wished to stop the Revolution. It became reactionary. It pursued its particular
interest rather than the general interest. It placed egoism and ‘the system of
110 Buchez and Roux were extremely hostile to Protestantism, regarding it as entirely opposed to the
spirit of the Revolution. Considerable venom was directed against the Protestant Guizot. They were
similarly hostile to the philosophy associated with Victor Cousin and Eclecticism. The Girondins were
also tarred with the brush of Eclecticism: Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, xxviii, pp. v–xv.
111 Ibid. ii, p. v.
112 Ibid. i. 1.
113 Ibid. 5.
114 Ibid. ii, p. ii.
History, Revolution, and Terror
263
individualism’ before the happiness of future generations. This was no more evident
than in the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. This ‘negative’
document placed individual rights before duties and imagined that the whole nation
was composed of property owners. It was similarly evident in the distinction
established between ‘passive’ and ‘active’ citizens. The members of the National
Assembly believed that the best government was an ‘impassive spectator’ protecting
individual interests. They spoke only of man and never of France or the nation. They
saw the Revolution as an ‘obstacle’ and acted without any sense of the future.
Accordingly, the bourgeoisie made every effort to contain popular discontent. All
the later misfortunes of the Revolution, Buchez and Roux argued, had their origin in
the errors of this assembly.115
It followed that the impetus and initiative driving the Revolution forward had
come not from the National Assembly but from the masses.116 It was among the
masses that was to be found ‘certainty in the fraternity of men’. It was here that lay
the ‘true doctrine’ of the Revolution, here that the obligations of duty preceded the
rights of men, here that was displayed a spontaneous love of the homeland. In
contrast to the Protestant and bourgeois doctrine of the sovereignty of individual
reason, it was here too that the doctrines of the sovereignty of the people and of
universal fraternity were found. The people did not calculate their interest. They
had acted, and in so doing they had saved France.
From this perspective, terror could be described as ‘an exceptional means,
invoked in certain circumstances against a defined enemy’ and as such could be
justified according to the end pursued. Faced with ‘evil’ and ‘anti-social interests’, it
was at times ‘obligatory’.117 Buchez and Roux thus displayed no sympathy towards
the Girondins, as not the least of their faults had been a failure properly to organize
the defence of France.118 But their antipathy towards Brissot and his colleagues
went much deeper. ‘In the Girondin system’, they wrote, ‘everything begins with
the individual and everything ends with the individual.’119 For them, society was
only a mechanism, where liberty was understood as the right to exercise our natural
faculties and where equality amounted to the equal right to exercise this right. In
sum, the Girondins stood for a philosophy of ‘absolute individualism’.
This, in the eyes of Buchez and Roux, was the very antithesis of what was found
among the Jacobins. Starting from a belief in God and the immortality of the soul,
the Jacobins saw personal self-sacrifice and devotion to duty as the basis of the new
social order. To this they had added the sentiment of universal fraternity. If the
Girondins were federalists lacking in ‘good faith’, the Jacobins were the ‘national
party’ totally committed to the ‘salvation of France’. Writing of Saint-Just, this was
115 Ibid. xii, p. xiv.
116 Buchez and Roux referred to Joseph de Maistre’s comment that it was not men who led the
Revolution but the Revolution that led men: ibid. iv, p. ii.
117 Ibid. xx, pp. v–xv. Buchez and Roux were at pains to deny the charge that they believed that the
end justified the means: ibid. xxv, pp. v–xv.
118 Ibid. xxviii. 145–6.
119 Ibid. xxvi, p. vi.
264
History, Revolution, and Terror
how they explained the contrast: ‘To the liberty that proceeds from natural right, he
opposed as alone being acceptable the liberty of innocence and virtue; to mutual
defence, to the passive interest of men . . . that the Girondin constitution declared
to be the sole object of social security, he opposed the active interest of the greatest
number.’120 Nor did Buchez and Roux seek to diminish the enormity of the
struggle engaged upon by the Jacobins. It was ‘a war of extermination between
the principle of modern civilization represented by France and that of the former
civilization represented by the absolute powers of continental Europe’.121 It was a
battle between the world of the fall and slavery and that of redemption and liberty.
In those circumstances, they ventured, it was not prisons and the scaffold that were
‘odious’ but ‘indifference’.122 According to Buchez and Roux, for Robespierre and
the Jacobins revolutionary government denoted ‘the absolute reign of morality’.123
If there had been excesses, these were to be attributed to selfish, unprincipled
rogues like Danton or atheists such as Hébert and his supporters. It was they, and
not Robespierre, who had turned the law of 22 Prairial into ‘the instrument of an
atrocious despotism’.124 When Robespierre failed to protect the Republic from the
‘most bloodthirsty and the most corrupt’ members of the Convention, the door was
opened to reaction and counter-revolution. After Thermidor, the army alone
remained devoted to the Republic. Exhausted, the people wanted rest and security:
from the Revolution they now cherished only military glory. Accordingly, ‘without
resistance’ they gave themselves up to the promises of a man who claimed to
understand them but who, in turn, would betray the Revolution and France.
The Restoration was nothing but ‘an act of egoism’.
Reading the final volumes of Buchez and Roux’s collection it is difficult to
fathom what sense they could possibly have made of the years between 1795 and
Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. Certainly this period received far less space and
attention in their narrative than the period from 1789 to Thermidor. How, from
their perspective of messianic expectation and possibility, could the Revolution
have initially faltered and then failed so badly? Their answer was that, if the
‘destructive’ phase of the Revolution had been completed, it had not gone on to
establish new forms of social organization. This was largely explained in terms of
the absence of sound morality and belief among its participants, who, on this view,
were consumed by doubt and ‘hypocritical egoism’. Likewise, the crimes of the
Revolution had their deeper cause in what Buchez and Roux repeatedly castigated
as the materialism of the eighteenth century. The mistake of men like Robespierre
was not to have proclaimed loudly the Christian origin of the beliefs they held. As a
consequence, many fine principles were announced but they were easily abused and
overturned. In the final analysis, ho
wever, the fundamental error had been to
attempt to rebuild society upon the doctrines of the rights of man and individual
interest, both of which only served to separate men from one another. The
diagnosis for France’s future, therefore, was that a ‘true social life’ could only rest
120 Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, p. xiv. See also 310–15.
121 Ibid. xxviii. 143.
122 Ibid. xxix. 4.
123 Ibid. xxx. 130.
124 Ibid. xxxiii. 5.
History, Revolution, and Terror
265
upon the spirit of sacrifice and duty and that, as a Catholic nation, her goal must be
‘to realize the ethics of Jesus Christ’.125
Few things could have been further from the thoughts of the governments of the
July Monarchy. Largely indifferent to religious matters as well as to the condition of
the people, for them the development of the economy and the expansion of
banking and industry was a far greater priority. They consistently repressed popular
dissent and defended the interests of wealthy property owners. And so, as opposi-
tion to the regime mounted and its unpopularity increased, the reappraisal of the
Revolution continued apace.
In 1836 Armand Marrast and Jacques-François Dupont published their celebra-
tion of the great days of the Revolution, Fastes de la Révolution française. Two years
later came Albert Laponneraye’s overtly anti-Girondin and pro-Jacobin Histoire de
la Révolution française, depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1814, with the ‘virtuous’ and ‘exalted
democrat’ Robespierre as its undisputed hero.126 The following year, the fiftieth
anniversary of the beginning of the Revolution, Étienne Cabet commenced the
publication of his four-volume Histoire populaire de la Révolution française. Again
the Girondins were condemned as men without morals and principles and the
Jacobins praised for their disinterested commitment to the people and to the values
of justice and fraternity. This was followed in 1845 by Edgar Quinet’s Le Chris-
tianisme et la Révolution where the message, although hostile to Buchez and Roux’s
Catholic neo-Jacobinism, was once more that the Revolution was the embodiment
of what was best in Christianity. Only two years later, three of the most important
histories of the Revolution appeared within months of each other: the first parts of
Louis Blanc’s Histoire de la Révolution française,127 Jules Michelet’s book of the
same title, and the eight volumes of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins.
Despite its self-evident weaknesses as a work of history, it was Lamartine’s poetical
tale, ‘full of blood and tears’, which immediately proved to be most popular with
the reading public.128 Who, after all, could be unmoved by such rhetorical
flourishes as the following: ‘After five years, the Revolution was no more than a
vast cemetery. Upon the tomb of each of its victims is written an exemplifying
word: On one, philosophy, on another, eloquence; on this one, genius, on that one,
courage; here, crime, there, virtue. But on every one is written: Died for the future
and an artisan of humanity.’129 The history of the Revolution, Lamartine con-
cluded, was glorious and sad, full of sorrow but above all full of hope. Its ‘immortal
principles’ transcended its blood-soaked reality.
125 Ibid. xl, pp. iii–xv.
126 In 1840 Laponneraye also produced a 3-vol. edn. of Robespierre’s speeches.
127 Blanc’s 13-vol. history was written for the most part in exile in London and was completed in
1862.
128 Subsequently Lamartine’s history has been regarded as the most ephemeral of these three works,
Norman Hampson going so far as to write that it could be disregarded as ‘something of a potboiler’: see
Hampson, ‘The French Revolution and its Historians’, in Geoffrey Best (ed.), The Permanent
Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy 1789–1989 (London, 1988), 216.
129 Histoire des Girondins, viii. 381–2.
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History, Revolution, and Terror
The same year Alphonse Esquiros, author in 1840 of L’Évangile du Peuple,
published his lyrical Histoire des Montagnards.130 It can be read as a compendium
of the new orthodoxy. The Revolution was the Gospel, armed by human reason
and the sentiment of right. To fight against the Revolution was to fight against
God. The people were the heart and soul of the Revolution. In the hands of the
Jacobins, the Revolution had taken on a character that nothing could efface. It had
‘helped the poor, the weak, the oppressed, and the child’.131 Robespierre and the
Jacobins were absolved of their crimes by a ‘purity of motives’. The Girondins were
‘the pagans’ of the Revolution, selfish, immoral, and unprincipled.132 Providence
had called upon the French people to fulfil ‘a great mission’. France was a ‘sacrificial
nation, a Christ nation: she lived and died for the salvation of the world’.133 The
Revolution marked the dawn of a new age.
I I I
In producing what was undoubtedly the most influential of all nineteenth-century
histories of the Revolution, Jules Michelet both embraced and challenged this
orthodoxy. When Michelet began writing his history in 1846 he was already one
of the great figures of the French academic world, having been elected to a chair at
the Collège de France in 1838. The first volume of his celebrated Histoire de France
had appeared in 1833 and by 1843, when he put this project to one side, seven
volumes (covering the period up to the reign of Louis XI) had been published.
Volume iv, published in 1840, with its portrait of a Jeanne d’Arc inspired by her
love of the people and by a fervent patriotism, had met with almost universal
acclaim.134 Yet Michelet had become an increasingly controversial figure, largely
because of his undisguised antipathy towards the Roman Catholic Church and his
determination to keep the University free from its influence. Taking the battle to
the enemy, in 1843 he published Des Jésuites and then, two years later, Du Prêtre, de
la Femme et de la Famille.135 ‘Our wives and our daughters’, Michelet declared, ‘are
brought up and ruled by our enemies.’ Both volumes were attacked by the Catholic
press but both sold fabulously well (by 1844 Des Jésuites was into its sixth edition)
and attendance at Michelet’s lectures, briefly suspended by Guizot, became a way
for radical students to voice their opposition to an increasingly beleaguered July
Monarchy.
130 See Anthony Zielonka, Alphonse Esquiros (1812–1876): A Study of his Work (Geneva, 1985).
131 Esquiros, Histoire des Montagnards (1847), i. 3.
132 Ibid. ii. 336.
133 Ibid. i. 77.
134 See ‘La Pucelle d’Orléans’, in Michelet, Le Moyen ge (1981), 740–56.
135 The themes of these two works reappear in Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution française. For
example, whilst Michelet recognized that Louis XVI showed himself to be a good man, he could not
refrain from saying that he remained a liar to the last because he had been a pupil of the Jesuits. He
similarly attributed counter-revolutionary sentiment to the alliance existing between priests and
women.
History, Revolution, and Terr
or
267
We have a reasonably clear idea of the sources employed by Michelet to write his
history of the Revolution.136 As attested by his diaries, he made assiduous use of
the French National Archives (where he was head of the Historical Section) and,
despite his antipathy towards the views of its authors, drew extensively upon the
primary material assembled by Buchez and Roux. He consulted newspapers (especially
Le Moniteur) and read the memoirs of participants. But this scarcely begins to capture
what Michelet understood by history. For Michelet, the historian recreated and
re-enacted the past. He placed himself within the action of events as they unfolded,
straining to recapture the emotions of those involved. His style therefore was dramatic,
declamatory, exclamatory, and exhortatory. But, just as importantly, Michelet also
drew upon his own youth and life experience for inspiration. ‘I commune with
myself ’, he wrote.137 This was especially so with regard to the people. ‘To know
the life of the people and their toil and sufferings’, Michelet wrote, ‘I had only to
consult my memory.’138 For Michelet, the people were not only the principal actors in
his account but also, ‘from the first to last page’, its collective hero.139
‘I define the Revolution’, Michelet proclaimed, ‘The advent of the Law, the
resurrection of Right, and the reaction of Justice’.140 This did not mean, he
immediately avowed, that the Revolution was the realization of Christianity.
Rather, it was, ‘at one and same time, its heir and adversary’.141 They shared the
sentiment of human fraternity but the Revolution, unlike Christianity, ‘founds
fraternity on the love of man for man, on mutual duty, on right and justice’.142 For
Christianity, salvation was a gift and relied upon faith alone; for the Revolution, it
was the work of justice itself. Moreover, the reality of Christianity had been ‘a vast
sea of blood’ and the ancien régime, the monarchy of king and priest, nothing else
but ‘tyranny in the name of grace’.143 So, as ‘the dogma of royal incarnation
perished forever’144 and as the Bastille fell, a new doctrine, with causes deep and
profound, was brought forth by the Revolution: the rights of man. ‘The approach-
ing dawn’, Michelet wrote, ‘was that of liberty.’145
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