No More Learning

Ideological Underpinnings
Identifying the ideological roots of the French Revolution is especially challenging because none of the leading participants began with a blueprint for the future political order that was well thought out? Without being able to consult an explicit revolutionary program, therefore, students of the pe- riod must try to identify the central ideas that informed political debate and drove political action, while recognizing that this vocabulary shifted in re-
5 See Robert Howard Lord, The Second Partition of Poland: A Study in Diplomatic History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1915), 75-82; Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, 51-55; and Clapham, "Pitt's First Decade," 190-97?
6 See Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 1:422-29; Lord, Second Partition, chaps. 1, 5-{i,
7 As the Jacobin Camille Desmoulins later recalled: "In all France there were not ten of us who were republicans prior to 1789. " Quoted in Henri Peyre, "The Influence of Eighteenth Century Ideas on the French Revolution," in his Historical and Critical Essays (Lincoln: Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1968), 72.
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sponse to the revolutionary process itsel? . 8 The concepts that shaped the rev- olution were not fixed, but they did provide the intellectual arsenal that rival groups employed both to understand the events in which they were immersed and to rally support and discredit opposition. And while these ideological underpinnings did not determine the course or outcome of the revolution, they did form the elements from which it was built. 9
What are the main ideas that shaped the revolution in France? At the risk of oversimplifying, I have identified four interrelated themes in prerevolu- tionary political discourse that merit particular attention.
The first key theme was a commitment to reason and natural law, to- gether with the concomitant belief that political action could correct existing social ills. In addition to undermining support for the Church, the notion that human affairs could be ordered according to the dictates of reason was a potent solvent to a conception of society based on privileged orders and monarchical authority. 10 This discourse implied that departures from tradi-
tion were permissible, provided they were based on reason, and faith in the power of reason helped created a new faith in politics and its unlimited ca- pacity for action. 11
A second theme was a broad ideological assault on the legitimacy of the absolutist state. This discourse contained several distinct but mutually rein- forcing strands: one focusing on "justice" (defined as restraint on monarchi- cal will}, another extolling liberty and equality and attacking the institutions of aristocratic privilege, and a third challenging the image of the king as
8 This war of ideas took place in a society that was experiencing an explosion in publishing. making it possible to disseminate contending opinions more rapidly and widely than ever be- fore. See Robert Damton and Daniel Roche, eds. , Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800(Berkeley:UniversityofCaliforniaPress, 1989);JeremyPopkin,RevolutionaryNews: The Press in France 1 789-1799 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990); and Colin Jones, ed. , The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (New York: Longman, 1988), 26o-62.
9 "The ideology embraced by the National Assembly . . . was . . . less a blueprint than a set of architectural principles that could be applied to the construction of quite different so- ciopolitical orders. " William Sewell, "Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case," Journal ofModern History 57, no. 1 (1985), 71. See also Daniel Momet, Les Ori- gines intellectuelles de Ia revolutionfran? aise (1715-1787) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933), esp. 477; Peyre, "Influence of Eighteenth Century Ideas"; and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolu tion, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). :
10 "The Enlightenment insisted on the universal applicability of reason to human affairs It had scorn for all privilege no matter how ancient or venerable. " Sewell, "Ideologies and So- cial Revolutions," 65.
11 Fran. ;ois Furet argues that "the very bedrock of revolutionary consciousness" is the be- lief that "there is no human misfortune not amenable to a political solution. " Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 25. As products of the En! ightenment, the revolutionaries "believed in the absolute efficacy of politics-which they thought capable of recasting the body social and regenerating the indi- vidual. " Bronislaw Baczko, "Enlightenment," in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. Fran. ;ois Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1989), 662-64; and see Chartier, Cultural Origins, 198.
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God's chosen representative. If not revolutionary by themselves, each of these strands nourished doubts about the existing order and cleared the way for a fundamental change. 12
Third, the wide-ranging challenge to absolutism featured a continuing debate on the nature of the political community. Over time, the image of France as the personal possession of a sovereign king was supplanted by the idea that sovereignty was held by a single people united by language, terri- tory, blood, and other "natural" characteristics. This transformation from subjects to citizens was already evident in 1788, when Abbe Sieyes declared that the Third Estate was "everything appertaining to the nation. "13 The rev- olution completed this process by replacing an abstract notion of the king as the sovereign authority with a concept of "popular sovereignty" in which the nation was the embodiment of the "general will. "14
Finally, under the influence of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others, the ideological foundations of the French Revolution also contained a powerful moral dimension, centered on the concept of virtue. The importance at- tached to virtue helped discredit the old regime (which was seen as corrupt) and legitimated efforts to inculcate proper conduct as part of creating a new political order. Abelief in reason and in the limitless possibilities of politics also implied that "human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries, preferably traitors. "15 This tendency reached its peak dur- ing the Reign of Terror, when the Jacobins used the machinery of the state to promote virtue among the citizens, while seeking to eliminate any individ- uals whose opposition to the general will exposed their evil natures. 16
12 See Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. 25-27; Jeffrey Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); and Robert Damton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
13 Sieyes added that "the Nation is prior to everything, it is the source of everything. . . . Its will is always the supreme law. " His attack on privilege placed these orders outside the polit- ical community; illl his words, "the nobility does not belong to the social organization at all. . . . whatever is not off the third estate may not be regarded as belonging to the nation. What is the third estate? Everything! " Joseph Emmanuel Sieyes, "What Is the Third Estate? " in A Docu- mentary Survey ofthe French Revolution, ed. John Hall Stewart (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 44?
14 According to Leah Greenfeld, "the Nation replaced the king as the source of identity and focus of social solidarity, as previously the king had replaced God. " Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 16<Hi8. See also Alfred Cobban, "The Enlightenment and the French Revolution," in his Aspects ofthe French Revolution (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 25.
15 Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 26.
16 See Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), chaps. 8 and 10; and also Alfred Cobban, "The Fundamental Ideas of Robespierre," in his Aspects ofthe French Revolution; and Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
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These four broad and interrelated themes formed the worldview of the revolutionary vanguard in France? They set the terms and limits of debate throughout the revolutionary period and encouraged a number of specific attitudes and actions. 17 The appeal to reason and natural law contributed to the optimism that is essential for revolutionary action, and this attitude was strongly reinforced by the extraordinary events of 1789-91. The revolution- aries' own experience seemed to prove that society could be transformed ac- cording to the dictates of reason, and the possibilities for political and personal transformation were soon regarded as virtually limitless. This be- lief helped discredit the voices of moderation and encouraged the revolu- tionaries' faith that they could overcome any obstacle.
Like any ideology, the worldview of the French Revolution contained obvi- ous ambiguities and contradictions. On the one hand, faith in the preeminence of reason and the operation of universal laws encouraged the revolutionaries in France to view their achievements as a world-historical event whose prin- ciples were of universal validity. On the other hand, the simultaneous redefi- nition of the political community in terms of the French "nation" encouraged more self-interested and particularistic conceptions, a tendency reinforced by existing animosities (such as the rivalry with England).
Furthermore, the revolutionary process created a profound tension be- tween the explicit goal of liberty and the implicit principle of national unity. It replaced the authority of the king with the authority of "le peuple," and it linked popular sovereignty to equality and Rousseauist notions of the gen- eral will (l! "ather than placing it within a framework of individual rights and representative institutions). The revolution was supposed to free citizens from monarchical tyranny and arbitrary government authority, and create a nation consisting of a single body shorn of privileged orders. 18 In the absence of a theory of representation, however, these principles left France without a legitimate avenue for disagreement. Given the presumption of unity, the only outlet for opposition was conspiracy, which was also the most obvious explanation for any failure to achieve the revolution's lofty goals. Thus, any sign of dissent was a potential hazard to the unity of the nation, leaving rev- olutionary France peculiarly vulnerable to fears of plots and conspiracies. ? 9
Although the French Revolution was not the product of a self-conscious revolutionary movement originating under the ancien regime, its underly-
17 As Sewell puts it, ideologies "are at once constraining and enabling. They block certain possibilities, but they also create others. " "Ideologies and Social Revolutions," 6o.
? 18 As Furet points out, "the 'people' were defined by their aspirations, and as an indistinct aggregate of individual 'right' wills. By that expedient, which precluded representation, the revolutionary consciousness was able to reconstruct an imaginary social cohesion in tlhe name and on the basis of individual wills. " Interpreting the French Revolution, 27.
19 See Norman Hampson, Prelude to Terror: The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Con-
sensus, 1789-1791 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988), esp. 106-107; and Furet, Interpreting the
French Revolution, 51-55.
.
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ing principles resemble the ideal type set forth in chapter 2. The revolution- aries were confident of their ability to reshape politics, society, and even human nature itself, strongly inclined to consider their opponents inher- ently evil and deserving of extermination, and prone to uphold their own experience as a model for others. As we shall see, these views, which con- tinued to shape perceptions and political debate once the revolution was underway, had a powerful influence on relations between revolutionary France and the rest of Europe.
The Dismantling of the Ancien Regime and the Initial Foreign Response
The immediate cause of the French Revolution was the fiscal crisis trig- gered by French aid to the American colonies during their War of Indepen- dence, which broke the back of the archaic French tax system. 20 The nobility successfully resisted Louis XVI's efforts to impose new taxes in 1787, forcing the king to summon the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Under pressure from liberal nobles and provincial authorities, Louis and his min- isters agreed to double the size of the Third Estate (representing the com-
moners) in January 1789. They resisted demands to grant each deputy a single vote, however, in favor of the traditional practice of each order voting in unison. 21
The first decisive break came when the representatives of the three estates met at Versailles in May. After a month of futile debate over the voting pro- cedure, representatives of the Third Estate designated themselves a new Na- tional Assembly and invited members of the other orders to join. Louis reluctantly accepted this measure on June 23, but he also began assembling troops near the capital in preparation for a coup de main against the defiant deputies. Before he could launch his coup, however, the fear of an aristo- cratic reaction sparked a popular uprising in Paris and began to undermine the loyalty of the royal garrisons. Supporters of the Assembly had already begun to mobilize the Parisian population, and an angry mob stormed the
fortress of the Bastille on July 14. Informed that he could no longer count on his troops' allegiance, Louis agreed to disperse the regiments surrounding Paris and declared his support for the National Assembly on July 17. A new
20 See Doyle, Origins ofthe French Revolution, 43-53; Jean Egret, The French Pre-Revolution, 1787-88, trans. Wesley D. Camp, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); and John Fran- cis Bosher, French Finances, 177fr1795: From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
21 The First Estate represented the clergy, the Second Estate the nobility, and the Third Es- tate everyone else. Representatives for each order were chosen through local elections, and the local assemblies drew up petitions of grievances (known as cahiers de do! eances) for con- sideration by the king and Estates General.
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municipal government was formed in Paris, the Marquis de Lafayette be- came commander of the new National Guards, and the first wave of emi- gres departed, including the king's brothers, the comte d'Artois and comte de Provence. 22
The upheaval in Paris was accompanied by similar events in the provinces. The departure of the emigre aristocrats increased concerns about a reactionary conspiracy and helped spark the "Great Fear" that engulfed France from July 20 to August 4? Inspired by reports of armed brigands, food shortages, and aristocratic plots, rural mobs began burning chateaux, destroying manorial records, and seizing noble property. Provincial nota- bles began forming "permanent committees" to restore order, and these bodies began to supplant the municipal institutions of the ancien regime as royal authority waned. 23
Meanwhile, the deputies (now designated the National Constituent As- sembly) were launching a direct assault on the institutions of the ancien regime. The deputies voted to abolish the feudal order "in its entirety" on the night of August 4 and approved the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on August 27. Over the next twenty-six months, the Assembly abolished noble and clerical privileges and reorganized the insti- tutions of local government and the judiciary. The deputies also voted to confiscate Church property in November 1789, banned religious orders in February 1790, and passed a new Civil Constitution of the Clergy that placed the church under the formal control of the state in July. Clerical op-
position to these measures prompted a further decree in November 1790 that required priests to swear an oath of allegience to the constitution or be removed from office. 24
Predictably, these steps provoked considerable opposition. The king re- fused to sanction the August decrees, and renewed fears of a royalist coup
22 On these events, see William Doyle, The Oxford History ofFrench Revolution (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1988), 107-11; D. M. G. Sutherland, France 1789-1815: Re-ilolution and Counte-revr olution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 47-48, 59-68; George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, trans. Elizabeth M. Evanson (vol. 1) and John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti (vol. 2) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, 1964); 1:12o-24. On the dis- integration of the army, see Samuel F. Scott, The Response ofthe Royal Army to the French Revo- lution: The Role and Developmentofthe Line Army, 1787-1793 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 51-59; and Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army ofthe French Revolution:from Citizen-Soldiers to Instru- ment ofPowe-r, trans. Robert R. Palmer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 22-29.
23 TheclassicanalysisoftheGreatFearisGeorgesLefebvre,TheGreatFearof1789:Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). On the provincial revolts, see Lynn A. Hunt, "Committees and Communes: Local Politics and National Revolution in 1789,'' Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18, no. 3 (1976); and Sutherland, France, 70'-76.
24 For the texts of these decrees, see Stewart, Documentary Survey, chap. 2; for summaries, see Sutherland, France, 81HJ9; and Michel Vovelle, The Fall of the French Monarchy, 1 787-1792, trans. SusanBurke(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress,1984),146-2-6 .
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led an unruly mob to invade Versailles on October 5 and bring the royal family back to Paris, where the king's activities could be monitored more easily. The anticlerical measures angered many priests and parishioners, economic conditions worsened, and the emigre exodus continued. When the king's brothers began to solicit aid for a restoration from the other Euro- pean governments, the rumors of an "aristocratic conspiracy," once entirely a myth, began to acquire a real basis. 25
Over the next ten months, the debate over the constitution saw the emer- gence of several contending factions within the Assembly. These groups were not formal political parties but loose alignments of delegates who shared similar views on salient political issues. The largest faction was that of the moderates, which was eventually centered around a group meeting at the Feuillant Club. Composed primarily of liberal nobles such as the Mar- quis de Lafayette and members of the upper bourgeoisie, the Feuillants fa- vored a constitutional monarchy, the strict protection of property rights, limited suffrage, and a laissez-faire economic policy. The Feuillants' main ri- vals were their former associates in the Societe des Amis de la Constitution, popularly known as the Jacobin Club, from whom they had split in July
1791. The Jacobins were more distrustful of the king and more supportive of popular democracy, although they shared the Feuillants' desire to safeguard private property and were not yet opposed to the institution of the monar- chy. More radical groups included the Societe des? Amis des Oroits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (known as the Cordeliers Club) and the various popular associations that were then emerging among the artisans and poorer classes of Paris. 26
The next phase followed Louis's unsuccessful attempt to flee from Paris in June 1791? 7 The royal family was captured and returned to Paris on June 25, but this new evidence of the king's attitude sparked renewed fears of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy and brought calls by the more radical deputies for the abolition of the monarchy. The moderates still hoped to persuade the king to accept the new constitution, however, and tried to dis- courage foreign intervention by treating Louis leniently. A commission of inquiry accepted the Feuillants' claims that the king had been abducted and declared Louis innocent of treason but suspended his royal functions provi- sionally. The verdict intensified the divisions within the revolutionary
25 See Sutherland, France, 82-85, 124; Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1 : 13o-35; and Hampson, Prelude to Terror, 77-81.
26 This account does not do justice to the diverse political groups that emerged after 1789; for a summary, see Jones, Longman Companion to the French Revolution, 170"-91. For back- ground, see Michael Kennedy, TheJacobin Club in the French Revolution: The First Years (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. chap. 15; and Patrice Gueniffey and Ran Halevi, "Clubs and Popular Societies," in Furet and Ozouf, Critical Dictionary, 458-72.
27 The abortive escape is described in detail in J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (Ox- ford: Basil Blackwell, 1943}, 198-210.
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movement, and Lafayette and the National Guards were forced to suppress a radical demonstration in the Champ de Mars in August.
Louis finally agreed to accept the constitution on September 14, and the Constituent As- sembly disbanded pending the election of a new Legislative Assembly. 28
At first, the main effect of the revolution in the international arena was to isolate France. Both allies and adversaries now discounted French power and influence and tended to focus their attention on other matters. At the same time, there were signs that the revolution might affect other states' in- terests adversely, and this fear grew as the revolution progressed.
The potentially threatening character of the French Revolution to foreign states had become apparent once the National Assembly began drafting a constitution in August 1789. By proclaiming that all men had the right to govern themselves, the universalist language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man constituted an implicit challenge to the legitimacy of the other European states. The decrees abolishing the feudal regime in France also threatened the traditional privileges of several foreign rulers, most no- tably in Alsace and Avignon. 29 The Assembly now claimed these territories on the basis of "popular sovereignty," an innovation that called the legal framework of the European political order into question. If the Assembly could rescind an existing treaty merely by invoking the will of the people, then no prior treaty (including any guaranteeing the present borders) was safe. Moreover, the notion of exclusive sovereignty based on the national will clashed with the heterogeneous and overlapping lines of authority that still held sway in much of Europe, especially in Germany. From the very be- ginning, therefore, the principles of the revolution posed a possible danger to political stability in Europe. 30
These inherent conflicts were magnified by some predictable side-effects of the revolutionary process itself. Not only had the events of 1789 gener- ated an enthusiastic response from intellectuals throughout Europe, but Paris quickly became a magnet for revolutionary sympathizers from other
28 See Sutherland, France, 127-31.
29 Alsace had been ceded t o France b y the Treaty o f Westphalia i n 1648, but the treaty also preserved the feudal rights of several German princes "in perpetuity. " The electors of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz, the bishop of Basel, the duke of Wi. irttemberg, and the margrave of Baden protested the Assembly's action. Leopold II backed their claims in his capacity as Holy Roman Emperor. A rebellion in Avignon in June 1790 ousted the papal authorities, and the population voted to petition the Assembly for absorption by France, which granted the re- questinFebruary 1791. SeeSydneySeymourBiro,TheGermanPolicyofRevolutionaryFrance: A Study in French Diplomacy during the War of the First Coalition, 1 792-1 797, (Cambridge: Har- vard University Press, 1957), 1:39-42; and Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, 77, and The French Revolulion in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland, 1792-1802 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 61? 2.
30 SeeDavidArmstrong,RevolutionandWorldOrder:TheRevolutionaryStateinInternational Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 85; and Schroeder, Transformation ofEuropean Politics,
71-'lJ
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countries. Such men saw events in France as heralding a new age of univer- sal liberty, and they offered their own support for the revolution while seek- ing French assistance for their own ambitions at home. In June 1790, for example, a sympathetic German baron named Jean-Baptiste (Anacharsis) Cloots, self-proclaimed orateur du genre humain, brought an international delegation before the Assembly to praise the revolution as "a trumpet . . . [that] has reached to the four corners of the globe, . . . a choir of 25 million free men [that] has reawakened people entombed in a long slavery. "31 But as Georges Lefebvre notes, "separation from their homeland induced errors of fact and judgment: they easily confused desires with reality and passed on their delusions to their French comrades. " Moreover, their presence in Paris and their activities there came to be seen as threatening by other states. 32
In the same way, the emigres who left France after 1789 sought assistance in restoring the old regime by telling foreign leaders that the revolution was a serious threat to other countries and by portraying the new regime as ille- gitimate, unpopular, and vulnerable. 33 Although they achieved only mixed results, they contributed to the growth of antirevolutionary sentiments in several European capitals. 34 More importantly, their activities fueled the rev- olutionaries' recurring fears of an aristocratic conspiracy, even though for- eign monarchs did not oppose the revolution until the summer of 1791. 35 Thus, just as the migration of foreign revolutionaries exaggerated the dan- ger France seemed to pose to other states, spurring hopes and fears of addi- tional upheavals elsewhere, the emigres simultaneously reinforced foreign fears about the revolution and French perceptions of foreign hostility. 36
Despite these omens, foreign reactions to the revolution were initially rather mild. Some European leaders took steps to contain the spread of rev- olutionary ideas, but they ignored the emigres' calls for action and made lit-
31 Quoted in Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, 74? See also Albert Mathiez, La Revolution et les etrangers: cosmopolitisme et difence nationale, (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1918), chaps. 3-4; Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:18o; Jacques Godechot, La Grande nation: L'Expansion revo- lutionnaire de Ia France dans le monde de 1 789 ii 1 799, 2d ed. (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983), 151, 213; and Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 2:53-55.
32 See Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:181 and passim; and Robert R. Palmer, The World ofthe French Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 84-86.
33 Thus, the comte d'Artois told Frederick William in January 1790 that the French people were "sighing for foreign help. " Quoted in Clapham, Causes of the War of 1 792, 23-24. Emigre agents also claimed the revolution was the work of an international network (the "Society of Propaganda") whose aim was to foment revolution throughout Europe. As one royalist put it, "If this should not be true, it would at least be worth it to spread the story. " Quoted in Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 2:51-52.
34 See Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:188.
35 See Blanning, French Revolution and Germany, 47-58, and French Revolutionary Wars, 85; and Biro, German Policy, 1:36-37.
36 Lefebvre observes that the role the emigres played abroad "bore close resemblance to that of political refugees in France. " French Revolution, 1:188.
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tle or no effort to organize a counterrevolutionary campaign until the revo- . lution was nearly two years old. Emperor Leopold expelled the emigres' emissary in January 1791 and forced d'Artois to depart for Mantua in May. The royal family's own search for foreign support was unsuccessful, despifre the close family connections between Louis and his queen and several rul- ing houses of Europe. Although Marie Antoinette maintained an active cor- respondence and Louis dispatched a personal emissary to negotiate for foreign assistance, their efforts brought only words of encouragement and counsels of patience. 37
One reason for restraint was the favorable reaction that the revolution had produced among many European elites. If men such as Edmund Burke were suspicious, artists and intellectuals such as Kant, Fichte, Blake, and Beethoven all welcomed the apparent triumph of liberty in France. 38 This fa- vorable view was shared by prominent political leaders: Thomas Jefferson described events in France as "the first chapter of the history of European liberty," and the leader of the English Whigs, Charles James Fox, called the fall of the Bastille "the greatest and best event that has happened in the world. " Other Englishmen-including Prime Minister William Pitt-were
reminded of England's own revolution and were flattered that France seemed to be following a similar path. 39 Although elites in Russia, Sweden, and Spain tended to see the revolution as illegitimate and dangerous, liberali monarchs such as Joseph II and Leopold I were more sympathetic. 40
European statesmen also welcomed the revolution because it reduced French power, thereby decreasing the danger that prerevolutionary France had
37 The queen's efforts to enlist foreign support are chronicled in Alfred Ritter von Ameth, ed. , Marie Antoinette, joseph II, und Leopold II: Ihr Briefwechse/ (Leipzig: K. F. Kohler, 1866); and 0. G. de Heidenstam, The Letters ofMarie Antoinette, Fersen, and Barnave (New York: Frank Maurice, n. d. ).
38 On European reactions to the revolution, see Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:179-87; Albert Soboul, The French Revolution, 1 787-1799, trans. Alan Forrest and Colin Jones (New York: Vin? tage, 1975), 216-18; Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 2:16-27, 53; George Rude, Revolutionary Ew- rope, 1783-1815 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964}, 18o-82; G. P. Gooch, "Germany and the French Revolution," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 3, no. 10 (1916), esp. 55-56; Vovelle, Fallofthe French Monarchy, 137-41; Alfred Cobban, ed. , The Debate on the French Revolution (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960); and Philip Anthony Brown, The French Revolution in English History (London: Crosby Lockwood and Son, 1918), 29-50.
39 Pitt told the House of Commons in February 1790 that "whenever the situation of France shall become restored, . . . France will enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate; . . . [I cannot] regard with envious eyes, an approximation in neighbouring states to those senti- ments which are the characteristic features of every British subject. " Quotations from Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U. S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 98; Brown, French Revolution in English History, 38-39; John Holland Rose, Life of William Pitt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1924}, 1:551; Cobban, Debate on the French Revolution, 68-69.
40 In August 1790, for example, the Spanish foreign minister, Count Floridablanca, de- scribed the French democrats as "a wretched set. . . . If I had my way, I would put a cordon along the frontier, as if for a plague. " Quoted in Clapham, Causes of the War of 1 792, 33-
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posed and creating opportunities to profit at French expense. This attitude was nowhere more apparent than in England: to Pitt, France was "an object for compassion," while the duke of Leeds, then foreign secretary, remarked in 1789, "I defy the ablest heads in England to have planned, or its whole Wealth to have purchased, a Situation so fatal to its Rival, as that to which France is now reduced by her own Intestine commotions. " His successor, Lord Grenville, rejoiced that France would not "for many years be in a situation to molest the invaluable peace we now enjoy," and the English ambassador at the Hague, William Eden (later Lord Auckland), judged that France had "ceased
to be an object of alarm" and would be "of little importance with respect to its external politics. " Even Burke, whose worries focused on the spread of sub- versive ideas, referred to the French as "the ablest architects of ruin . . . in the world. "41 Thus, when the emigres offered them colonial concessions in ex- change for Briftish support, England's leaders chose the more immediate ben- efits of neutrality. As James Burges, undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, wrote Auckland in December 1790: "We have felt too strongly the immense ad- vantages to be derived by this country from such a state of anarchy and weak- ness as France is at present plunged in to be so mad as to interfere in any measure that may . . . tend to [give] France . . . the power to injure us. "42
France's reduced power was equally apparent to the eastern monarchies.
Frederick William saw the revolution as a blow to the Franco-Austrian al- liance and began contemplating the acquisition of French territory once the Convention of Reichenbach ended his plans for war against Austria. 43 Simi- larly, Catherine II's hostility toward the revolution did not blind her to its strategic benefits: the revolutionary crisis had left France unable to come to the aid of Poland, Sweden, or Turkey, and Catherine's subsequent denunci- ations of the new regime were partly intended to draw Prussian and Aus- trian attention westwards so as to free Russia's hand in the east. 44 Some
41 See Rose, Life ofPitt, 1:542-43; Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, 79-Bo, 132; Rude, Rev- olutionary Europe, 181; and Harvey Mitchell, The Underground Waragainst Revolutionary France: The Missions ofWilliam Wickham, 1794-1Boo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 14. Such views were not confined to the English; one French agent reported in May 1790 that "England has nothing more to fear from France and can without qualms and without fear assume the su- premacy of the [New and Old] worlds. " Quoted in Albert Sorel, L'Europe et Ia revolution
Jranfaise (Paris: E. Pion, Nourrit, 1883-1912), 2:91.
42 QuotedinClapham,CausesoftheWarof1792,16. AucklandsharedBurges'sview,writing
Grenville, "I heartily detest . . . the whole system of the Democrates [sic] . . . but I am not sure that the continued course of their struggles . . . would not be beneficial to our political interests, and the best security to the permanence of our prosperity. " Quoted in Mitchell, Underground War, 19.
43 The court in Berlin reportedly believed that "the great popular revolution in France will prevent that country effectually from interfering in any shape in favour of the Imperial courts. " Clapham, "Pitt's First Decade," 190.
44 In November 1791, Catherine reportedly told her secretary that she was "racking her brains to push the Courts of Vienna and Berlin into the French enterprise, so that she might have her own elbows free. " Quoted in Lord, Second Partition of Poland, 274; and see also Clapham, "Pitt's First Decade," 190.
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Austrian officials were pleased to watch French power decline, and Leopold began exploring a renewed alliance with England. Thus, the initially mild reaction of the other great powers was partly due to the strategic benefits that each hoped to gain from the disarray in France.
The belief that the revolution posed little danger at first was reinforced by the caution and circumspection that characterized French diplomacy from 1789 to 1791. When the Spanish seizure of English fishing vess? ls in the Nootka Sound brought the two nations to the brink of war in 1790, for ex- ample, the Assembly's de facto refusal to honor the Family Compact left Spain isolated and forced Madrid to beat a hasty retreat. 45 Louis did order the arming of fourteen ships of the line as a precautionary measure in May, but this move led the Assembly to decree that any declaration of war was subject to their approval. In a further burst of idealism, the deputies also voted to renounce "the undertaking of any war with a view of making con-
quests" and declared that France would not use force "against the liberty of any people. "46 By limiting royal authority over the conduct of foreign policy, these measures appeared to reduce French influence even more. The As- sembly was equally unresponsive when Austria suppressed a revolt in the Netherlands later in the year, reinforcing the prevailing image of French im- potence.
In addition, despite having renounced feudalism in August 1789, the As- sembly treated the feudal rights of foreign powers cautiously. It offered to indemnify the Rhenish princes whose lands had been appropriated in Al- sace and refrained from annexing Avignon until the pope had openly de- clared his own opposition to the revolution. Nor was the threat to the existing order that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the renuncia- tion of feudalism embodied as novel or as far-reaching as it first appeared: the French monarchy had violated the rights of foreign princes on numer- ous occasions before the revolution, and other rulers had acted similarly in their own realms. The situation in Avignon was equally muddled, as the French claim to the territory rested on both the notion of popular sover- eignty and a number of traditional legal precedents. Given that annexation was common under the old regime, the Assembly's assertion of French sov- ereignty over a small enclave lying entirely within French borders hardly
45 The tepid French response may have been partly due to English bribes to the comte de Mirabeau, the dominant figure in the Assembly during this period. See John Ehrman, The Younger Pitt, vol. 1: The Years ofAcclaim (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1969), 553? 8; Rose, Life of Pitt, 1:577-81; and Clapham, "Pitt's First Decade," 198-200.
46 The decree was incorporated in the Constitution of 1791, and the comte de Mirabeau de- clared that "the moment is not far off when liberty will acquit mankind of the crime of war. " Quoted in Gunther E. Rothenburg, "The Origins, Causes, and Extension of the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon," in The Origins and Prevention ofMajor Wars, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2o6; and see Stewart, Documentary Survey, 260.
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posed a radical threat to the existing order. Until 1791, in short, the revolu- tion in France simply did not appear that dangerous. 47
Foreign reactions were further muted by the unpopularity of the emigres and the obviously self-serving nature of their testimony. Although the emi- gres were greeted warmly by some rulers (and were subsidized by Cather- ine the Great), their extravagance and vanity won them few friends in foreign courts and made them something of a nuisance in their adopted places of residence. 48 Moreover, the French royal family usually opposed their efforts, fearing that a restoration conducted under the auspices of the emigres would weaken royal authority even more than the Assembly had. 49 Louis repeatedly rejected the emigres' suggestions that he flee, preferring to make his own arrangements, and Louis explicitly warned Leopold not to support the emigres (which the Austrian ruler was loath to do in any case). Contacts with emigre agents did reinforce Prussian revisionism (though Frederick William hardly needed encouragement), but England and Austria remained largely immune from their blandishments. 5? During the Nootka Sound dispute, for example, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Gower, wrote that "the aristocratical party has little to hope from peace and shews evident signs of wishing to profit by the confusion which a war would cer- tainly occasion. " During the summer, the discovery that counterrevolution- ary groups were trying to provoke a war between England and France by blaming the revolution on English interference led Pitt to send two agents to
France to reassure the Assembly of England's pacific intentions and con- vince it not to support Spain. 51 Thus, the royalists' efforts to sound the alarm generally feB flat at this stage.
Last but by no means least, the revolution in France received modest at- tention because the great powers were preoccupied by more pressing prob- lems elsewhere. Russia was at war with Turkey and Sweden and faced a direct challenge from the Poles, while Prussia was backing the Polish rebels
47 See Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:196--97; Blanning, French Revolutionary Wars, 76-78; Clapham, Causes ofthe Warof1792, 19-21; and Schroeder, Transformation ofEuropean Politics, 7J.
48 On the activities of the emigres and foreign responses to them, see Blanning, French Rev- olution in Germany, 52-53, 6o-61; Biro, German Policy, 1:42-45; Lefebvre, French Revolution, 1:187-88; and Massimo Boffa, "Emigres," in Furet and Ozouf, Critical Dictionary, 326-28.
49 Rivalry between the crown and the nobility predated the revolution. The comtes d'Ar- tois and Provence sought to limit royal authority and preserve noble and provincial privi- leges. See Albert Goodwin, "Calonne, the Assembly of French Notables of 1787 and the Origins of the Revolte Nobiliaire," English Historical Review 61, nos. 24o-41 (1946).
50 See Lord, Second Partition ofPoland, 159; and also J. Holland Rose, "The Comte d'Artois and Pitt in December 1789,'' English Historical Review 30, no. 118 (1915).
51 Pitt's instructions convey his desire to remain aloof: "In the present circumstances the ut- most care is necessary to use no language which can lead to an expectation of our taking mea- sures to forward the internal views of any political party. " Quoted in Mitchell, Underground War, 17-18.
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and concocting its own schemes for aggrandizement. Austria's army was bogged down against the Turks, unrest at home was spreading, the Nether- lands were in open revolt, and Prussia's restless revisionism remained a se- rious concern. England and Spain were at loggerheads for most of 1790, and Pitt was more concerned about the balance of power in the East than the col- lapse of England's rival across the Channel. Spain, Sweden, and the Rhen- ish princes were genuinely alarmed by the revolution but were too weak to act alone. Although events in France were of great interest, other problems still took precedence.