Can there exist a more reasonable and incontestable relationship than the one between policing and the science of mœurs?
—J. Peuchet, “Discours préliminaire,” Jurisprudence, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1791
Standing before the National Convention on February 5, 1794 (17 Pluviôse, Year II), Maximilien Robespierre delivered his most famous speech, “On the Principles of Political Morality.” “The moral force of popular government in times of revolution,” he declared, “is both virtue and terror.” Few statements express so succinctly the pathological spirit of the Terror. For historian R. R. Palmer, the speech constitutes “one of the most notable utterances in the history of democracy.”1 Indeed, from the perspective of stable liberal democracies today, it reads like a blueprint for totalitarianism. Put in context, however, the speech can be understood as a tactical response to the revolutionary predicament. As a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety, which held executive power, Robespierre found himself pinched between those who wanted to dismantle the Terror (the Indulgents) and those who wanted to push it further (the hébertistes). He felt compelled to justify the Terror, aware that repudiating it would leave too many revolutionaries who had blood on their hands—not least himself—vulnerable to countervengeances. At the same time, he recognized that rampant vengeances were threatening to consume the whole Revolution. Thus, even as he presided over efforts to channel them into judicial institutions, he tried to inspire civil restraint by invoking virtue. Finally, he felt obliged to pay lip service to the principle of popular sovereignty, which Jacobins had used so effectively in wresting executive power from the monarchy in 1792 and from certain Girondin ministers in 1793.
In short, factions had to be defanged, the state’s monopoly on punishment had to be secured and legitimized, and society had to be both empowered and restrained. Translating these tasks into a convincing political program was not easy. But since “virtue” and “terror” struck chords with idealistic and vengeful revolutionaries, Robespierre wove them into his rhetoric. Propounding on virtue, he insisted that the duty of legislators was to “inspire patriotism, purify mœurs, elevate spirits and minds, and steer the passions of the human heart toward the public interest.”2 Under ordinary circumstances, he explained, virtue would suffice to sustain democracy. In the throes of revolution, however, virtue would have to be accompanied by terror. “Without virtue,” he warned, “terror is calamitous; without terror, virtue is impotent.” For Robespierre, the Terror was “nothing other than prompt, severe, and inflexible justice.”3 For many historians, it was a brutal police state, one that made a mockery of the civil liberties declared in 1789, especially the freedom of expression and of opinion. Indeed, by 1794, the revolutionary government was actively monitoring, repressing, and manipulating public opinion.
How did Robespierre, a strident advocate of press freedom at the Revolution’s outset, end up leading such a ruthless, propagandistic regime? Why did he think “virtue” and “terror” were compelling justifications for policing opinion? Some scholars point to the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In The Social Contract, Rousseau imagined democracy as a moral project involving constraints on individuals for the sake of the “general will.” Individuals, he theorized, achieve true freedom only by putting the community’s interests before their own. The community thus has the right and responsibility to compel all members to submit to the general will, by force if necessary. “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.”4 For Rousseau, the individual who attacks the general will “becomes by his crimes a rebel and a traitor to his country. . . . The judgment [stands as] proof . . . that he has broken the social contract, and consequently that he is no longer a member of the State. . . . He ought to be cut off from it by exile as a violator of the compact, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral person, he is simply a man.”5
Robespierre’s speeches echoed The Social Contract in many respects. According to the “incorruptible” deputy from Arras, virtue consisted in “the sublime sentiment that imagines the priority of the public interest over the interests of individuals,” and terror was to be directed against “the oppressors of humanity” who undermined this sentiment. Such similarities have led some scholars to see The Social Contract at the origins of the French Revolution, particularly the Terror. This faute à Rousseau thesis stretches back, in fact, to the period of the Revolution itself. Fulminating across the English Channel in 1790, Edmund Burke criticized French revolutionaries for spending too much time pondering Rousseau.6 Several nineteenth-century historians, picking up on Burke’s refrain, traced the Terror’s origins back to Rousseau.7 During much of the twentieth century the faute à Rousseau thesis was overshadowed by interpretations stressing circumstances and class friction, but with the linguistic turn in the 1970s, it began making a comeback among historians (it had flourished among political theorists between the 1950s and 1970s). It figured in much of the scholarship inspired by François Furet in the years leading up to the Revolution’s bicentennial.8 By the mid-1990s, however, historians began challenging this explanation. Some argued that few national deputies had read, much less understood, The Social Contract when they arrived in Versailles for the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789.9 Others insisted that even if revolutionaries had read it, they rejected crucial parts of it, especially its insistence on unmediated popular sovereignty.10 By the mid-1990s, even Furet rejected the thesis. “In the final analysis,” he concluded in one of his last essays, “there is not much of The Social Contract in the French Revolution.”11
Rousseau’s influence on revolutionaries continues to be debated, and recent work suggests that the pendulum may be swinging back in the affirmative direction.12 In any case, I believe that the Terror—and Rousseau’s ideas—can be better understood by situating them within Old Regime and Enlightenment culture more broadly. While the next chapter examines the origins of the Terror’s violence, tracing it back to the Old Regime culture of calumny and honor, this chapter considers the origins of the Terror’s policing of opinion and moral regeneration, relating them to longstanding concerns with religion and mœurs.
As the Bourbon state expanded during the Old Regime, its policing became increasingly theorized. For contemporaries, la police referred to “the order or regulations established in a city for all that concerns the security and utility of inhabitants.”13 As scholars have noted, the term was often conflated with Eurocentric notions of “civilization.” To be “well policed” meant to be “polished, refined, cultivated, and advanced,” and societies lacking police were considered uncivilized.14 Antoine Furetière’s dictionary of 1690 stated, “In general, [la police] is opposed to barbarism. The savages of America had neither laws nor police when they were discovered.”15 Throughout the eighteenth century, absolutists, philosophes, and revolutionaries all agreed that security and prosperity depended on competent administration and the improvement of mœurs. They differed, though, on how to accomplish this improvement, especially in the second half of the century. While some considered Catholic orthodoxy to be indispensable for securing good mœurs, others stressed the benefic effects of refined sociability and the development of the arts, sciences, and commerce. Still others thought that good mœurs depended on universal ethics; although the Church might be useful in spreading ethical precepts, those precepts were ultimately rooted in Nature and accessible to all religious sects.
The issue of mœurs was much less complicated at the beginning of the eighteenth century, or at least it seems so in Nicolas Delamare’s Traité de la police. Released in several editions between 1705 and 1738, this multivolume treatise anticipated the scientific approach to governing that philosophes would later develop. Although the treatise dealt with many practical administrative matters (health, roads, public order, subsistence, construction, and sanitation), religion and morality took precedence. Delamare stated, “Religion is without a doubt the first and principal [object of policing] . . . one might even say the only object if we were wise enough to perfectly fulfill the duties religion prescribes.”16 Religion instilled, he explained, the morality needed to maintain good mœurs.17 The religion Delamare had in mind was, of course, Catholicism, and he devoted many pages to refuting the claims of paganism, Judaism, and the “heresies” (Calvinism and Jansenism). But Delamare was ultimately a bureaucrat, not a theologian. Hence, he employed quasi-secular reasoning—the same kind of reasoning, in fact, that philosophes and revolutionaries would later employ. According to him, heresy was immoral not because it offended the heavens, but because it elevated individual passions and interests over the well-being of the community. In terms anticipating revolutionaries’ condemnations of counterrevolutionaries, Delamare referred to heretics as “blind and corrupt, substituting their particular interests for the truth.”18
Before the high Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century, conventional wisdom held that the ultimate source of morality and good mœurs was religion. In his 1688 Les mœurs de ce siècle, for example, Jean de La Bruyère reflected on the mœurs of various societies throughout the world. Like Montaigne and other early modern writers, he credited “uncivilized” societies for possessing the simple virtues that many Europeans lacked. In the final analysis, though, the absence of Christianity in these societies deprived them of “truth,” rendering them inferior. For La Bruyère, truth inhered only in Christian mœurs, and he counseled European travelers not to overexpose themselves to foreign ones. Alien manners, he warned, would rub off and corrupt their own.19 But by the mid-eighteenth century, enlightened philosophes were seeking to displace Christianity as the ultimate source of morality and good mœurs. For them, the improvement of mœurs required scientific inquiry, not theological exegesis or blind faith. The 1740s and 1750s saw a flurry of tracts on mœurs: François-Vincent Toussaint’s Les mœurs (1748), Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748), Charles Duclos’s Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751), and Voltaire’s Essai sur les mœurs (1756). Although religion was not entirely absent from these works, these authors tended to treat it as, at best, a convenient instrument for propagating the tenets of a moral system grounded in Nature, at worst, a fanatical force capable of destroying mœurs and unleashing sectarian violence.
In his De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu had little to say about the necessity of religion for the maintenance of good mœurs. Developing a comparative sociological perspective, he analyzed the relationship between positive law, moral principles, and mœurs (as manners) in various types of societies. He argued that positive law, rather than standing apart from mœurs, should be situated within them, constituting their declarative and coercive aspects. If authorities wanted to be obeyed, their laws needed to resonate with the customs and values already present in society. Although Montesquieu’s sympathies with republicanism are discernible, he did not announce a universal basis for morality and mœurs. Laws were to be considered good or bad according to how well they reinforced the moral principles needed to maintain the type of society in question. In monarchies, good mœurs were to be reinforced through the moral principle of honor; in republics, through virtue (through public spirit in democratic republics); in despotisms, through fear.
Montesquieu’s moral relativism was not embraced by all contemporaries—and certainly not by Jansenists and Church authorities in France. The latter came close to condemning the work, but the Vatican took care of the task, putting De l’esprit des lois on the Index in 1751.20 Yet, even many philosophes eschewed his relativism, preferring a universal basis for good mœurs. According to Voltaire, this basis lay in the development of the arts, sciences, and commerce. In his Essai sur les mœurs, which recounted world history from the Ancients to the reign of Louis XIV, Voltaire attributed Europe’s “superior” mœurs to precisely this development. Although all societies, including European, were prone to fits of fanaticism and war, Europe’s unmatched progress in the arts, sciences, and commerce placed it ahead of others in the evolution from barbarity toward civilization.21 In the 1770s, philosophes began grafting the norms of civility in the Republic of Letters onto Voltaire’s notion of universal history. Politeness in exchanges was no longer a matter of mere courtesy.22 Nor was it simply an expedient for maintaining harmony within the expanding Republic of Letters, as it had been at the turn of the century.23 Polite sociability and refined mœurs were now bound up with the progress of civilization.24
Some philosophes doubted that the arts, sciences, and sociability would lead to moral progress. In numerous essays beginning with his celebrated Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), Rousseau argued famously that, to the contrary, they undermined it. In cultivating desire for status and luxury, the arts, sciences, and polite sociability increased social inequalities and corrupted individuals, making them slaves to the perceptions of others.25 Although few philosophes rejected civilization so roundly, many shared Rousseau’s misgivings about the capacity of the arts, sciences, and sociability to improve mœurs without the help of morality. In his Les mœurs, for example, Toussaint argued that good mœurs depended on proper moral principles, ones rooted in Nature, not religion.26 “This study is about mœurs,” he announced in the preface; “religion figures in it only in so far as it contributes to mœurs.” Virtue, for Toussaint, was the universal moral principle prescribed by Nature. It transcended religions, appealing to “Mohammedians” and Christians alike. Toussaint believed that by advancing knowledge of universal morality and cultivating sentimental attachments to it, mœurs could be improved. “What are good mœurs? . . . They are behavior regulated by the knowledge and love of virtue.”27
In Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (1751), Charles Duclos also stressed the moral foundations of good mœurs. Like Toussaint, he believed that neither religion nor polite sociability sufficed for their improvement. “Religion,” Duclos asserted, “is the perfection of morality, not its basis.”28 As for manners, he thought it “desirable that the politeness of gentle manners be united with the politeness that comes from the heart.”29 Without good intentions, polished manners were nothing but hypocritical varnish concealing immoral egoism. “The most polite people are not the most virtuous. Simple and austere mœurs find themselves among people guided [policé] by reason and equity. . . . Well-policed people are better than polite ones [les peuples policés valent mieux que les peuples polis].”30 For Duclos, policing involved governing consciences according to moral guidelines, specifically, “[the] seeking of personal advantages within the project of the general good.” Good mœurs required “being a patriot” and “considering men in relation to humanity and one’s country.”31 “Let us teach people to love each other, and prove to them that doing so will bring them happiness. We can demonstrate to them that their own glory and interest can only be secured in exercising their duties.”32
Duclos reflected on the links between morality, reputation, and public opinion. He was aware that in a society in which status and opportunities turned on honor and reputation, opinions mattered immensely. “Public opinion,” he observed, “is both judge and punishment. It never fails to be severe toward what it condemns.”33 For Duclos, public opinion was as important in society as subsistence. “It is not only material needs that bind people together; men also have an existence that depends on the reciprocal opinions they have of each other.”34 Hence, opinions, like the distribution of resources, needed to be based on the ethical principle of the general interest. “It is the general interest that dictates the laws and fixes virtue; it is the particular interest that commits crimes when it is opposed to the general interest. In fixing the general opinion, public interest becomes the measure of esteem and respect.”35 Duclos’s ideal economy of esteem stood apart from the actual one, and his pronouncements must be read against the backdrop of a world in which respect and deference depended greatly on proving oneself capable of avenging wounded honor. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, these two economies of reputation—an ideal one based on commitment to the general interest and the actual one based on individual honor and the ability to defend it—coexisted in revolutionary politics. In their effort to protect their reputations from calumny, revolutionaries would waver between the two, preaching the virtues of the general interest while resorting to whatever means possible—including terror—to punish calumniators.
Other philosophes shared Duclos’s belief that sound morality consisted in contributing to the general interest, being patriotic, and basing public esteem on those values. In a republican idiom, these values constituted public spirit.36 In his Morale universelle (1776), for example, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, wrote, “What is called public spirit refers to the general interest of society. . . . Spread throughout the nation, public spirit heralds good government and citizens who seek to earn the esteem of their fellow citizens.”37 This esteem was to be grounded in “a most sensible morality [that] makes it a duty for all citizens to contribute to public utility.”38 Under tyranny, Holbach theorized, social bonds break down. With individuals pursuing only their particular interests, “public spirit does not exist.” In Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, the abbé Raynal (or one of his collaborators, which included Holbach) attributed the decline of republicanism in Holland to the weakening of public spirit. “How much have mœurs degenerated there! Private interests that purify themselves in their union have become entirely isolated.”39 Lacking patriotism, Holland “no longer has any public spirit.”40 Raynal claimed that the Dutch conquest of Indonesia was fraught with problems because the Dutch East India Company relied on mercenaries rather than citizen-soldiers. Mercenaries, he observed, were motivated solely by the promise of plunder. Having no stake in the common interest of the nation that recruited them, they were prone to corruption. Citizen-soldiers, on the other hand, possessed public spirit since they were motivated by the quest for their country’s glory and the prospect of sharing collectively the material benefits of colonization. To reinforce public spirit, Raynal recommended that all citizens be given stock in the East India Company.41
Although the Old Regime offered many theoretical paths to good mœurs, it offered few institutional vehicles for reaching them. Much of the literature promoting sociability and the arts and sciences was written by participants of salons, royal academies, and sociétés savantes. In practice, the salons hardly lived up to the moral, egalitarian ideals that their literary participants propounded; they could be as divisive, petty, and hierarchical as any other Old Regime institution. In any case, salons touched the lives of few.42 The royal academies and sociétés savantes involved the participation of more individuals, both in terms of membership (though women were excluded) and the publics attending open meetings. And as Daniel Roche has shown, the proportion of meetings devoted to la morale increased in function of the size of the public attending them—a clear sign that elite members felt a civic duty to spread their scientific findings on morality with the population.43 Still, these institutions hardly constituted universal education. Nor was there consensus that the masses should be educated, in the broad sense of being enlightened. With the notable exception of Condorcet, the philosophes opposed teaching the laboring masses how to reason critically. At most, the masses were thought to need instruction in rudimentary skills, such as reading, writing, counting, and basic morality (to inculcate discipline and respect for hierarchy). Voltaire wrote, “It is not the working man who should be educated, but the worthy bourgeois.”44
Yet, moral education was on the decline in eighteenth-century France. In his study of educational reform in the Old Regime, Harvey Chisick shows that “those most ready to see the people broadly educated and even enlightened were pious Christians,” not secular-minded philosophes and administrators.45 But the Church’s ability to educate the masses was weakened by the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in the early 1760s and by the overall secularization of society during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Chronic fiscal strains throughout the century precluded any effort on the part of the state to support mass education, despite promises to do so stretching back to the reign of Louis XIV.46 What Duclos concluded in his Considérations sur les mœurs in 1751 remained true through to the end of the Old Regime: “Today we find many forms of instruction but not a [moral] education. We train savants and artists of all kinds, but we have not yet undertaken to make men, that is, to instill a sense of mutual respect for each other.”47
By 1789, then, there were many theories about mœurs and high expectations for their improvement but few institutional mechanisms for realizing this improvement. Steeped in a culture prone to conceiving social and political problems in moral terms, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries drew upon these theories after 1789. Ending the Revolution, they believed, would require a regeneration of mœurs. Yet, the diversity of views they had inherited led to clashing approaches on how to do so, notably between devout Catholics and moderate Christians in favor of religious freedom. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790 was an attempt at compromise. It gave the Church a central public role in educating the masses in exchange for swearing an oath of fidelity to the principles of the Revolution. But the compromise failed. Chronic tensions over reconciling religion and the Revolution eventually led revolutionaries to put Catholicism aside altogether and establish a new, secular cult, one based on virtue, patriotism, and the general interest, that is, on public spirit.
If the Old Regime had few institutions for improving mœurs, it had a battery of them to police opinions. Royal censors, inspectors of the Book Trade, the Council of State, the Church, the Lieutenant General of Police in Paris, the intendants in the provinces, the local courts, and the parlements all tried to regulate public opinion. They monitored, suppressed, and punished. They also spread opinions of their own, officially through publicized bans and condemnations, secretly by manipulating texts and planting rumors. Yet, state control over public opinion was hardly monolithic. Governing institutions often worked at cross purposes and sought to undermine each other. In this, they were quite successful. By 1789, none of them had much credibility left; consequently, their ability to control the force they helped create—public opinion—was greatly diminished.
Recent studies of royal censorship reveal the complexity of institutional struggles over regulating public opinion.48 The censorship bureau was part of the Administration of the Book Trade, which was situated within the monarchy’s Chancellerie. The censors inspected manuscripts prior to publication and, when they did not reject the work outright, accorded various kinds of official approbations: privilèges, permissions simples, and permissions tacites. These attributions conferred various degrees of rights, or rather privileges, over texts. Censors often worked with writers to modify texts in accordance with the press laws of 1723, 1728, and 1727, which prohibited attacks on religion, mœurs, and authorities. Although there was much consensus on these prohibitions, they were defined so broadly that altering texts often boiled down to tactical maneuvers to advance the interests of particular institutions, Court factions, or clientele networks. Although censorship might enervate writers, it could also lead them through political minefields, shielding them from more threatening forces. Indeed, writers did not merely “put up” with censorship. Many embraced it, taking the censors’ approval for success and legitimacy within the world of letters.49
As the print industry expanded in the eighteenth century, so too did the censorship bureau. Although it banned only 10–30 percent of submitted manuscripts over the course of the eighteenth century, its arbitrariness and ineffectiveness provoked criticism, not only from authors and printers, but from the Church, Court factions, and parlements as well.50 By the late 1750s, the shortcomings of censorship had become obvious even to the Director of the Book Trade himself, C.-G. Lamoignon de Malesherbes. For Malesherbes, the main problem was how to reconcile religious and political orthodoxy with the commercial interests of the French publishing industry, whose profits were increasingly going to foreign printers who managed to smuggle works banned in France across the border. In his unpublished Mémoires sur la librairie (1758–1759), Malesherbes justified the expanded use of permissions tacites—authorizations which did not bestow as many benefits as privilèges but which conveyed official tolerance.51 With this more relaxed policy, which lasted through to the end of the Old Regime (though with periodic suspensions and crackdowns), Malesherbes tried not only to create a more tolerant environment for writers and greater profits for French publishers; he also tried to spare the censors the embarrassment of seeing the books they approved subsequently condemned by the Parlement of Paris.
Unlike other forms of policing public opinion, censorship did not figure in the course of the French Revolution. Curtailed by the monarchy in 1788, abolished by the National Assembly in 1789, censorship vanished from the literary landscape in 1790 when the bureau finally closed its doors.52 More important for their legacy on the Revolution were the practices of seizing print and punishing writers, printers, and booksellers. During the Old Regime, these actions were conducted at times discreetly, at other times spectacularly. The discreet suppression of texts before they were printed or distributed had the advantage of not attracting the public’s attention to the work. As many contemporaries observed, nothing increased demand for a book more than burning it on the steps of the Palais de Justice. Among the more discreet means, authorities might thwart the spread of “bad books” through intimidation, unpublished bans, and lettres de cachet. Lettres de cachet usually resulted in the imprisonment of printers and authors without trial.53
With discreet means at their disposal, why would authorities ban and condemn books with great fanfare? According to historian Barbara de Negroni, publicized condemnations were less about preventing a work from being read (though condemnations might make books prohibitively expensive) than about gaining political leverage over rival institutions, embarrassing them for having failed to protect mœurs, religion, and authority. During the Old Regime as during the Revolution, condemnations served as vehicles for asserting power and conveying values. An official who denounced or condemned an allegedly bad work might win public esteem, not to mention deference from other authorities who, though chafing at being upstaged, might feel pressured into going along. For example, when the Parlement of Paris condemned Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s atheistic De l’Esprit in 1759, burning it on the steps of the Palais de Justice, the magistrates managed to humiliate the royal censors who had approved it, forcing Malesherbes to revoke its privilège.54 The Parlement thus demonstrated that it was more vigilant than the monarchy in protecting religion and mœurs. It also proved that it was capable of transcending longstanding struggles against the monarchy over its supposed Jansenist sympathies by positioning itself as the protector of all Christianity from the “atheistic” assault of la philosophie.
Public condemnations of printed works might also serve to undermine certain patronage networks. When Parlement banned Rousseau’s Émile, it struck not only at the monarchy’s “lax” censorship bureau but also at Rousseau’s protectors, notably, the extremely powerful Madame Luxembourg and Prince de Conti.55 Condemnations may have been arbitrary—works more impious than Émile managed to circulate unmolested by Parlement—but they had a political logic: in the name of protecting religion, mœurs, and authority, public condemnations were political weapons. Revolutionaries, we shall see, were no less conscious of the political value of public condemnations, even if the principles they claimed to protect were different from those of their predecessors.
Print was not the only target of Old Regime policing. The theater, a notably contentious site of public opinion throughout the eighteenth century, also drew the attention of authorities.56 At the turn of the century, the itinerant acting troupes of the seasonal fairgrounds appeared and disappeared in the wake of erratic rulings over the monopolistic privileges held by the Comédie-française.57 The Comédie-française itself was subject to the intervention of authorities. Although the actors had a great deal of control over their repertoire, numerous institutions (or clientele networks working through those institutions) might intervene, prohibiting performances and banning publications of scripts.58 Meanwhile, authorities also policed audiences. It was not uncommon for parterres to be hemmed in by troops and permeated with spies. Spectators who misbehaved (and in the eighteenth century authorities were highly concerned with political agitation) might find themselves brought before police courts or community-based bourgeois commissions who occasionally imposed punishments.59
Speech and singing were also targets of surveillance and repression during the Old Regime, especially during political crises.60 The power to police speech was greatly enhanced in 1708 when a network of undercover agents was established under the authority of the Lieutenant General of Police.61 These agents roamed the public spaces of Paris, eavesdropping on conversations and initiating arrests for seditious speech and song.62 Historian Alan Williams estimates that the number of spies on the police payroll in Paris varied between 350 and 500 in the years 1730 to 1785. These spies, in turn, relied on informers who were recruited on a contingent basis.63 The number of informers is unknown, but one can well imagine, as Williams does, that given the mass of poor Parisians, information might easily be obtained for a beer or a ticket to the opera.64
Old Regime policing institutions not only monitored and repressed opinions; they spread opinions as well. Covert propaganda was sometimes circulated with the connivance of key officials who would tolerate, even facilitate, the sale of unapproved works. In 1760, for example, Malesherbes surreptitiously sent Voltaire’s Pierre le Grand, which had been seized by the inspectors of the book trade and denied a permission by the dauphin and the king’s chancellor, to a bookseller in the Palais-Royal, who sold copies discreetly.65 Ministers and high-ranking officials had many means to spread news, rumors, and calumny that suited their interests. In addition to its official newspaper, Gazette de France, the government maintained a bureau des nouvelles, which regulated the flow of information and opinions in Paris with the help of hired hacks.66 Robert Darnton claims that future revolutionaries Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and Honoré-Gabriel-Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau were on the Old Regime police payroll, “writing bulletins and circulating them throughout the public to contradict false stories and anecdotes.”67 Arlette Farge shows how the police tried to manipulate opinion during the Cartouche affair in 1721. Leader of a network of thieves in Paris, Cartouche was a hero to many. To garner public support for executing him and disbanding his network, the police actively diffused moralizing propaganda.68
The Parisian public was aware of the government’s efforts to monitor and manipulate its opinions. In his Tableau de Paris, Louis-Sebastien Mercier refers to the presence of undercover agents in public places, such as cafés, as common knowledge.69 State surveillance and propaganda were so well known that they could be mocked in an anonymous pamphlet published in early 1789, Les mânes de M. Métra ou ses réflexions posthumes pour guider ses confrères les gobe-mouches des Tuileries, du Luxembourg et du Palais-Royal, sur les reformes à proposer aux États-généraux. The narrator of this pamphlet was the ghost of the notorious and now deceased purveyor of rumors, François Métra.70 In small print on the first page, the author reminded readers who Métra had been: “Everyone knows or should know that M. Métra was one of the most solid supports of the Cracow tree [a rumor mill in the Luxembourg Gardens].”71 In the text, Métra confesses to his prior involvement in spreading rumors and explains that he has been instructed by his fellow deceased Frenchmen to convey their proposals for the upcoming meeting of the Estates-General. “After having spent the better part of my life listening to and spreading a great deal of nonsense, it is about time that I listen to and spread news which is interesting and reasonable.”72 His talents as an informer and propagandist were now summoned for the more dignified tasks of serving as a reporter and representative. “[My dead compatriots] thought that it was important for their descendents that there be a deputy in Paris in charge of communicating their ideas about the nation, and to inform them about all that goes on at the Estates-General.”73 Press freedom was among the many reforms Métra was instructed to propose. “It will be necessary to take care of the first and foremost freedom, that upon which all others are assured, in a word, the freedom to think, which must be founded on the freedom of the press.”74
Revolutionaries would, indeed, declare the freedom of the press in August of 1789. But in doing so, they abolished only prepublication censorship. State surveillance, repression, and manipulation of opinion would persist. But unlike the political institutions of the Old Regime, which had a certain degree of legitimacy to police public opinion, those of the Revolution—the monarchy, the National Assembly, the Church, the new municipalities, local clubs, and sectional assemblies—attempted to do so without clearly defined laws and without sufficient legitimacy. Clashes ensued, contributing to the Revolution’s radicalization.
A vast historical literature on the rise of public opinion in eighteenth-century France has sprung up in recent decades, much of it inspired by Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and new readings of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic The Old Regime and French Revolution.75 Habermas argued that a “bourgeois” public sphere emerged in response to, and in tandem with, the development of capitalism and the absolutist state in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Less concerned with the origins of the French Revolution, Habermas’s aim was to show how eighteenth-century public opinion was relatively open (at least to the bourgeoisie), governed by reason, and resistant to the manipulation of governments and clientele networks. Tocqueville’s view of public opinion was less rosy. According to this nineteenth-century writer and statesman, authors during the Old Regime, excluded from formal positions of authority, came to wield political influence through writing. Their abstract “literary politics,” which reflected a lack of practical experience in governing, led to catastrophe. After contributing to the demise of the Old Regime, their ideas accelerated the recklessness of the new one. In seeking to make the world conform to their utopian principles—notably, equality—revolutionaries broke with all tradition and abandoned all restraint.
Although Habermas and Tocqueville presented public opinion in different lights—as an ideal model of democratic communication on the one hand, as a harbinger of dangerous revolutionary politics on the other—both saw it as independent of state control before 1789. This view has been overturned by a large body of recent scholarship that shows how Old Regime institutions contributed to the rise of public opinion, both as a rhetorical construct and sociological force. According to Keith Baker, the monarchy and the Parlement of Paris began in the 1750s to erect “public opinion” as a final court of appeals in struggles against each other.76 Focusing on the content and diffusion of opinions, Robert Darnton argues that the proliferation of political libels, some of which became best-sellers, eroded the legitimacy of the Old Regime. Like Baker, Darnton sees Old Regime institutions and power brokers as influential in the development of public opinion. By the 1770s, he notes, many of the great philosophes had managed to work their way into the regime’s administrative and cultural institutions. Writers of the next generation, largely denied access to these privileged precincts, ended up offering their services to notable public figures and officials, who used them in waging libel wars against each other.77 Although they earned their living as the mouthpieces of powerful insiders, these hack writers expressed the rage and frustration of oppressed outsiders. They turned the “victim of despotism” trope into a veritable leitmotif for politics in the last two decades of the Old Regime. Their messages, Darnton suggests, eroded the legitimacy of the Old Regime.
If state institutions and elite insiders contributed to the rise of public opinion, by the end of the Old Regime, public opinion had taken on a life of its own, outstripping their control. But how did public opinion figure in the course of the Revolution? Few studies have explored this question. For their part, Baker and Darnton attribute the Revolution’s radicalization to other factors; while Baker stresses revolutionaries’ commitment to Rousseauian notions of collective will, Darnton points to contingent circumstances, notably the outbreak of war in 1792.78 One might argue, as Daniel Mornet did in Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française, that 1789 was so cataclysmic that little in the Old Regime is relevant for understanding the Revolution.79 Yet there is much in the recent literature on public opinion in Old Regime France that helps make sense of the Revolution’s course. Taken together, this literature reveals contradictory dynamics in the public sphere. On the one hand, public opinion enlarged, ideologically and sociologically, who was to be included in the public. Expansive conceptions of the public tended to be invoked in efforts to outflank entrenched authority or political rivals. Those who employed this inclusive logic may not have espoused democratic sovereignty, but their arguments nevertheless had democratic implications. On the other hand, the expansion of the public sphere spawned concerns about indiscriminate inclusion. Such worries prompted the creation of moral, intellectual, and social criteria for deciding who should be admitted into the ranks of the legitimate public.
Several historians have underscored the increasing inclusiveness of public opinion in the eighteenth century. In her study of the popular underground Jansenist newspaper, Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, Arlette Farge notes how its popular, informal tone reached out to a broad public, encouraging “the participation of lay people” as early as 1728.80 By the time that “public opinion” implied a right and a duty to know and judge in the 1750s, there had already been nearly three decades of struggle between the police and the organs of popular opinion, the effect of which was to sensitize the people to the power of their views. The Nouvelles ecclésiastiques was not the only cultural vehicle for popularizing and politicizing the public in the early eighteenth century. The subaltern troupes of the seasonal fairground theaters drew the public into their battles against the Comédie-française. At times when the troupes were forbidden to speak on their makeshift stages (the Comédie-française’s privileged monopoly covered spoken performance), they put on plays depicting their political-legal struggles, calling upon spectators to read out the lines that actors carried on placards. In this way, spectators became politicized, drawn into affairs involving privileges and the state.81
While spectators were breaking into the ranks of the public despite efforts to exclude them, subaltern art critics began challenging the tight grip elites had on aesthetic judgment. These “low-life” critics contributed to the formation of an oppositional public, one that would eventually work its way into artistic representation itself, appearing in the paintings of Jacques-Louis David’s Brutus and the Oath of the Horatii in the 1780s.82 Meanwhile, spectators at the Comédie-française and in many provincial theaters began asserting themselves as sovereign publics—the voice of the nation—toward the end of the Old Regime. This self-proclaimed status made efforts to repress unruly audiences politically charged; it was one thing to repress rabble, quite another to repress “the public” and “the nation.”83
On yet another front, trial-brief writers increasingly incorporated “the people” in their well-publicized trial briefs in the 1770s and 1780s. Exploiting the trope of “simple virtue victimized by aristocratic cunning and despotism,” these writers legitimized popular indignation, implicitly fusing it with public opinion. Moreover, in trying to reach as many readers as possible, trial-brief writers sought to enlarge the public.84
The democratizing dynamics of public opinion were, to some degree, countered by disciplinary ones. Enlightened elites such as Kant, Malesherbes, and Condorcet often went to great lengths to distinguish public opinion from popular opinion.85 The tribunal of public opinion was, according to these theorists, limited to the abstract world of print; it did not extend to the agitated world of assembled individuals. Even Condorcet, the most republican of the three, expressed misgivings about popularizing “the public.”86 A member of the French Academy, Condorcet was steeped in a milieu that valued (in theory at least) civility and reason, considering them prerequisites to participating legitimately in the public sphere. Indeed, these criteria were brought to bear in appointments to the royal academies.87 Before being appointed, candidates had their morality, reputation, and talent scrutinized. Civility—as a concept and as a set of “polite” practices—held a preponderant place in other sites where public opinion was produced, notably, the salons and the Republic of Letters. To gain access to these cultural precincts, philosophes and playwrights had to demonstrate good morals and manners.88 Meanwhile, efforts to “civilize” unruly spectators took place in the official theaters in the 1780s. While audiences were trying to elevate themselves into empowered publics with the right to balk at bad plays and even determine playbills, authorities were trying to get them to sit still and be silent. The installation of benches in the parterres of the Comédie-française and Comédie-Italienne was an attempt—one that failed—to discipline theatergoers and to transform the theater into a kind of school.89
The emergence of public opinion in eighteenth-century France thus bequeathed two sets of dynamics, democratizing and disciplinary. Both would persist after 1789. While authorities stressed the latter, oppositional forces exploited the former. The politics of the Year II are interpretable in light of these twin dynamics. Once in power, Jacobins sought to discipline an unruly society through moral regeneration and policing. But since they had risen to power by exploiting democratic impulses within the public sphere, they could hardly abandon the principle of empowered inclusion. Rhetorically at least, sovereignty had to reside in the people; in practice, the people had to be morally restrained and their opinions policed.
The French Revolution inherited much from Old Regime policing: theories, practices, and perhaps even personnel. In Paris, many of the Châtelet’s commissioners, the former police inspectors working for the Lieutenant General of Police, and a part of the guet police force were invited to work for the newly established policing committee of the municipality in the fall of 1789.90 Although personnel records for the comité de police, sûreté et tranquillité of Paris during the early years of the Revolution no longer exist, the frequent visits to print shops and seizures of publications conducted by police in this period suggest a continuity of tactics, at the very least.91 We do know that the permanent staff of General Lafayette’s National Guard in Paris (founded in July 1789) comprised many former gardes de la prévôté de l’Hôtel and sergents à pieds et à cheval, with the more radical elements of those forces confined to the Guard’s volunteer contingents and sectional battalions. National Guard units throughout France would partake, as we shall see, in the policing of public opinion after 1789. At the same time, the Revolution initially upheld the monarchy’s police générale; assigned to departmental administrations, its attributions included the maintenance of the physical and moral order of the realm. But the police générale existed alongside new municipal police forces, a situation not without tensions.92 Indeed, the multiplicity of policing institutions in the early years of the Revolution, together with the lack of legal guidelines, generated confusion and a good many jurisdictional disputes.
If Old Regime police practices (and perhaps personnel) persisted after 1789, so too did Old Regime notions about what constituted legitimate policing. Revolutionaries may have denounced the “despotism” of the old police system—and they certainly decried the ongoing use of spies in the new one—but new authorities upheld the view that opinions and mœurs needed to be policed.93 In 1790, Louis Pierre Manuel wrote a scathing, though skewed, two-tome work exposing the arbitrariness of the Old Regime police, La police dévoilée de Paris. He was quite familiar with the prior system, having spent three months in the Bastille in 1783 for his Coup d’œil philosophique sur la règne de Louis. His position in the new municipal government gave him access to police archives, which he culled diligently, if selectively, revealing the corruption of the old system. In well-documented detail, he showed how the Lieutenants General of Police had become the arbitrary referees of clashes within the Republic of Letters. In one set of correspondence, he discovered Rousseau corresponding with Antoine de Sartine, the Lieutenant General of Police in 1772. Rousseau had tried to persuade Sartine to investigate the source of malicious rumors against him, and he even provided Sartine with the names of those whom he suspected. Manuel expressed dismay that the very writer whom revolutionaries so admired could have stooped to the level of a paranoid snitch; “it is always the [all too human] man who betrays the philosophe!”94 This anecdote was one of many such incidents recounted in La police dévoilée. Indeed, the Lieutenant General of Police was so frequently solicited that one wonders why Manuel limited the title of his work to “exposing” only the police; it reads like a general indictment of Old Regime society.
Although Manuel criticized Old Regime policing in practice, he did not reject its theoretical principles. In many respects, he shared Delamare’s early eighteenth-century views, though with some modification. Whereas religion was the sole source of good mœurs for Delamare, for Manuel “the great force on our mœurs is opinion.”95 Like Delamare, though, Manuel believed that good mœurs required state tutelage. Anticipating the public-instruction policies of the Ministry of the Interior in 1792, Manuel suggested that the National Assembly appoint “a man of letters . . . in each city” of France. This “instructor” would be responsible for dispelling old prejudices and “teaching the people, sovereign as they are, deference for those whom they choose as their . . . municipal officers.”96 Thus, the new regime was to be as committed to securing good mœurs as the old one should have been, had it lived up to its own principles, advancing that “great art of policing” by “managing and forming public opinion through Enlightenment and mœurs.”97
In the volume of the Encyclopédie méthodique devoted to jurisprudence, policing, and municipal government published in 1791 (written in 1789), Jacques Peuchet sang the praises of the Old Regime police. “The police of Paris, separated from its abuses and deformities, is without doubt one of the most perfect that exists, and one that can be reasonably presented as a [good] model.”98 Like Delamare, Peuchet believed that morality was the chief object of policing. Again, whereas Delamare conceived of morality in exclusively religious terms, Peuchet conceived of it in terms of universal ethics. Still, Peuchet found religious sentiments useful for reinforcing civic values. Distancing himself from theological dogmatism, he wrote, “I won’t bother examining whether those who are raised with the values of morality and honor . . . can forgo religion; I only want to say that, whatever reasoning one employs, it is impossible to prove that the masses can go without religious sentiments which conduct them in the exercise of their [civic] duties.” He added, “All that alters these sentiments, or makes one forget or spurn them . . . merits public hatred and repression.”99 Peuchet warned that curtailing religious authority would lead to undue reliance on secular authority, which, in the absence of a shared secular morality (revolutionary moral regeneration had not yet begun), would become arbitrary and repressive. “It is indisputable that anywhere [religious] authority over consciences is destroyed, it will be necessary to replace it with another authority and increase the means of constraint and force within families and society. . . . It is an error to vote for the destruction of religious administration and increase the excessive powers of arbitrary authority.”100
For all its reliance upon religion to cultivate civic discipline, Peuchet’s police was nevertheless grounded in philosophical principles that transcended any particular sect. Like many philosophes, he claimed that “public morality is born within the general order. . . . [It stems] from the relationship that men, living closely with each other, perceive between their duties [on the one hand] and their interests, their happiness, and the happiness of the community [on the other].” Conceding that morality, like religion, could be perverted and used as a pretext for social intolerance, he nevertheless believed it was indispensable for securing virtue and social bonds. “Public morality makes men see their particular interests in the social union and the preservation of the fundamental principles of society.”101
If public morality served as society’s guiding principle, public opinion served as its guiding force. Like his enlightened predecessors, Peuchet believed that public opinion exerted a salutary influence on authority, “extending all the way up to the ministers and even the sovereign himself.” But opinion needed tutelage, and it was the task of writers, he insisted, to enlighten the public through moral reflection. Through their mediation, discord in the public sphere could be avoided and public spirit would flourish. “Public spirit . . . this temperament of the national character, is maintained and, in a sense, assured by writers. They are respected by the nation, they modify public opinion, and alter it in the long term; their ideas fuse with popular ideas, purifying, improving, and civilizing them.” It is worth stressing that, for Peuchet, public opinion was influential, not sovereign, and its policing was needed to encourage the progress of “gentle mœurs, polite manners, generosity, and humanity.”102
There is an ambivalent tension in Enlightenment theories of policing and public opinion, from Montesquieu to Peuchet. It is difficult to determine whether the state, as a moral tutelary agent, or society, through the authority of its opinion, was supposed to have the final say. Vectors of command and influence seemed to point back and forth between state and society, with writers sometimes emerging as mediators between the two. In most of these tracts, disciplinary and democratic drives seem to be operating simultaneously, with little clarity about their respective limits. But whereas most philosophes were content to envisage a loose, mutually reinforcing relationship between mœurs and opinion—between state and society—Rousseau collapsed them. In The Social Contract, all these elements are fused and frozen in the constitutive moment of democracy. “It is pointless to distinguish the mœurs of a nation from the objects of its esteem [its opinions and laws], since they all adhere to the same principle,” that is, to the general will.103 But Rousseau’s melding of mœurs, opinion, state, and society into the general will does not, I believe, sufficiently account for the Revolution’s radicalization. Neither, though, should the loose, imprecise way these elements interacted with each other in the theories of other philosophes be seen as responsible for it. The theoretical tension between the disciplinary and democratic discourses that accompanied the rise of public opinion in the eighteenth century was not necessarily bound to produce the anarchy and authoritarianism of the Revolution’s radical phase. To the contrary, by accommodating positions of command and resistance, this tension provided the Old Regime with checks and balances—not republican checks and balances, of course; these discourses were less about formal constitutional arrangements and the rule of law than about rapports de forces. Still, they provided rationales for contingently working out daily struggles between competing forces. They helped authorities justify policing opinion for the sake of mœurs while offering contesting forces the leverage of public opinion as an authoritative voice.
Once the Old Regime fractured in 1789, no institution—old or new—had sufficient power or legitimacy to mediate between the disciplining and democratic currents animating the public sphere. While disciplinary efforts were denounced as “despotic,” democratic drives were branded “anarchic.” Again, the problem was not an inherent incompatibility between those drives; after all, both have been present in democratic political culture for centuries. The problem, rather, was the weak legitimacy of institutions that tried to regulate them.
The imperative incumbent upon revolutionary leaders to manage disciplinary and democratic impulses in the public sphere helps explain why they would try, rhetorically at least, to base the regime’s legitimacy on both. It sheds light on why Robespierre, in his speech on political morality, would stress virtue (to satisfy demands for discipline) and collective sovereignty (to satisfy demands for democracy). In doing so, he drew on rationales and dynamics deeply rooted in the Old Regime.
If the legacy of Old Regime policing goes a long way in accounting for the Revolution’s policing of public opinion, it does not explain the Terror’s lethal brutality. It is one thing to monitor and manipulate opinions, quite another to send individuals to the scaffold for them. What, then, drove revolutionaries to kill each other for speech and opinions?