Revolution and the Republic

by Jeremy Jennings

  consciences of those shaped through what Cochin called the philosophical societies

  336 Ibid. 368.

  337 Ibid. 367.

  338 Ibid. 368.

  339 According to François Furet, Cochin is ‘probably the most neglected historian of the French

  Revolution’: ‘Augustin Cochin: the theory of Jacobinism’, in Interpreting the French Revolution, 164.

  See also Fred E. Schrader, Augustin Cochin et la République Française (1992). Cochin was killed at the

  front in 1916. Much of his work was publ. after his death.

  340 Cochin, La Crise de l‘histoire révolutionnaire: Taine et M. Aulard (1909), 1–8.

  296

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  or ‘sociétés de pensée’. From within this perspective, the Revolution amounted to

  the emancipation and then victory of the ‘God-people’ as the ‘true sovereign’, and it

  was this belief in a pure or direct democracy, Cochin contended, that provided the

  Revolution’s internal and irresistible dynamic. ‘So simple in theory’, Cochin wrote,

  ‘pure democracy is less so in fact’, and this was so because the people could neither

  administer nor govern on every detail: therefore, some form of administrative and

  representative machinery was required. If, then, they were to remain the governors,

  the people had to have the means of watching over and controlling their admin-

  istrators and deputies ‘without cease’. This, Cochin argued, was the role of ‘popular

  societies’ such as the Jacobin club. They were the eyes of the people: ‘their function

  is surveillance, and their means, terror’.341 In the name of the people these clubs

  exercised a power that was without limit or appeal. Everything done in the name of

  the people was legitimate. From this, Cochin argued, arose a ‘new morality which

  asked not if an act was good or not, but if it was revolutionary or not, whether it

  conformed to the active and present will of god’.342 For this reason, it made no

  sense to talk of terrorist ‘excesses’: rather ‘the first illegal act of the Revolution is the

  9th Thermidor’.343

  It was this argument that allowed Cochin to dismiss Aulard’s attribution of the

  Terror to external circumstances as being unfounded. Cochin accepted that certain

  external circumstances influenced the Revolution but denied that these circum-

  stances acted in such a way as to define its essential characteristics. It was from the

  principles of pure democracy and not from the circumstances of war that ‘pro-

  ceeded the most frightening attributes of the new rule’.344 ‘What we affirm’,

  Cochin wrote, ‘is that the very idea of law, of a revolutionary act defined in the

  precise terms of 93—that is to say, of legitimate acts which violate all the rules of

  law and of the most elementary morality—would not have been born without the

  principle of direct sovereignty and the regime which flows from it.’345

  Cochin saw the origin of the thesis (articulated, as he acknowledged, from

  Barruel onwards)346 that the Revolution was the result of a conspiracy as laying

  in the great gap that came to exist between ‘the People Sovereign and the people’,

  between the ‘purified and enclosed’ world of ‘the Jacobin nobility’ and the majori-

  ty. Robespierre, Cochin recalled, believed that virtue only existed among the

  minority. Yet, Cochin observed, if the Revolution was a tyranny, it was also a

  Revolution without tyrants, a dictatorship without dictators, and this was so

  because no one individual or group of individuals ever came properly to control

  or understand the Revolution. The Jacobins, he wrote, ruled ‘by virtue of an

  impersonal force which they served without understanding and which destroyed

  them as effortlessly as it had raised them up’.347 Seen from this perspective, Taine’s

  mistake had been to try to explain Jacobinism in terms of a collection of individual

  psychological traits and to see the Revolution through the lenses of its participants,

  341 Cochin, La Crise de l‘histoire révolutionnaire: Taine et M. Aulard (1909), 35.

  342 Ibid. 39.

  343 Ibid. 41.

  344 Ibid. 37.

  345 Ibid. 41.

  346 Ibid. 48.

  347 Ibid. 51.

  History, Revolution, and Terror

  297

  as the result of conscious intentions. With the new age, Cochin wrote, we entered a

  world of ‘unconscious forces’.

  A new method was required, therefore, and Cochin believed that he had

  found it in the sociological programme recently set out by Émile Durkheim.

  ‘According to M. Durkheim’, Cochin commented, ‘the psychological school,

  when it wishes to explain social facts, attributes too much weight to intentions and

  not enough to situations.’ It saw ‘only the calculations of men’ where it should

  see ‘the slow and deep operation of institutions and human relations’.348 In other

  words, the Jacobins were not the products of contingent circumstances or of a

  few months of anarchy. Rather, Jacobinism was the developed form of a particular

  type of philosophical society that had come into existence in the latter half of the

  eighteenth century and that had propagated a particular form of ‘social opinion’

  focused upon an abstract form of social equality. Viewed incorrectly, as was

  later to be done by Aulard,349 Cochin’s analysis looked like a restatement of the

  Revolution as conspiracy thesis, but this was the exact opposite of what he wanted

  to argue. For Cochin, the Revolution was not the result of conscious intrigue

  but the unconscious outcome of an impersonal ‘social machine’ or apparatus.

  How, therefore, could the crisis of revolutionary historiography be brought to a

  close? First, historians had to forego ‘indignation’ and embrace ‘explanation’. As

  Cochin observed, the last three months of the Terror might not have been the most

  odious and unhappy in French history but they were the ‘most interesting’: ‘there

  was then attempted a moral, political, and social experiment that was truly

  unique’.350 Next, historians had to abandon the ‘revolutionary fetish’ for the

  people, and should relegate it to ‘the museum of religious myths’.351 When this

  had been done, Cochin believed, historians would be able to comprehend why the

  Revolution was so innovative, why it constituted such a radical break with the past,

  and why it possessed an internal dynamic that proved so irresistible. And, if they did

  so, they would come to see that what they were dealing with was the birth of

  modern democratic politics. It was, however, to be some years before Cochin’s

  advice was acted upon. As we shall see, the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution of

  1917 in France was sufficient to ensure many more years of indignation and

  revolutionary fetishism.

  348 Ibid. 58.

  349 See Furet, ‘Augustin Cochin’, 168.

  350 Cochin, La Crise, 99.

  351 Ibid. 100.

  7

  Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction

  I

  In 1925 Alphonse Aulard published Le Christianisme et la Révolution française.

  In tone and approach, it bore the hallmarks of his earlier work on the Revolution.1

  ‘My endeavour’, he wrote, ‘has been to be impartial.’ Yet the historian’s ‘tale’ he was
/>   to tell was nothing less than that of the attempted ‘de-Christianization’ of France.

  ‘I am startled’, Aulard added, ‘by the ease with which the people of France in 1794

  began to abandon their customary forms of worship.’2

  On the eve of the Revolution, Aulard recalled, France was a country which—

  with the exception of a few Protestants and Jews—enjoyed religious unity

  and where Christianity seemed to be flourishing. Her monarchs did not hesitate

  to style themselves ‘the most Christian’ of kings and her people were happy to

  be members of a nation which, in the papacy’s eyes, was ‘the eldest daughter of

  the Church’. ‘The Gallican Church’, Aulard wrote, shone ‘with the splendour of an

  unrivalled power.’3 Undoubtedly, there existed—as there had always existed—

  ‘a small minority of unbelievers’, and to this was to be added a larger number of

  people ‘indifferent’ to religion, but ‘no one dreamt in 1789 of de-Christianizing

  France’.4

  Four years later, according to Aulard, this was exactly what was being con-

  templated. By then, the Revolution had been drawn into conflict with the

  Church; the idea of a secular state was gaining ground; and refractory priests

  who refused to endorse the new Civil Constitution of the Clergy were feared as

  counter-revolutionaries. After the uprising in the Vendée—‘a crime against the

  patrie’, Aulard avowed5—moves against the Christian religion became more

  general. The republican calendar was introduced. Churches were closed and

  turned into Temples of Reason. Undertaken ‘in an atmosphere of militant joy’,

  the culmination of this process of ‘destruction and replacement’ was attained, in

  1 In addition to Histoire politique de la Révolution française, see Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de

  l’Être suprême (1892).

  2 Ibid. 10.

  3 Aulard, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, 17.

  4 Ibid. 28.

  5 Ibid. 88.

  Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction

  299

  Aulard’s words, with the inauguration of Robespierre’s ‘great political-religious

  project’: the cult of the Supreme Being.6

  Why was there no sustained opposition to such acts of impiety? Aulard advanced

  three facts by way of explanation. First, the French peasant was fundamentally

  ‘indifferent’ to religion. His Christianity was superficial, something superimposed

  upon older, pagan rituals.7 Next, the urban middle classes were ‘largely imbued

  with the natural religion of Voltaire and Rousseau’.8 Finally, and most importantly,

  de-Christianization was ‘a means or expedient of national defence, of defending the

  Revolution’.9 ‘Whether under the name of the Supreme Being or that of Reason’,

  Aulard wrote, ‘it was the patrie that was worshipped more and more.’10

  With France saved and the nation’s independence secured, the fire of anti-

  Christian sentiment diminished. After 1795, Aulard observed, there was a revival

  in Catholic worship and churches were restored to the faithful. Nevertheless, under

  the Directory the work of secularization went on, most notably with the introduc-

  tion of legislation in 1795 separating Church and State. Through public instruction

  founded upon rational principles and through civic festivals, the hold of revealed

  religion over the people was to be progressively eliminated. Whether just or unjust

  in its treatment of the Catholic Church, Aulard argued, this had been a system that

  had worked. Placed ‘beneath the superior independence of the State’, no religion

  occupied a dominant position and no sect could become tyrannical. There existed

  ‘a kind of religious equilibrium’.11 It was this ‘political-religious regime’, Aulard

  concluded, that Napoleon Bonaparte had destroyed in 1801 when he had signed

  the Concordat with Pope Pius VII. The laïcité of the State was abandoned and the

  dominant position of the Catholic Church was re-established. Napoleon had done

  this not out of piety but for political ends. ‘He thought’, Aulard wrote, ‘that he

  would dominate the pope and, through the pope, the consciences of mankind.’12

  Two things stand out in Aulard’s account. The first is the manner in which its

  argument complemented that provided in his Histoire politique de la Révolution

  française. In the same way that the Terror had been attributed to the imperious

  necessity of circumstances, so the struggle against France’s inherited religion had

  been largely driven by the sentiment of the Church’s betrayal of the nation. There

  had been no preconceived plan to destroy the Church or philosophers’ plot to turn

  the French nation into Protestants or atheists. If the Revolution had attacked

  Christianity it had had little to do with the influence of Voltairean scepticism

  and more to do with the fact that Catholic priests were conspiring with the external

  enemy. This view ignored the fact that, from the moment the National Assembly

  6 Ibid. 122. See Timothy Tackett, ‘The French Revolution and Religion to 1794’, in Stewart

  J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vii. Enlightenment,

  Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 2006), 536–55.

  7 Aulard, Le Christianisme, 113.

  8 Ibid. 114.

  9 Ibid. 115.

  10 Ibid. 123.

  11 Ibid. 138.

  12 Ibid. 151. See Suzanne Desan, ‘The French Revolution and Religion, 1795–1815’, in Brown

  and Tackett, Cambridge History of Christianity, vii. 556–74.

  300

  Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction

  decreed the confiscation and sale of Church property in November 1789, it

  embarked upon a course of action that would lead to the reconstruction of the

  ecclesiastical system and, therefore, conflict with the Holy See. It likewise provided

  no explanation of the sheer ferocity of popular violence directed against the clergy,

  many of whom were imprisoned, driven into exile, or forced to renounce their

  priestly calling.

  The second point relates to the broader historiography of the Revolution. As we

  have seen, throughout the nineteenth century there had been no agreement as to

  whether the Revolution had presaged the final realization or ruin of Christianity.

  There was, in fact, much truth in Aulard’s description of the position of the Church

  in pre-revolutionary France. Since Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes in

  1685, it had enjoyed a legal monopoly of the right of worship.13 The Church

  possessed immense power and wealth. The clergy were a privileged class. Yet the

  Church—even in its post-Tridentine form14—lacked spiritual vitality. Its bishops

  cared little for the religious welfare of their flocks. Its parish priests, often

  impoverished, were largely ignorant of matters theological. Many of its monasteries

  were closed or empty. If the people remained attached to the rituals of the Church,

  they observed them with less frequency and their faith was frequently lukewarm.

  Factors such as these led Aulard to the conclusion that Christianity was not

  ‘indestructibly embedded in the consciences of the French’.15 It is in this light,

  therefore, that Aulard’s favourable comments on the religious policies of the

 
Directory have to be interpreted.

  With the separation of Church and State in 1795, religion became a purely

  private affair. To that extent, the Revolution, when not deflected from its original

  purpose by dire necessity, denoted neither the realization nor the ruin of Christian-

  ity but rather its removal from the public realm. Moreover, this was precisely the

  religious settlement arrived at by the Third Republic when, following the Dreyfus

  Affair, in 1905 it re-established the separation of Church and State.16 By such a

  separation, it was imagined, the bitter polemic that, for over a century, had pitted

  philosophy against religion, science against faith, would be brought to an end.

  Certainly, in the years following the Revolution no such stable solution had been

  found. Indeed, the question more often posed was whether there could be a revival

  of Catholic thought and, if not, whether a new religion could be established and

  put in its place. Few were those who doubted the social utility of religion.

  Let us next accept that a case can be made for saying that the Revolution of 1789

  had its own religious origins.17 As Dale Van Kley has observed: much followed

  13 The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598, had granted freedom of public worship to

  Protestants.

  14 The Council of Trent (1545–63) defined the doctrines that were to inspire the Catholic

  Counter-Reformation.

  15 Aulard, Le Christianisme, 10.

  16 See Dominique de Villepin (ed.), 1905, la séparation des Églises et de l’État (2004) and Jacqueline

  Lalouette, La Séparation des Églises et de l’État: Genèse et développement d’une idée 1789–1905 (2005).

  17 See Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil

  Constitution 1560–1791 (New Haven, Conn., 1996).

  Religion, Enlightenment, and Reaction

  301

  from the French monarchy’s puzzling decision not to side with the Protestant

  Reformation.18 In particular, the threat of internal disorder was met not only by the

  bureaucratization of the monarchy but also by its divinization, with Bodin’s secular

  version of absolutism—rooted in a conception of the indivisibility of sovereignty—

  being complemented by Bishop Bossuet’s affirmation that the majesty of God was

  most clearly visible in kings.19 To attempt anything against the person of a king,