By spring 1793, as France edged toward the Terror, even Tom Paine’s patience with free speech began wearing thin. In a letter to Georges Danton, deputy to the French National Convention and founding member of the Committee of Public Safety, Paine expressed his alarm about the relentless insults and slander plaguing revolutionary politics. A deputy himself, Paine urged Danton to take repressive measures. “Calumny,” this champion of civil liberties insisted, “is a species of treachery that ought to be punished as well as any other kind of treachery.”1 He explained why: “[It] is a private vice productive of public evil, because it is possible to irritate men into disaffection by continual calumny who never intended to be disaffected.” In other words, calumny weakened the bonds between citizens and their political system, fomenting agitation or, worse, civil war. “The danger increases every day of a rupture between Paris and the departments,” he presciently warned. “The departments did not send their deputies to Paris to be insulted, and every insult shown to them is an insult to the departments that elected and sent them.” A month later, sixty departments went into rebellion against Paris.
Paine’s letter is historically ironic. Just months earlier, the former American revolutionary and British radical had been tried in absentia by a special court set up by William Pitt in London. He was convicted for his Rights of Man, declared to be seditious libel and an insult to the English monarchy.2 Paine’s election to the French National Convention allowed him to evade Pitt’s wrath with dignity in Paris. It was there, though, that he saw calumny consume his cherished democratic politics. He watched as it inflamed factions in the Convention and poisoned relations between local and national authorities. Tensions culminated on May 31, 1793, when armed sans-culotte radicals in Paris surrounded the National Convention, forcing legislators to arrest twenty-two Girondin deputies, “the calumniators of the citizens of Paris.”3 Shortly before the purge, Paine expressed optimism that the Girondins would remain in office. “Calumny [against the Girondins] becomes harmless and defeats itself when it attempts to act upon too large a scale. Thus the denunciation of the [Paris] sections against the twenty-two deputies falls to the ground.”4 Events proved him wrong. The Terror was just beginning to build momentum. Later that year, several leading Girondins were guillotined, and Paine was arrested for his ties to them. He languished in prison until the fall of Robespierre in July 1794.
Perhaps the greatest irony about Paine’s letter is that the Terror enacted precisely what he had demanded: the repression of calumny. Beginning with the Law of Suspects (September 17, 1793), revolutionaries criminalized a wide range of calumnious speech, from insults and defamatory remarks against authorities to the disparagement of patriotism, republicanism, and the Revolution.5 Over the next ten months, thousands throughout France were arrested for crimes of expression. In Paris, more than one-third of the indictments brought before the revolutionary tribunal involved crimes of speech and opinion.6 But the revolutionary government did not stop at repression. It also created a nationwide network of agents responsible for monitoring public opinion and spreading revolutionary propaganda. It embarked on an extravagant campaign to morally regenerate society, spreading patriotism, republican virtue, and enlightenment throughout France. Little more than four years after having proclaimed the freedom of expression in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, revolutionaries appear to have turned their backs on their own principles. In the terms often used during the Cold War, the Revolution, it seems, had slid from freedom to totalitarianism.
This study examines the many reasons for the tragic reversal in freedom of expression between 1789 and the Year II (1793–1794). It is worth noting at the outset one of the most important reasons, namely, that most contemporaries did not view the repression of calumny as a violation of free-speech principles. For them, press freedom (which was the kind of free speech they insisted on most often) was not incompatible with restrictions and regulations. In the months leading up to the passage of the Declaration of Rights, contemporaries demanded only the abolition of prepublication censorship, that is, the requirement to submit book and pamphlet manuscripts to royal censors for approval prior to publication. (Some wanted the principle to be extended to the newspaper press, which was heavily regulated and censored.) At the same time, they insisted on maintaining, even reinforcing, old laws against offensive writings. Attacks on religion, moral values, honor, and social and political hierarchy were all considered criminal forms of calumny. This conception of press freedom was prominent among the advocates of press freedom in all three orders, or Estates, of France—the clergy, the nobility, and the third estate (commoners).
Recognizing the distinction contemporaries made between prepublication censorship (which they opposed) and ex post facto punishment for calumny (which they supported) is crucial for understanding the chronology of the Revolution and how the problem of free speech figured in it. In most accounts of the revolutionary press, historians contrast an early liberal phase of unlimited freedom with a subsequent, repressive phase.7 In explaining how the Revolution passed from the one to the other, they stress the outbreak of war or the rise of Jacobins to power, both of which occurred in 1792.8 The tendency to divide the Revolution into “liberal” and “repressive” phases stretches back to the rise of French liberalism in the early nineteenth century. In her attempt to salvage parts of the Revolution at a time of conservative backlash near the end of Napoleon’s reign, Madame de Staël, novelist and political commentator, idealized its early years, distinguishing them from the horrors that followed once Jacobins—“that dreadful sect”—came to power. In her Considerations of the Principal Events of the French Revolution, she asserted, “Not only does the Constituent Assembly [1789–1791] claim the gratitude of the French people for the reform of the abuses by which they were oppressed; but we must render it the further praise of being the only one of the authorities which have governed France before and since the revolution, which allowed, freely and unequivocally, the liberty of the press.”9
De Staël paints a glowing but inaccurate portrait of the Revolution’s early years. Efforts to repress injurious speech—oral and printed—occurred in the Constituent Assembly as at all levels of politics between 1789 and the Terror. Nor were these efforts uniquely Jacobin. Punitive demands came from all quarters. Although few were convicted for speech crimes before the Terror, this was due to legal and judicial chaos, not to rising tolerance thresholds.10 To the contrary, tolerance thresholds dropped precipitously in the Revolution’s early years, compelling leaders—despite nascent libertarian views espoused by some Jacobins in 1791—to repress calumny by 1793. At the same time, many leaders, distressed by the escalation of calumny, sought to counter the deteriorating situation by promoting moral regeneration. They hoped that spreading “public spirit” would curb calumny and quell rampant vengeance. Engineering civic consciousness was not, for them, antithetical to free speech. It was the precondition for its enjoyment.
French revolutionaries were not the first to tether free speech to legal limits and moral regulation. Although the French tradition of freedom is often criticized for being inherently illiberal—favoring state authority over civil liberties—revolutionaries’ notions about the nature and limits of free expression were neither new nor peculiarly French. In ancient Greece, the principle of parrhesia, translated today as “free speech,” involved numerous social, intellectual, and moral prerequisites. To legitimately exercise it, one had to be free from all social dependencies, guided by a desire to speak truth to power, and, for the Epicureans at least, trained in the art of “educating the soul.”11 These conceptions were revived and modified in early modern Europe. In early Stuart England, freedom of speech was thought to be not a negative liberty opposed to censorship (as it is generally understood today), but a positive liberty through which virtue could be realized.12 This helps explain why John Milton, who called for repealing the Licensing Act in his celebrated 1644 tract Areopagitica, could elaborate on the benefits of press freedom even as he denied this freedom to “papists” (Roman Catholics), heretics, and the vulgar, that is, individuals he deemed incapable of demonstrating virtue. “No law,” he insisted, “can permit that which is impious or evil absolutely, either against faith or manners.”13 These ideas crossed the Atlantic to New England, where they found expression in the Puritan imperative to “govern the tongue.” As historian Jane Kamensky has shown, Puritan obsessions with the spiritual and moral implications of speaking freely led on occasion to extreme measures, notably banishments and witch burnings.14
The rise of the secular Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did nothing to alter the belief that moral and intellectual regulation should accompany the freely spoken or written word. Baruch de Spinoza, arguably the most radical free-speech philosopher of the Enlightenment, declared that only speech inspired by a desire to think rationally was to be free. Words inspired by the passions or intended to undermine authority assumed the status of an action, and actions could be subject to constraints. “[A man] can speak against [authorities], provided that he does so from rational conviction, not from fraud, anger, or hatred”—calumny, in other words—“and provided that he does not attempt to introduce any change on his private authority.”15 A century later, Immanuel Kant built upon Spinoza’s ideas. In his “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), he, like Spinoza, distinguished between speech and action. “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!”16 To the question “Which restriction [on speech] hinders enlightenment and which does not, but instead actually advances it?” he responded, “The public use of one’s reason must always be free. . . . The private use of reason may, however, often be very narrowly restricted, without otherwise hindering the progress of enlightenment.”17 “Public” speech, for Kant, involved speaking as a disinterested scholar to other disinterested scholars in an effort to advance knowledge and the collective good. It did not encompass speech deployed in the service of particular interests or passions.
Thus, French revolutionaries were hardly novel or unique in imagining moral and legal limits on free speech. Nor did the Anglo-American legal tradition give them any reason to modify their views. Press freedom had existed in England since the expiration of the Licensing Act in 1695, but as the jurist William Blackstone explained in his popular Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), it consisted in “laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published.”18 Although historians of the early American republic disagree on whether the framers of the Constitution embraced Blackstone’s definition in drafting the First Amendment, there can be little doubt that press freedom was, at the very least, ambiguous, leading Benjamin Franklin to remark, “Few of us [have any] distinct Ideas of its Nature and Extent.”19 For his part (and in what is still another irony), Paine continued adhering to Blackstone’s definition of press freedom even after the Terror and the repeal of the U.S. Sedition Act of 1798.20
However, unlike the framers, who made no mention of limits in the First Amendment, French revolutionaries alluded to them in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Article 10 reads, “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, even religious, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.”21 This qualification may seem trivial; after all, most liberal governments prohibit such speech as crying out “Fire!” in crowded theaters. But contemporary notions of “public order” were much broader than those commonly held today. “Public order” encompassed a religious, moral order, which is why the defenders of religious freedom lamented its inclusion. Similarly, Article 11 reads, “The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Consequently, every citizen may speak, write, and print freely, subject to responsibility for the abuse of such liberty in the cases determined by law.”22 But what constituted an abuse? And how were abuses to be dealt with?
Revolutionaries’ responses to these questions were greatly informed by what I refer to as the culture of calumny and honor. Inherited from the Old Regime, this culture involved the contradictory habits of expressing contest through calumny and of treating calumny as a criminal offense, even treason if it attacked the honor of sovereign authority or the moral values that authority was thought to embody and protect. For revolutionaries as for contemporaries of the Old Regime, honor and morality were the sine qua non of stable society. Without mechanisms for avenging wounded honor and without institutions for reinforcing moral consciousness, society, they feared, would succumb to anarchy and strife. This is precisely what many thought was happening after 1789. Not only was the Revolution destroying the institutions that had formerly regulated honor and morality; it was also overturning the principles upon which honor and morality had been based, namely, social hierarchy and religious orthodoxy.
The advent of free speech and civil equality in 1789 had a profound impact on social and political relations. It threw into question the norms governing patterns of esteem and deference and exacerbated antagonisms hitherto contained by Old Regime customs and institutions. Madame de Staël, though she may have exaggerated the Constituent Assembly’s commitment to unlimited free speech, keenly understood the antagonistic nature of hierarchy and honor in Old Regime society. Her insights merit quoting at length.
As the different classes of society had scarcely any relations with each other in France, their mutual antipathy was of course the stronger. . . . In no country have the men of birth been so completely strangers to the rest of the nation: they came into contact with the second class only to bruise it. . . . The elegance of the French nobility increased the envy which they inspired. To imitate their manners was as difficult as to obtain their prerogatives. The same scene was repeated from rank to rank; the irritability of a nation, lively in the extreme, inclined each one to be jealous of his neighbor, of his superior, of his master; and all, not satisfied with ruling, labored for the humiliation of each other.23
Two decades ago, historian François Furet saw in de Staël’s observations a source of the Revolution’s radicalization. Better known for attributing the Terror to Enlightenment egalitarianism, he briefly speculated in his essay “The Terror” that the legacy of Old Regime privilege may have also contributed to the Revolution’s tragic course. “Aristocratic society, composed of castes created by the monarchy and fiercely jealous of their privileges, left the embers of its violence to the Revolution, which fanned them into conflagration.”24
The chapters ahead explore this conflagration. They show how the transition from aristocratic privilege to civil equality unleashed the systemic violence of the Old Regime. The problem, I argue, was not the principle of civil equality; rather, it was the abruptness of the transition. The sudden democratization of honor unleashed a sudden democratization of vengeance. Meanwhile, contemporaries continued to view calumny as a criminal offense. In the absence of stable courts, calumniated individuals tried to stir up the public’s outrage by conflating their individual honor with the honor of sacred totems of authority and collective identity. While for revolutionaries injurious attacks amounted to attacks on the honor of the nation, for royalists they constituted assaults on the honor of the throne (lèse-majesté) and the sacredness of the altar. As the Revolution progressed, affairs of calumny thus took on increasingly eschatological dimensions, making tolerance and compromise increasingly unlikely. Clearly, it was one thing to declare free speech and civil equality, quite another to raise tolerance thresholds and secure the principle of loyal opposition.
In exploring how the culture of calumny and honor radicalized revolutionary politics, this study engages with debates on the origins of the Terror, the thorniest issue in the study of the French Revolution. Many explanations have been advanced over the past two centuries, but three broad interpretations have taken prominence. According to the first, the Terror grew out of revolutionaries’ ideological commitments to equality, collective sovereignty, and moral regeneration. These “utopian” ideals, often attributed to the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writings, are said to have set the bar too high, leading disillusioned revolutionaries to blame and kill each other for the failure to realize them.25 The second explanation emphasizes resistance and counterrevolution. Its defenders stress the destabilizing role of those who refused to accept the freedom of religion, the abolition of privileges, and the curtailment of monarchical authority and who sought to reverse the Revolution by any means possible, including arms.26 The third explanation stresses circumstances. Its proponents believe that early revolutionary reforms might have been consolidated had it not been for contingent, unforeseen events, such as the outbreak of war in 1792 and the king’s failed attempt to flee France in June 1791—the famous flight to Varennes.27
My thesis reinforces aspects of these interpretations and ties them together. It points to a polarizing dynamic at the heart of revolutionary politics—one that began by exacerbating enmities between revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries and continued by exacerbating enmities among revolutionaries themselves. The culture of calumny and honor, as an explanation for the Revolution’s radicalization, sheds light on key events, notably the king’s flight. Insofar as the king’s honor demanded unwavering esteem and deference, relentless affronts to it did much to turn royalists against the Revolution and compel the king to flee. Indeed, Louis XVI said as much before and after the flight. On the eve of it, he deplored the “thousands of calumniating newspapers and pamphlets” of rebels who “labor to present the monarchy under the most false and odious colors.” Upon his return, he attributed his reasons for fleeing to the “insults [that] have gone unpunished.”28
In addition to explaining the origins of the Terror’s repression of speech, this study offers an alternative perspective on moral regeneration. Scholars have been largely unsympathetic to “utopian” attempts to remake the moral foundations of society, viewing them as naive, illiberal, even totalitarian. Yet early revolutionaries were hardly naive or utopian in the way they initially invoked morality to legitimize the new regime. Despite Edmund Burke’s assertion in 1790 that they were nothing but “atheists and madmen,” most French legislators shared Burke’s assumption that religion constituted the only viable moral foundation for the new order.29 If revolutionaries were naive about anything, it was in thinking that they could count on the existing moral infrastructure—the Church—after having declared religious freedom, expropriated Church property to pay the monarchy’s debt, and imposed on the clergy an oath of allegiance to the new regime. It was only after three years of failing to win the clergy’s support that revolutionaries embarked on the radical project of inventing a secular religion, turning churches into temples of reason, erecting altars to the nation, and creating a new calendar based on nature. The fervor with which they pursued these endeavors sprang from their alarm over spiraling civil strife. Moral regeneration, they hoped, would curb calumny, a major source of their troubles, by inspiring unity and restraint. By 1793, revolutionaries had indeed become schizophrenic, calumniating, killing calumniators, and moralizing all at the same time. This state of affairs, I show, owed to the collapse of institutions and norms that used to regulate honor and the failure of new ones. The Terror may have exhibited traits common to modern totalitarian regimes—rampant denunciation, fanaticism, purges—but it emerged from conditions commonly found in weak or failed states.30
Since the Terror’s policing of public opinion had origins in Old Regime customs and practices, our study begins there. Part I, “The Old Regime,” begins with a chapter on eighteenth-century beliefs about the need to “police,” or manage, collective values. From devout absolutists to secular philosophes, there was widespread consensus that the state should maintain and reinforce moral values, customs, and manners, what the French called mœurs. Chapter 1 also identifies the police practices that would persist after the abolition of prepublication censorship in 1789, specifically, repression, surveillance, and the diffusion of moral propaganda. Finally, this chapter points out the tensions within an increasingly self-conscious and expanding “public opinion,” specifically, between democratic and disciplinary tendencies. These tensions would become explosive in 1789, once institutions that had regulated them collapsed. Chapter 2 analyzes the Old Regime culture of calumny and honor. It stresses how honor figured as a basis of social hierarchy and political legitimacy and, consequently, why contemporaries so frequently resorted to calumny in the course of social and political conflict. I also review the institutional and social practices governing the economy of esteem and deference in Old Regime society, focusing particularly on dueling and the jurisprudence on injurious speech. Chapter 3 traces how philosophes and administrators imagined legitimate limits on press freedom during the Enlightenment. Tensions among their views foreshadow revolutionary clashes over free expression. Finally, chapter 4 examines how demands for press freedom evolved between the drafting of cahiers de doléances (formal demands for reform) throughout France in the winter and spring of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen promulgated in August. Although the majority of cahiers demanded press freedom, they also insisted on maintaining Old Regime laws against verbal and written attacks on authority, religion, mœurs, and honor. In promulgating the Declaration of Rights, the National Assembly made no mention of these desired restrictions, deferring the matter to subsequent legislation, which was not forthcoming. The stage was thus set for widespread conflict over limiting free speech and determining core values.
Part II, “The French Revolution,” examines the struggle to define and enforce limits on free speech between 1789 and the Terror (1793–1794, or the Year II according to the revolutionary calendar). Chapter 5 focuses on efforts to pass press laws. It analyzes the shifting tactical stances of revolutionaries on the issue of free speech. I show the emergence of a new, quasi-libertarian position on free speech that rejected the notion of seditious libel.31 Trumpeted by radical and reactionary minorities, the position had no impact on legislation. More prominent was the belief that calumny constituted a criminal offense. As early as July 1789, revolutionaries began translating the Old Regime crime of lèse-majesté (treasonous activity, including calumnious speech against monarchical authority) into the new crime of lèse-nation. Special courts were established to deal with such crimes, and several affairs involving speech were put on the dockets, but judicial instability and amnesties prevented them from being treated. Shortly after the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792, the lèse-nation court was abolished. Affairs of calumny shifted to the National Convention, where they were more vulnerable to political pressure. Punitive demands intensified, culminating in the legislation of the Terror, which made calumny a capital offense.
Chapter 6 focuses on four instances of arrest or exclusion of deputies in the National Assembly for speech offenses in the year 1790, the supposedly “peaceful” year of the Revolution’s “liberal phase.”32 These case studies reveal the interplay between popular agitation and high Assembly politics, showing how struggles over honor and religion generated punitive, exclusionary impulses. In the absence of libel laws, embattled parties invoked sacred principles to justify punishment, thereby infusing affairs with eschatological stakes. Chapter 7 examines this “will to punish,” as historian Georges Lefebvre referred to it, more broadly. Drawing on police records in Paris and the provinces, I trace how punitive impulses radicalized politics at all levels between 1789 and the Terror. Several affairs involving “speech crimes” on the revolutionary tribunal’s docket in the Year II, I show, began as local squabbles over honor, though convictions were often justified on ideological grounds. This chapter also reveals that despite the Terror’s harsh laws against calumny, revolutionary tribunals frequently cited earlier ones passed during the so-called “liberal phase” of the Revolution (1789–1791).
Finally, chapter 8 returns to the issue of morality and the “policing” or state management of public opinion. It shows how leaders, alarmed by escalating calumny and vengeance, tried to inspire civil restraint by reinforcing morality. At first, they expected clerics to assist them in this task. But sharp divisions within the Church—exacerbated, though not caused, by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1790—led revolutionaries to abandon traditional religion altogether and create a new one based on patriotism and secular civic morality. In 1792, a Bureau of Public Spirit was established within the Ministry of the Interior, and its agents were sent into the provinces to spread republican propaganda and monitor public opinion. The work of these agents and the polarizing impact they had will be discussed in this chapter, along with the numerous proposals for civil censorship put forth in 1793. I argue that the authors of these proposals, mostly deputies, sought to channel the punitive impulses generated by calumny into mild, pedagogical forms of censure. Finally, I show that moral regeneration efforts continued after the Terror. They were espoused and theorized by a former royal censor, Dieudonné Thiébault, the very individual who had defended prepublication censorship in 1789. Thiébault’s ideas about the importance of “public spirit” persisted through the nineteenth century, eventually leading to the creation of universal, compulsory education during the Third Republic, as I suggest in the conclusion.
To argue, as I do, that revolutionaries remained attached to Old Regime habits, that the early years of the Revolution were not as “liberal” as often portrayed, and that the problem of free speech contributed to the repressive and regenerative practices of the Terror is not to deny the Revolution’s achievements. This study in no way refutes the view that the Revolution contributed to advancing human rights, democratic institutions, and civil equality, at least in the long run.33 It does, however, explain why the Revolution produced lethal repression and moral fanaticism in the short term. In doing so, it aims to broaden the problems and expose the pitfalls encountered when hierarchical, authoritarian reflexes mix with liberal aspirations—especially under the strains of abrupt regime change.