Europe: A History (145 page)
CHOUAN
F
OR
most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the local politics of the western region of the Département of the Sarthe, beyond Le Mans, was dominated by a solid right-wing, anti-republican tradition. It stood in marked contrast to the region to the east, dominated by an equally solid left-wing, anti-clerical and pro-republican block,
la zone rouge
, which in the 1960s was still voting Communist. The pattern could not be attributed to social, landholding, or religious factors. According to France’s leading rural historian, it can only be explained by the lingering trauma of the revolt of the Chouans of 1793–9. This is all the more remarkable since the
cahiers de doléances
of 1789 show that the most militant protests against tithe and clergy emanated from the west, not the east. The conduct of the revolutionary Republic was apparently so extreme that it converted its original supporters into implacable enemies. Electoral behaviour in the Fifth Republic was still being influenced by the mistakes of the First. ‘It is impossible’, wrote Le Roy Ladurie, ‘to explain the present by the present.’
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If this is true of one department of France, how much more does it apply to Europe as a whole?
Violence is the one feature of the Revolution which its critics have always found most repulsive. It took many forms. Mob rule and lynching occurred from the start on 14 July 1789, when the heads of the Bastille’s governor, du Launay, and of fellow victims were paraded round Paris on pikes. Wanton attacks against the persons and property of priests and nobles were commonplace. There were random massacres, such as the slaughter in the Paris prisons in September 1792; there were many assassinations, such as that of Marat; and there were terrible revenge killings, such as were perpetrated in Marseilles after the fall of the Jacobins. None of these events was unique. But two aspects of revolutionary violence had no precedent: one was the sheer scale of military casualties that arose from the use of mass conscript armies; the other was the cold-blooded reign of political terror unleashed by the Jacobins. In the realm of mass psychology, both these phenomena were connected to the vast energies which sent a despondent and bankrupt nation on a twenty-year spree of enthusiastic conquest. They were both avoidable.
The Reign of Terror was conceived by the (second) Committee of Public Safety and carried out as a deliberate instrument of policy. It was not confined to the destruction of the Revolution’s active opponents. It was designed to create such a climate of fear and uncertainty that the very thought of opposition would be paralysed. Its twin weapons were to be found on the one hand in the Law of Suspects of Prairial and, on the other, in the Revolutionary Tribunal. The former required all citizens to denounce anyone who might be suspected of harbouring ill will towards the authorities. Linked to the Law of Maximum Prices, which turned the whole economic sphere into a source of potential crime, it exposed every French family to the possibility of sudden, baseless catastrophe. The latter law, which rarely issued anything but a summary death sentence, fed the guillotine with a constant supply of innocents. The total tally in Paris ran into tens of thousands. In the provinces, it was backed by military force. It is a sobering thought to realize that for every victim of the Terror killed in Paris there were ten who were killed in the Vendèe.
Yet the ethos of the Terror does not cease to amaze. It produced a climate of spies, informers, and unlimited suspicion. It produced the scenes of crowded tumbrils carting the condemned through hate-filled streets, of men and women facing death, alternately serene or wretchedly broken, of the ghoulish
tricoteuses
knitting away beside the guillotine as severed heads dropped into the nearby basket. Through the dire extremity of the circumstances, it produced a large repertoire of grim humour. Danton, when asked for his name and abode, replied: ‘I am Danton, a name tolerably well known. My abode is Le Néant [Annihilation]; but I shall live in the Pantheon of History/ Desmoulins, when asked for his age, said, ‘My age is that of the
bon sansculotte
Jesus: a fatal age for revolutionaries.’ He was 38. Louis XVI on the scaffold started an unfinished speech: ‘I die innocent, and I
forgive my enemies,’ he began, ‘I wish that my blood …’ Danton, in the same straits, said, ‘Danton, no weakness’; then: ‘Executioner, show them my head; it’s worth showing.’ Robespierre, who had earlier taken a pistol shot through the jaw, could only shriek incoherendy.
ROUGE
T
HE
tricolour of 1789 was made up from the white of France’s royal standard and the red and blue ensign of Paris. It was destined to become the flag of the French Republic. The same colours, arranged horizontally, were adopted by the Batavian Republic in 1794, in succession to the similar but much older flag of the United Provinces.
But it was the red flag which the revolutionaries soon adopted. In Roman times, the red flag had signified war. Red was the colour of blood, fire, and magic. By tradition its modern career began in 1791, when the crowd attacking the Tuileries picked up a blood-soaked royal standard. Henceforth, ‘red’ and ‘white’ were the accepted colour codes for revolution and counter-revolution. Stendhal used the variant of
Le Rouge et le Noir
for his depiction of the struggle between the radicals and the clerical reaction under the Restoration.
The colour-coding of political movements has deep connotations. Red was taken up by Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’, by socialists, and most fervently by the Communists. Green, the colour of the land (and once of the Merovingians), was adopted by peasant parties, by Irish patriots, and much later by the environmentalists. ‘True blue’, once a Spanish epithet for aristocratic blood, suited British Tories and other conservatives. The Unionists preferred
[ORANGE]
and the Liberals yellow. The Nazis, from the SA uniforms, were first known as ‘Browns’. Later, from the uniform of the SS, they were associated with black, which for others was the traditional European colour for evil, death, and piracy. In their concentration camps, they forced prisoners to wear colour patches according to the scheme of Red = political; green = criminal; black = antisocial; pink = homosexual; violet = Jehovah’s Witness; brown = gypsy; yellow = Jew.
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Ambiguities abound. In Catholic symbolism, red stands for martyrdom and cardinals, white for purity and chastity, blue for hope and for the Virgin Mary, and black for grief, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits. In the age of racial consciousness and political correctness, ‘black is beautiful’; ‘whites’ are as unwelcome as ‘dead males’, ‘redskins’ have to be changed to ‘cardinals’; and the favourite metaphor is the rainbow.
Many of the perpetrators of revolutionary violence, like Robespierre, met a violent death themselves. Westermann, the ‘Butcher of the Vendèe’, died on the same scaffold as Danton. The Directory initiated trials which punished some of the more notorious sadists.
Legislative reform followed the same broad trends as the Revolution itself, passing through constitutional, republican, and imperial phases. The effect was immensely confusing. The institutions of the old order were abolished, and replaced by abortive or short-lived expedients, which the Empire then overturned or modified for its own purposes. The eventual offspring often consisted of strange hybrid creatures, neither
ancien
fish nor revolutionary fowl. Hereditary nobility, for example, was abolished in 1789, together with the other social estates. Under the Republic, all people were reduced to the one rank,
citoyen
or
citoyenne
(citizen). Bonaparte introduced the idea of advancement by merit,
la carrière ouverte awe talents;
and the Empire adopted a hierarchical system of new ranks and titles, an aristocracy of princes, dukes, and counts, based on state service. The
Legion d’Honneur
(1802) was Napoleon’s own idea for an order of merit.
In religion, the civil establishment of the clergy (1790) turned all priests into salaried state officials, and sequestrated all Church property. The Republic persecuted the non-jurors, disestablished the constitutional Church, de-christianized public life by inventing its own secular Calendar and its own secular cults, such as the Worship of the Supreme Being in 1794 or the Theophilanthropy of 1796. Bonaparte, after humiliating the Papacy, officially reintroduced Roman Catholicism. The Concordat of July 1801 recognized it as the religion of most French people, whilst leaving Church appointments, salaries, and property at the disposition of the State. Pope Pius VII attended the Emperor’s coronation at Notre Dame on 2 December 1804, but was too slow when Bonaparte placed the crown on his own head. Rightly or wrongly, Jean Bigot de Préamenau (1747–1825), Napoleon’s minister of cults, gave his name to religious intolerance.
[GUILLOTIN]
In education, the former monopoly of Church schools was broken. Under the Empire, the system of centralized state schooling based on the Ministry in Paris and on
lycées
in all major towns gave French life one of its most characteristic institutions.
In regional government, the old provinces were destroyed, together with their historic privileges and assemblies. The 83 smaller
départements
or districts, of 1790, usually named after rivers or mountain ranges, were retained under the Empire and greatly increased in number. Their internal organization was remodelled by Napoleon, who set up the office of departmental Prefect.
In the economic sphere, the Revolutionary regimes worked their way through
a long series of experiments. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly, having abolished the old revenues, was forced to invent a number of new land, income, and property taxes. It financed the nationalization of Church property by issuing the famous
assignats
or state bonds, which steadily deteriorated into a highly devalued form of paper money. In 1793 the Jacobins adopted an economic programme designed to meet the demands of a mass army, of the Terror, and of their own social ideology. Their doctrine of ‘a single will’ was applied to economics no less than politics, and produced a state-run armaments industry; rigorous price control through the Law of the Maximum, and the cancellation of all peasant debts. After 1795 the Directory looked increasingly to plunder and tribute as a substitute for economic policy. Napoleon added the outlook of an old-fashioned Colbertian mercantilist. Grandiose public projects were made possible by the priority given to the regular inward flow of cash.
Both the Republic and the Empire were opposed to free trade, and the long struggle with the British over the control of commercial shipping began during the first Coalition. In November 1806 Napoleon’s Berlin Decree formally declared the British Isles to be in a state of blockade. ‘I wish’, he said, ‘to conquer the sea by the power of the land.’ The British response came in the Order in Council of 1807 forbidding all neutrals to trade with France, except under licence. This in turn provoked Napoleon’s Milan Decree of December 1807, threatening dire retribution on anyone following the British rules. The resultant Continental System was enforced in all countries occupied by the French, and was made a condition for Napoleon’s co-operation with other countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Russia. It gave Europe its first taste of a united economic community; but it also generated much of the resentment which undermined the French position.
Taxation endured many vicissitudes. The old hated taxes and exemptions disappeared. The constitutional regime aimed at equitable and universal taxation for all; whilst the Jacobins excised the requirement whereby the franchise was limited to taxpayers. The Directory moved back towards a democracy of property-owners. Under the Empire, although centralized land taxes were more efficiently run, the tax burden, especially on the peasants, was enormous.
The torrent of legislation in the 1790s caused a log-jam which could only be sorted out by systematic review and codification. Work started by the Convention in 1792 culminated in the towering Civil Code (1804), soon to be renamed the
Code Napoléon
. The Code replaced the 360 local codes in force in 1789, and drove a middle path between the Roman law of the south and the customary law of the north, between the egalitarian principles of 1789 and the authoritarian, propertied reaction of the Directory. (Common law lost its place in the civil sphere.) The universal rights of citizenship, and of equality before the law, were confirmed. In family law, civil marriage and divorce were retained; but the equal division of property was limited to male heirs. Married women were judged ‘incapable’ of making contracts. This Code has profoundly influenced the social development of at least thirty countries.
In the long run the Revolution probably had its greatest impact in the realm of pure ideas. Much of this detailed legislation was due for further revision after 1815, or was applicable only in France. But many of the basic ideas, and ideals, remained in existence for all the world to contemplate, even where they found no immediate form of practical expression. Republicanism, for example, was defeated in France long before the restoration of the monarchy in 1814–15. But it remained alive to feed a tradition which reasserted itself in 1848–51, and took permanent hold of the country after 1871. Since monarchy was still the predominant mode of government in nineteenth-century Europe, the memory and example of the first French Republic of 1792–9 could not fail to offer powerful attractions.
The idea of revolution itself was irrepressible, even where particular revolutionary movements were repressed. Prior to 1789 most Europeans held a static view of the political and social order, where change could at best be limited and gradual. After 1789 everyone knew that the world could be turned upside down, that determined men could mobilize the social forces and psychological motors which underlay the surface of the most tranquil society. This realization aroused widespread panic and, in some quarters, hope. It also gave a powerful spur to the growth of the social sciences. Henceforth, revolution was to be distinguished from all lesser forms of rebellion,
jacquerie
, or
putsch
.
