cial documents and in the celebration of marriages not
having allowed him to be given that satisfaction’, at the end of the session he walked up to Dr Chouet, swore, and then hit him. He demanded that the council’s denial of his son being allowed to read from the newspaper be entered in the minutes. Th
is was refused too,25 and he boiled over into
anger, giving out more threats, until Dr Chouet was ‘obliged to remind him of the law authorizing the arrest of disturbers of the peace like him’. Th e
commissioner went on to say that the things he had been shouting were not
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true in the least. He had not been excluded from the communal assembly of Port d’Envaux the year before: he had brought about his own exclusion by losing his temper before the meeting had even started. Seillès claimed that Chouet himself had excluded him, but Chouet told him that he had no authority in a communal assembly. Seillès was not qualifi ed to be on the roll of those paying land tax, or the tax on houses, and he could not make a claim to be heard on the basis of any outstanding tax payments he might have, because he had none. He had asserted during his outburst that, as a veteran of campaigns in the war, he deserved more considerate treatment from the council, but Chouet had taken the trouble to fi nd out that Seillès had never so much as put on uniform or gone on parade. Chouet shouted back at his opponent, perhaps rubbing his bruised chin, ‘Your exclusion was based upon the law!’
Th
e minutes go on to tell us that ‘to his collective insults there was no response beyond the deepest indignation’. Seillès claimed that he was a better Republican than these councillors who had been running the canton for nearly ten years now,
but it was remarked that an exaggerated and near-savage civism is not one that bodes well towards the best in a teacher, who ought to have as his task the making of amiable virtues to inspire his pupils hearts, and ought, in the end, to cover the blow of instruction with the honey which he wants them to taste . . . as it were.
All this was drawn up into a procès-verbal, and Dr Chouet signed it, along with the president of the tenth day assembly, Constantin. Th e council secretary, who was now Richelot, and responsible for the convoluted sentence translated in the last paragraph, signed as well. Seillès was not asked to sign.
Seillès seems to have accepted defeat afterwards, and became more con-versant with civic virtues. He did sign minutes as being present at meetings a few times after this. Th
ere was an oath-taking ceremony soon after,
and Mlle Yonnet took part, along with Potiron and Fricaud, the teachers from Plassay and Ecurat. In December 1800, the Seillès aff air was settled by Pierre-Philippe Maugé from Saintes being nominated by the prefect of the department as the primary school teacher at Port d’Envaux. ‘He was installed with due civic ceremony and lodged in the presbytery, according to law.’26
A discussion of roads and the post offi
ce, since wartime conditions
demanded better communications,27 brings us to the end of the decade
War and Education
217
in which these council registers give us a picture of the French Revolution in a part of France that was and is intensely rural. Th
is was not the rar-
efi ed atmosphere of the room in Tuileries, where the Committee of Public Safety had met, nor the apartments in the Luxembourg Palace, where the fi ve frequently changing Directors, bizarrely dressed in costumes designed by Jacques-Louis David, read Bonaparte’s dispatches from Italy. Th is was
where ordinary men and women in the abnormal war situation absorbed the requirements of the new laws, and local government saw those requirements put into uncompromising action.
After the Terror was dismantled, we can pick up a sense of a good deal of popular indiff erence towards the new order of things, but the new order was there to stay. Men like Dr Chouet, who usually adds the word commissaire to his signature, had taken over in the countryside and claimed to represent constructive authority. Th
ey enforced a compromise between Republican
social control and a sense that there was genuine liberty under the law.
Compromises depend for their success upon those who gain most from them, so France remained a country in traction.
Conclusion
An Eye to the Future
The French Revolution threw up a great deal of distress. Yet, in spite of all the violent behaviour we have looked at, there were people involved who stood for a moderate approach and were eventually successful in fi nding one. Louis-Michel-Étienne Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély achieved national prominence as a result of the lawyers’ revolution in the Charente-Inférieure without being a supporter of Terror. His real prominence was in Napoleon’s Empire, where he was a responsible fi gure in the drawing up of the Civil Code, which made the law of the French nation accessible to all who were governed by it. Napoleon made Regnaud a Count of the Empire, and he has been spoken of as the Emperor’s éminence grise. Nevertheless, he had a signifi -
cant role in the revolutionary decade: not least as a counterbalance in history to the excesses of other people who appeared on the national scene from the Department of the Charente-Inférieure at the same time.
His statue was put up in the main square of his home town in 1863 during the Second Empire, and a biographical note prepared at the same time says that ‘he always showed himself devoted to [good] order’, and that he had ‘partisan zeal for conciliation and respect for persons’. He ‘wanted to see abuses disappear and a new society raise itself on the ruins of the old one’.1
He deserved this later comment for what he had said and done as a deputy in the Estates-General and in the Constituent Assembly which followed it.
He adopted the motto ‘Avoid spreading bitterness when peace is needed.’
He had been brought up on a property called Desrichards, at Mazeray, which his grandfather owned, and went to school from the age of six with the Benedictines in Saint-Jean, seeing the great western towers being built. Th
ese towers still dominate the town, though they were abandoned unfi nished at the Revolution and the abbey was closed like all the others.
After qualifying in Paris Regnaud came back to Saint-Jean in 1781. He wanted a job in the sénéchaussée, but all the posts were taken by people like Normand d’Authon, who later became a friend. Th
e best he could do was
to earn 1,300 livres a year in the Lieutenancy of the Navy at Rochefort. Th is
218
An Eye to the Future
219
15. Portrait of Regnaud de Saint-Jean-d’Angély (reproduced from Jean-Noël Luc (ed.), La Charente-Maritime, L’Aunis et la Saintonge des origines à nos jours (Saint-Jean-d’
Angély, 1981), by permission of the publishers, Éditions Bordessoules).
gave him an impressive uniform to wear and enhanced his natural ability to exercise charm over people but, after two years, he had had enough of naval administration and resigned, intending to go back to Paris.
However, he had a relation called Paulian, who pulled old order strings and got him into the legal establishment in Saint-Jean in private practice after a wait of less than a year. He became well known and respected,
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e Unseen Terror
despite being a young man in an elderly profession. He was given the task of editing the lists of grievances for the third estate of Saint-Jean-d’Angély and its surrounding villages into one coherent document, and then was elected as one of the two deputies from Saint-Jean-d’Angély to the Estates-General called to meet at Versailles in May 1789. Th
e other was Jean-Joseph
de Bonnegens, who was much more prominent in the establishment of the area than him, since he was seigneur of more than four villages, as well as being a royal advocate, the lieutenant-general of the sénéchaussée of Saint-Jean d’Angély, and the president
of the assembly that drew up the cahier de doléance. Bonnegens was also friendly with Baron Normand d’Authon, leader of the conservative faction in Saint-Jean-d’Angély.
Despite association with Normand, Regnaud did have progressive ideas.
He spoke in the National Assembly in favour of doing away with the offi ce of
intendant and argued that it was against the national interest to keep the system of generalities. It was at his suggestion that the Assembly adopted the new scheme of dividing the country into departments subdivided into districts and municipalities. Th
is was simple and understandable: you literally would know
where you were. His moderate approach appeared in the articles he wrote for newspapers such as the Courier de Versailles and the Journal de Paris, which energetically upheld the policies of the king’s popular Finance Minister Necker.
Although he was temperamentally against the Church, when the time came for monks and nuns to leave their cloisters and convents, Regnaud argued in the Assembly for pensions to be provided for them. Furthermore, he wanted to prevent the destruction of religious buildings now that they were national property and being sold off to reduce the national defi cit. He was politically close to Mirabeau, Barnave, and Lameth, and supported them in their desire to restrict royal power but not abolish it, broadly accepting the programme of the Feuillants and the idea of a constitutional monarchy with two chambers.2
One of the principal contributions of Freemasonry to the Revolution was the idea that there is a basic equality between all men, as they had experienced in the working of their lodges. Regnaud had been a Freemason since 1780 in the Égalité lodge, which had been set up in the town as early as 1764. His colleague as deputy, de Bonnegens, was a member of the same lodge. Regnaud’s antagonism towards the clergy cannot be directly attributed to his Freemasonry because one of his associates in the lodge at Saint-Jean had been the curé of Brizambourg, in spite of offi
cial church disapproval towards clerical
membership. Of the 16 deputies elected for the three orders in the Aunis and the Saintonge (4 clergy, 4 nobles, and 8 thirds) 5 were Freemasons. Besides the two from Saint-Jean d’Angély, there was Alquier from La Rochelle, who
An Eye to the Future
221
soon joined La Concorde lodge in Paris, and de Richier was from L’Aimable concorde lodge in Rochefort. De Malartic who sat for the nobility was in a military lodge, La Parfaite union of the Vermaidois Regiment. Recent pastoral letters from Popes Clement XII and Benedict XIV had condemned the craft, so there were no clerical masons elected as deputies.3 Regnaud opted for secularism, and was in fi rm support of the change made in May 1791 which took the registration of births, marriages, and deaths away from the Church and established the État civil, with the registers at the Mairie.4
Regnaud was a member of the earliest Jacobin Club (as the Breton Club was re-named when the National Assembly moved to Paris in November 1789), but sat with the Feuillants in the Assembly in July 1791 because his opinion was increasingly anchored in constitutional monarchy. His idea of it seemed more monarchist than constitutional, and he did not want to entertain the idea of a Republic, which he described as ‘an open suitcase into which the demagogues of the Cordeliers Club (Danton and company) were ready to slip all sorts of things’.5
Regnaud spoke on a great number of subjects while he was in the Estates-General and the Constituent Assembly which followed it. In September, before the move to Paris, he urged keeping the royal succession from passing to the Spanish Bourbons. He denounced the old order parlements as being ‘like so many citadels of reaction’. He defended Necker’s fi nancial policy, and spoke in favour of Saintes being the capital of the Charente-Inférieure in preference to La Rochelle.
Th
e Assembly sent Regnaud on mission to the Ain, Haute-Saône, Jura, and Doubs in turn to receive the oath of troops stationed in each of the frontier departments, and to take measures for safeguarding public order and the security of the State: he was an early precursor of those representatives of the Convention whose personal rule was often so extreme. He did all this in a fortnight, coming back to a Paris in turmoil because of the royal family’s fl ight to Varennes. Regnaud opposed the Republicans in the salons of Sophie de Condorcet and Lucille Desmoulins, whose husband Camille published Le Vieux Cordelier as the fi rst Republican newspaper in France.
He excused the king’s attempt to escape from the Assembly’s control by going to the eastern frontier of France in terms of the king having been abducted, and pressed for a decree to ensure the individual liberty of the unfortunate sovereign. From then on Regnaud was personally dedicated to the cause of constitutional monarchy in the person of Louis XVI.
On the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille to be held on 17 July 1791, the members of the Cordeliers Club intended to demand the
222 Th
e Unseen Terror
setting up of a Republic.6 But on the day before, Regnaud had announced in the Assembly that he had heard of the existence of a faction ready to make trouble at the Champs de Mars, where the petition was going to be drawn up. He pressed for the proclamation of martial law and his suggestion was adopted. In anticipation of that acceptance, he had written a newspaper article for a paper called La Queue de Postillon. Th e patriots who wanted
to use the occasion to end monarchy were enraged, and the owner of that paper was a patriot. Regnaud dramatized the killing of a hairdresser and a man with a wooden leg found sheltering from the rain under the tribunal to justify Maire Bailly’s sending in of the National Guard under La Fayette and their shooting into the crowd. Th
e outcome was disastrous, with 50
people killed when they did not disperse, but the event shows Regnaud himself against the Jacobins, the future protagonists of the Terror.
When the Constituent Assembly abolished itself and there had to be new elections for the Legislative which replaced it in October 1791, with the former deputies not allowed to off er themselves as candidates, Regnaud stayed on in Paris and set up his law offi
ce. He made a good deal of money to add to
what he had inherited from his father, and acquired an apartment at 15, rue Taitbout, in the prosperous Chaussée d’Antin quarter. His offi ce had Mirabeau’s mother as a client. He wrote articles for L’Ami des Patriotes ou le Defen-seur de la Constitution and continued to collaborate in the Journal de Paris as a friend of the poet André Chénier and other literary giants. Th e Journal de
Paris supported constitutional monarchy and received funding from civil list money. Papers taken from Regnaud at the Restoration in 1815 confi rm that he was with the Feuillants, who were all constitutional monarchists. Th ey
took their name from their meeting place in the former convent of the Strict Bernadines which had become the royal chapel after the move from Versailles in October 1789. He had exchanged letters with opponents of revolution like Montmorin, who had been foreign minister and worked hard to win favour for the court, allegedly persuading Mirabeau to support the king. Th ere
were also letters between Regnaud and Bertrand de Molleville, Tarbé, and Narbonne, ministers during the time of the Constituent Assembly and now members of the king’s own intimate council which he created in an attempt to avoid his Girondin ministers. Papers seized on 10 August 1792 in the offi ce
of the Intendant of the Civil List, Arnault de Laporte, confi rm that Regnaud had a permanent entry pass into the Tuileries.7
Serious accusations were made by the Girondin journalist J.-L. Carra8
in March 1792 based on reports by the committee of surveillance of the
An Eye to the Future
223
Assembly. ‘Calumny is my trade and I am in the pay of the Jacobins’, Carra said. Deputies immune from prosecution had given him the information for his press articles. He reported that there was an ‘Austrian Committee’
under the presidency of the Princesse de Lamballe. She had
come back from emigration to be at the disposal of the queen, who was called l’Autrichienne as soon as war with Austria was declared. Carra accused Regnaud and others of being members of this secret committee. All the accused denied that there was any such body.
It was true, however, that Arnault de Laporte had called meetings at the Tuileries. Th
e Princesse de Lamballe is supposed to have presided as the Queen’s representative. Hua, a member of the palace staff admitted that there was politicking even if no committee, but he did not say that Regnaud was involved.9 Yet, whether there was such a committee or not, Regnaud certainly kept company with supposed members of it, and took part in political meetings in a reading room in a vast apartment in the Hôtel de Londres at 14, rue de Richelieu. It had been rented in March 1792 by Richer de Sérizy Parisol de la Valette, Knight of Malta, and was one of the chief counter-revolutionary meeting places.
A contemporary commentator, Dubois-Crancy, argued that Regnaud was motivated by money from the civil list to support the King. But the political development of Regnaud is coherent enough without the persuasions of bribery.10 Regnaud had mixed with Montmorin, Bertrand de Molleville, Omer Talon, and Radix de Saint-Foi – all staunch royalists. He kept to a position that could be taken for ambiguous for several months, though his actions were not driven by money since he had enough of his own. It was mistrust of the Republican government, with no more than the appearance of democracy in his eyes, which motivated him. Th e time
for making plans was rapidly passing, and desperate times were approaching for those who supported the monarchy in any form. Th
e king had
tried to use his veto to protect refractory priests from being deported and, on 20 June 1792, sans-culottes invaded the Palace to make him drink the health of the nation and wear a bonnet of liberty while the queen and the royal children hid behind stacked tables in another room during the two hours the incident lasted. As a National Guard captain in command of the grenadiers of the Filles de Saint-Th
The Unseen Terror Page 31
