blood would be repaid
in torrents. ‘Perhaps four million Frenchmen’, Maistre wrote, ‘will pay with their
heads for this great national crime of an anti-religious and anti-social insurrection
crowned by a regicide.’23 Few would be innocent victims.
Despite its ‘satanic’ and ‘diabolical’ character, order could be discerned in the
disorder of the Revolution. With France’s enemies defeated and peace returned, the
monarchy would be restored and the king would reascend to his throne ‘with all his
pomp and power’. Purified by the travails of injustice and tyranny, the clergy would
be regenerated and freed from the temptations of luxury and moral laxity. More-
over, it was with absolute certainty that Maistre asserted that the Republic could
not last, as divine sanction alone could establish durable institutions. Thus, if
France had nothing to fear from counter-revolution—the king’s most pressing
interest would be to ‘unite justice and mercy’—so also it was inevitable, as ‘all the
monsters born of the Revolution have, apparently, laboured only for the monar-
chy’.24 Maistre’s view, therefore, was that the Revolution was ‘one of the most
astonishing spectacles that humanity has ever seen’. Through it would be secured
the redemption not only of France but of European civilization more generally.
Legitimist opinion was never in total agreement about the causes and character
Revolution and the Republic Page 51
