Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  In what followed Michelet was always at pains to relieve the people of any

  responsibility for the acts of violence and savagery that came increasingly to

  characterize the Revolution. Those ‘sanguinary deeds’ had as their perpetrators

  only ‘an infinitely small number of men’.146 Rather, Michelet’s emphasis fell upon

  what he described as ‘the epoch of unanimity, the holy epoch when the whole

  nation, free from distinctions of party and scarcely knowing opposition between

  classes, marched together under the flag of fraternity’.147 This ‘humane and

  benevolent’ phase of the Revolution, on Michelet’s account, attained its apotheosis

  with the first Fête de la Fédération on 14 July 1790. ‘I do not believe’, Michelet

  wrote, ‘that at any time the heart of man was more generous or full.’148 What was

  136 See Eric Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire du professeur d’histoire (1990), 224–316; Paul Viallaneix,

  Michelet, les travaux et les jours 1798–1874 (1998), 299–326; and Paule Petitier, Jules Michelet:

  L’Homme histoire (2006), 201–53.

  137 Histoire de la Révolution française, i. 31.

  138 Le Peuple, 58.

  139 Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 897.

  140 Ibid. i. 51.

  141 Ibid. 54.

  142 Ibid. 55.

  143 Ibid. 93.

  144 Ibid. 75.

  145 Ibid. 198.

  146 Ibid. 37.

  147 Ibid. 38.

  148 Ibid. 330.

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  History, Revolution, and Terror

  here most evident was what Michelet described as ‘the spontaneous organization of

  France’, the overcoming of the distinctions and barriers of geography, race, wealth,

  language, and religion that had formerly divided the French from one another.149

  ‘To attain unity’, Michelet wrote, ‘nothing was able to prove an obstacle, no

  sacrifice was too dear.’150 Such was the power of love. Was this a miracle? Yes,

  Michelet replied, and ‘the greatest and the simplest of miracles’, the renunciation of

  ‘senseless animosities’ and a return to ‘sociability’.151 So too it was but ‘the natural

  and necessary application of the very principle of the Revolution’: justice.152

  Yet Michelet knew as much as anyone else that the Revolution had not delivered

  on this initial promise and that he had to explain the failure of the new religion of

  fraternity. Not for the first or the last time, ambiguity appeared in the account

  provided. It began in the first chapter that followed the three devoted to the Fête de

  la Fédération. The unity there displayed, Michelet wrote, had been sincere but

  momentary and had not been strong enough to prevent the reappearance of class

  divisions and differences of opinion. The bourgeoisie ‘trembled’ before the Revo-

  lution it had made and, standing back from its work, was soon consumed by hatred

  and fear. As this ‘internal obstacle’ to the Revolution took shape, there emerged the

  external obstacles fuelled by the hypocrisy and ‘unshakable hatred’ of the clergy and

  the English. ‘The bourgeoisie’, Michelet commented, ‘drank the English opium,

  with all its ingredients of egoism, well-being, comfort, and liberty without sacri-

  fice.’153 It was then that Michelet introduced the Jacobins into his account,

  describing what he termed ‘a revolutionary clergy’ with Robespierre as its leader.154

  ‘Mutual surveillance, public censure, and even secret denunciation’ were what they

  taught and practised, their vision of society modelled upon the ‘illustrious examples

  of Antiquity’ and ‘the monastic cities of the Middle Ages’. For these bitter and

  distrustful men everyone appeared as a suspect.

  Over the next several hundred pages, Michelet explored the dynamics of this

  situation, the great Jacobin ‘machine’ thriving on public apathy and indifference

  and progressively substituting the spirit of conspiracy for that of fraternity.155 He

  castigated the clergy and their counter-revolutionary allies. He condemned the

  duplicity of traitors such as Charles-François Dumouriez156 and deplored the

  endless infighting among the factions that vied with each other for leadership of

  the Revolution. He likewise scorned the lack of principle and vanity of the

  Girondins, deriding them as ‘the protective mask’ of royalism.157 The Terror was

  nothing but a ‘judicial dictatorship’ inspired by fanaticism and sectarianism.

  Unusually, but intentionally, Michelet ended his account with the fall of Robe-

  spierre. After Thermidor, there was nothing left of the Revolution.158

  149 Histoire de la Révolution française, 318.

  150 Ibid. 326.

  151 Ibid. 325.

  152 Ibid. 336.

  153 Ibid. 356.

  154 Ibid. 393.

  155 Ibid., ii. 127–8.

  156 Ibid. 335–48. After having led the French army to victory at Valmy and Jemmapes, Dumouriez

  went over to the Austrians.

  157 Ibid. 143–8.

  158 Michelet was to explore this period of French history in his Histoire du dix-neuvième siècle (see

  Œuvres complètes, xxi. 1872–1874 (1982)), starting his history of the 19th cent. with the fall of

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  269

  Michelet’s Revolution, therefore, was the Revolution of 1789. For him, the

  stirring events that followed the calling of the Estates-General denoted a radical

  rupture with the past and the advent of a new age. He gloried in the Revolution’s

  universal message of justice and peace, believing that for the first time law and

  religion had been brought together as one.159 He recognized the uniqueness of the

  event and saw it as being embedded in the history and destiny of France. He never

  ceased to praise the heroism and generosity of the people, always comparing their

  behaviour favourably with that of their leaders. To that end, Michelet’s Revolution

  was not, unlike that of Mignet and Thiers, a history of the rise of the bourgeoisie.

  Nor was it infused with the liberal Anglophilia associated with Guizot’s popular

  notion that 1789 was a French 1640 and, therefore, that the Revolution of 1830

  was a replay of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. In contradistinction to

  Buchez and many others, he saw the Revolution not as a rebirth of the true spirit of

  Christianity but as marking its end, as the effacement of a doctrine that espoused

  ‘the unjust transmission of evil by original sin’.160 Michelet’s Revolution took

  inspiration from Voltaire and Rousseau, not from the Bible. Likewise, if Michelet

  accepted that the Jacobins had saved France from external invasion, he was not

  prepared, as Mignet and Louis Blanc had been, to attribute the Terror to circum-

  stances alone. It had been tyranny and Michelet could not refrain from observing

  that many royalists had a weakness and sneaking admiration for Robespierre.

  Michelet defined his own position as ‘Montagnard but not Jacobin’.161 He

  would, he told his readers, have voted against the Girondins but he would have

  opposed the ‘inquisitorial spirit’ and ‘violent Machiavellianism’ of the Jacobin club.

  If, beyond the people themselves, he had any heroes they were Danton and Camille

  Desmoulins.162 Yet Michelet believed that the violent efforts that the Revolution

  had made t
o save itself had subsequently been mistaken ‘by a forgetful generation’

  for the Revolution itself. So unknown was its origin and nature that the ‘the

  profoundly peaceful and benevolent character’ of the Revolution now seemed a

  paradox. None remained upon the altar of the Revolution but Robespierre and

  Saint-Just and, for as long as this remained the case, Michelet concluded, the

  message of the Revolution would not be heard and absolute governments could

  sleep easily. The world would only be won over by ‘the fraternity of love, and not

  that of the guillotine’.163

  Michelet began writing his Histoire de la Révolution française under the July

  Monarchy and completed it in August 1853 under the Second Empire. In the

  mean time, in April 1852, he had been removed from his post at the Collège de

  France by the new Minister of Public Education. The same fate befell his close

  Robespierre. As he commented: ‘At this moment history seems to fall into a chasm’. History was now

  reduced to that of one man, Napoleon, and to ‘pure biography’: ibid. 218–19.

  159 Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 172–3.

  160 Ibid. i. 36.

  161 Ibid. ii. 404.

  162 Desmoulins was a talented journalist and member of the Convention. He was executed, along

  with Danton, on 5 Apr. 1794.

  163 Ibid. i. 34.

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  History, Revolution, and Terror

  friend Edgar Quinet.164 During the Second Republic Quinet had served as a

  parliamentary deputy and he was now to begin a period of lengthy exile in Belgium

  and Switzerland.165 Side by side, both men had waged a common struggle against

  the power of the Roman Catholic Church, each devoting a course of lectures to the

  Jesuits.166 In Quinet’s case, he followed this with a second volume in 1844 devoted

  to a doctrine closely associated with the Jesuits: Ultramontanism.167 In the intro-

  duction to the latter, Quinet indicated his preference for what he called ‘a religion

  of sincerity’. A similar battle cry was heard one year later when Quinet published

  his magisterial Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, except that this time he

  began by voicing his disapproval of the dominant philosophy of the age: the

  Eclecticism associated with Victor Cousin.168 It was, Quinet announced, a philos-

  ophy that no longer even believed in itself and denoted nothing else than ‘spiritual

  and moral bankruptcy’.169 If then, as he proclaimed, the ‘philosophy of the

  Restoration was dead’, from what sources could the discouraged generation of the

  July Monarchy derive moral and intellectual succour?

  To answer that question Quinet delved deep into the history of the Christian

  Church, uncovering a set of beliefs and practices that were far removed from those

  of its modern equivalent. The early Christians were not constrained by a body of

  fixed and rigid dogma—all was ‘inspiration, fervour, spontaneity, movement’—and

  the Christian fathers had believed that the spirit of God was to be found in all of us.

  They similarly thought that the ideals of Christianity were realizable here on earth.

  However, overlaid upon this early faith had been doctrines that had undermined

  the emancipatory potential of the Christian religion. The distinction between the

  City of God and the City of Man entailed the indefinite postponement of a

  terrestrial paradise. The doctrine of predestination took away any notion of

  man’s ‘moral liberty’. Bossuet’s conception of a Christian sovereign relieved the

  monarch of any concern for his people. The Crusades turned war into a form of

  hatred and extermination. Quinet’s list was extensive but each item was designed to

  show that Christianity had been betrayed by the Catholic Church. Conversely,

  Quinet was prepared to draw inspiration from those heretics and dissenters who

  had sought to return to the words of Christ himself and running through his

  lectures was the constant invocation to his audience that they should aspire to do

  the same. ‘Our task, and that of those who come after us’, he wrote, ‘will be to show

  that the people of God are not only in Judea, that they live among us, that the city

  164 See Hermione Quinet, Cinquante Ans d’amitié: Michelet-Quinet (1825–1875) (1899). See also Edgar

  Quinet, Lettres d’éxil à Michelet et à divers amis, 2 vols. (1885).

  165 On Quinet see Winock, Les Voix de la Liberté, 450–62, Furet, La Gauche et la révolution au XIXe

  siècle (1986) and Ceri Crossley, Edgar Quinet (1803–1875): A Study in Romantic Thought (Lexington,

  Ky., 1983).

  166 The courses of both men were printed in the same volume: Des Jésuites (1843). Quinet’s text

  appears at pp. 107–249.

  167 L’Ultramonantisme ou l’église romaine et la société moderne (1844). As opposed to Gallicanism,

  Ultramontanism stressed the authority of the Pope over the Catholic Church in France.

  168 On Cousin and Eclecticism see pp. 320–3 below.

  169 Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (1845), 41.

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  271

  of God is not in ruins, that each day it continues to grow in the midst of us and

  through us.’170

  Yet Quinet also believed that the true spirit of Christianity found expression

  outside the Church. It existed within the French people and defined the character

  of the French Revolution. The Revolution, he argued, drew upon the hope that

  the message of the Gospel could be realized in this world and that it was not

  consigned to the ‘city of the dead’.171 In this Quinet was scarcely original: the

  assumption of a similarity between the Christian and the revolutionary idea had

  become something of a commonplace. It was what came next in Quinet’s argument

  that was new.

  ‘Alone of modern nations’, Quinet asserted, ‘France carried out a political and

  social revolution before completing its religious revolution.’ From this, he

  continued, arose all that was ‘original, monstrous, gigantic, and implacable in this

  history’.172 A revolution that began by wishing to reconcile Church and State

  finished up by setting them at war with each other but, although seemingly

  banished, the intolerant spirit of Catholicism had remained at the heart of things.

  Quickly one church was replaced by another, replete with its own ceremonies,

  rituals, and images. A new state religion was created with Robespierre cast not only

  as dictator but also as the new pope. Why, Quinet asked, was Danton sent to the

  scaffold if not for lack of faith, ‘to be an epicurean became a crime of heresy’.173

  In brief, the argument was that the Revolution had not freed itself from the

  exclusive and absolutist temper of the Church and therefore that the least dissent

  was viewed as ‘inexpiable schism’. ‘The sentimental logic of Rousseau’, Quinet

  wrote, took ‘as its instrument the axe of Saint Bartholomew’.174 The result was

  violence and a disregard for individual conscience. If Quinet admired the heroic

  efforts of the Convention to secure the defence of France, he saw the Terror and the

  cult of the Supreme Being as nothing but manifestations of a new state religion. He

  also believed that the armies of the Revolution were new crusaders, their task being

  the
‘moral elevation of their adversaries’ and ‘friendship between peoples’.175 The

  defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, by contrast, was the Golgotha of the modern age,

  an act of Providence that had left France for dead.176

  Manifestly, Quinet was not writing a history of the Revolution. His concern was

  to explore its temperament and spirit, to trace its lineage and affiliations. The failure

  of the Revolution, in his view, resulted from the prior absence of a genuine religious

  revolution but this did not prevent him from maintaining that, ‘in many regards’,

  the ideal of the Revolution came closer to that of Christianity than did anything

  then being preached by the Church.177 The significance of this should not be lost

  upon us. First, it meant that, in Quinet’s eyes, Catholicism could no longer be

  considered ‘the national religion of our country’. Next, by drawing out the

  absolutist tendencies of both the Revolution and the Church, he distanced himself

  from interpretations of the Revolution and of Jacobinism as forerunners of

  170 Ibid. 127–8.

  171 Ibid. 113–14.

  172 Ibid. 334.

  173 Ibid. 348.

  174 Ibid. 349.

  175 Ibid. 202–3.

  176 Ibid. 383.

  177 Ibid. 402.

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  History, Revolution, and Terror

  Christian socialism. This was so because, although no Protestant,178 at the heart of

  Quinet’s conception of Christianity was the sanctity of the individual conscience.

  Quinet unambiguously placed the rights of the individual before the demands of

  association.179 Finally, although Le Christianisme et la Révolution française was

  dedicated to Michelet, what separated the two men was all too clear. Both endorsed

  the exemplary and universal character of French history and of the Revolution

  itself; but for Michelet the Revolution terminated the history of Christianity whilst,

  for Quinet, what was best in the Revolution recaptured and gave life to Christian-

  ity’s original message.

  The political conclusion that Quinet sought to convey was summarized in the

  fourteenth of his lectures. The ‘ideal of the future’, he announced, ‘must contain

  and reconcile the moral advance of the Constituent Assembly without its illusions,

  the energy of the Convention without its cruelty, and the splendour of Napoleon

  without his despotism’.180 In line with this clarion call Quinet actively embraced