FOR MANY PARTICIPANTS, THE CELEBRATION OF THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY OF the storming of the Bastille, the event that had opened the path of the Revolution, was as memorable as the journée itself. Held on the Champ de Mars, the large open space on Paris’s Left Bank that is now the site of the Eiffel Tower, on July 14, 1790, the celebration, known as the Festival of Federation, drew a crowd of over three hundred thousand. Whereas the “victors of the Bastille” had been drawn mostly from the neighborhood immediately around the fortress, the participants and spectators at the festival came from all over the country. To symbolize the unity of the new national community proclaimed by the Revolution, members of the patriotic militia, the National Guard, marched to Paris from every one of the newly established departments to join soldiers from the regular army, the deputies, and the king himself in swearing a public oath of loyalty to the nation and the new constitution.

Preparations for the huge oval of grandstands and for the field to be used for the festival were still not completed in the days prior to the event, and a call went out for volunteers to wield spades and fill carts with debris to clear the ground for the “altar of the fatherland” and other structures needed for the ceremony. The king himself visited the construction site, and “the most distinguished society ladies gave themselves over to this patriotic work with a graciousness that redoubled the enthusiasm,” the Jacobin deputy Alexandre Lameth remembered. “It would be impossible for those who didn’t see these extraordinary days to imagine what they were like… the truest happiness, the most original remarks, patriotic songs, lively exchanges, the free opening up of hearts, the quick sharing of hopes, the anticipation of the beautiful future that was being prepared for France… formed something that had never existed on earth before this great moment of political regeneration.”¹ As the volunteers toiled, they sang a catchy ditty, “Ça ira, ça ira” (Things will go fine), that became an anthem of the Revolution. Numerous verses could be fitted to the song’s simple refrain, and singers often joined hands in a circle dance, the carmagnole, as they sang. In 1790, the song reflected popular optimism that “in spite of the mutineers everything shall succeed”; later versions became more explicit in calling for punishment for aristocrats and other opponents of the movement.

On the morning of the event at the altar erected in the center of the grounds, the deputy and bishop Talleyrand led two hundred priests in celebrating Mass to bless the country. Like the Church, Louis XVI made a show of accepting the new order by swearing a solemn oath of loyalty to the constitution. “I heard him pronounce it and fifty thousand people heard it as I did,” Ferrières wrote.² But the high point of the ceremony came when Lafayette, in his uniform as commander of the National Guard, strode to the center of the massive arena and led the assembled guardsmen in taking the oath. If the king symbolized the old regime that had originally given him his authority, Lafayette was the embodiment of the revolutionary movement for liberty and equality that he had joined in America and that had now come to France.

Attending the ceremony was a life-changing experience for the young Jean-Marie Goujon. Inspired by the Revolution, Goujon had abandoned a promising law career and cut his hair short in “the most natural, the simplest, the healthiest [style],” in order to proclaim his political sympathies. At the festival, he later wrote to his mother, he “saw five hundred thousand men assembled, their arms raised to the Supreme Being, offering him free souls worthy of virtue. I saw it, I joined them, my flaming heart sought in nature a more beautiful title than that of French citizen, and I felt glorious because it was given to me.… I will live free or die.”³ His words were more prophetic than Goujon knew: five years after dedicating himself heart and soul to the Revolution, he would literally give his life for the movement.

The enthusiasm with which the Parisians helped complete the preparations, the enormous turnout, and the willingness of the crowd to endure the rain that poured down for most of the day showed that the Festival of the Federation had tapped into a widely shared wish for the success of the Revolution. But the feelings generated by the festival could not dissipate the tensions that continued to grow as proponents of the radical measures taken to promote liberty and equality in 1789 sought to put them into practice, and as those who feared the Revolution’s consequences stiffened their opposition. Rather than remaining united, French men and women found themselves making choices that increasingly divided them into hostile camps. On June 20, 1791, less than a year after he swore to uphold the new constitution on July 14, 1790, Louis XVI would dash the hopes of people like Goujon when he tried to flee Paris and force a reversal of the Revolution.

Even the events that had led up to the festival reflected the tensions running through the country. The national festival was a carefully choreographed elaboration of celebrations that had begun on a local level in the previous winter in southwestern France, where peasants were eager to see the promise of “the abolition of feudalism” carried out. A veritable wave of disturbances had affected at least three hundred parishes spread across eight of the newly created departments. Groups of armed men would go to a neighboring village and urge the inhabitants to join them in attacking symbols of noble privilege, such as the weather vanes on the local seigneurs’ houses and the coats of arms of aristocratic families on church walls or pews. These gatherings frequently culminated in the erection of a “liberty tree,” similar to the maypoles raised during annual spring festivals. Liberty trees were decorated with symbols of the Revolution: tricolor ribbons, panels painted with revolutionary slogans, and sometimes representations of the gallows as a threat against opponents of the Revolution. Boisterous locally organized federations, frequently accompanied by drinking and the random discharge of gunfire, were joyous occasions, but they also showed how strong popular fear of a reaction against the Revolution remained and how easily it might spill over into violence.

In the spring of 1790, the federation movement spread from the countryside to the towns, reaching almost every part of the country. Gatherings of National Guards from entire regions came together to swear loyalty to the nation and the constitution. The small town of Tain, considering that “such confederations can only accelerate the regeneration of the kingdom,” voted to provide funds to send all three hundred of its National Guardsmen to Lyon for a regional event at the end of May. The Lyon ceremony, which stretched over three days and included concerts and a fireworks show, attracted fifty thousand guardsmen and fifty thousand civilians. The Lyonnais paid a local sculptor to create a seventy-six-foot-high artificial mountain topped with a female statue of Liberty “in the Egyptian style,” and had souvenir medals struck to commemorate the occasion. The city’s official address promised support for the National Assembly’s decrees and menacingly declared “the rebels who oppose[d] them despicable and traitors to the country.”⁴

The militant tone of such declarations and the insistence of regular army soldiers that they be allowed to participate in the federations along with the “patriots” of the National Guard alarmed the government. Most denunciations of the aristocracy might be dismissed as empty rhetoric, but soldiers who directed such epithets at their noble officers threatened to plunge the army into “the most turbulent anarchy,” as the army minister warned the National Assembly on June 4. The grand assembly in Paris on July 14 was designed to channel and control the patriotic enthusiasm that had started the confederation movement. Only uniformed soldiers and National Guardsmen were allowed to participate actively, and initiatives from below, such as that of Madame Mouret, who proposed a parallel “confederation of French women,” were discouraged. These efforts to set strict boundaries to the festival angered radicals like the journalist Marat. Always suspicious of the motives of men in power, he vociferously denounced the “criminal oath” that would bind the soldiers and National Guardsmen to blindly obeying an assembly that had denied voting rights to the poor; he warned the populace against the “lures of this festivity, where your implacable enemies will promise you fraternal friendship.”⁵

Both the authorities’ fears and Marat’s anger grew out of the many conflicts unleashed by the revolutionary reforms of the previous year. The successful harvest in the fall of 1789 did reduce one source of unrest: riots over bread prices remained relatively rare until 1792. Local elections in January and February of 1790 were also largely peaceful. Turnout was high, especially in rural areas, and the results seemed to indicate that members of all three former orders were willing to accept the new system. Peasant voters frequently chose local nobles or village priests as mayors, and their willingness to accept these responsibilities showed that members of the former privileged orders were ready to give the new regime a chance. The king gave the same impression on February 4, 1790, when he made a surprise appearance at the National Assembly. Addressing the deputies in person for the first time since the October Days, he promised to uphold the new constitution, raising hopes of a peaceful transition to a new regime.

At the same time as the local elections were being held, however, the wave of peasant unrest that started the federation movement was setting off alarm bells. Reporting to the National Assembly about these troubles on February 9, 1790, the abbé Grégoire attributed them to “fear that the decrees of August 4 would not be implemented, to the false interpretation of these decrees,” and called for the deputies to quickly make it clear which feudal rights would be abolished outright and which ones peasants would have to buy out.⁶ The Assembly answered that question in mid-March, when the veteran feudal lawyer Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai presented the results of months of debate in the committee charged with implementing the decrees passed the previous August. In almost impenetrable language full of archaic words such as gavenne, poursoin, sauvement, and avourie—regional terms for dues paid to a lord in exchange for the theoretical protection he owed his vassals—the proposal separated the hundreds of privileges that seigneurs had accumulated over the centuries into those that were considered outright violations of individual natural rights and those that could be classified as legitimate properties of their holders. The Assembly had recognized the former in its declaration, and they had been abolished without compensation; peasants would have to buy out the latter.

The committee’s proposal heavily favored the former seigneurs. The rates at which they were to be paid for the extinction of the dues they had traditionally collected were high, and the procedures established made it difficult for peasants to actually liberate themselves from their obligations. If there was a dispute about the legitimacy of a particular claim, it was up to the former vassal to prove that it was not justified. Peasants were further disappointed by the committee’s treatment of the tithe. Now that the clergy were to be paid by the state out of tax revenues, cultivators who leased land had expected their burdens to be reduced. Instead, the deputies decided that tithes should be considered part of the legitimate rent due to the owners of property. Most of the benefits from the abolition of the tithe wound up in the pockets of former seigneurs and of bourgeois landowners rather than going to those who worked the land.

As news of the details of the Assembly’s plan filtered out to the countryside, peasants reacted angrily. “The people… not only refuse to pay or recognize these rights, but threaten the owners and the notaries who try to collect them,” a local official in the department of Nièvre complained.⁷ Rural populations were especially frustrated to learn that they were expected to continue paying dues even on former church properties that now belonged to the nation: the revolutionary government still wanted the revenue from these holdings until they were sold off. Now that they were officially free and equal citizens, peasants saw no reason why they should be subject to the same obligations that had marked their inferior status before 1789. Although the letter of the law was largely on their side, former seigneurs were no happier with the legislation. They quickly realized that they had little chance of collecting the compensation they were promised, and they complained that they were not allowed to free themselves from traditional restrictions on the use of their property, such as the requirement to let villagers glean leftover grain in the fields after the harvest.

The National Assembly’s increasingly radical decrees on religious matters were just as controversial as its decisions on feudal rights. On February 13, 1790, the deputies voted to abolish the religious orders of monks and nuns, with the exception of congregations that provided necessary services, such as nursing and education. Enlightenment critics had long had the orders in their sights; unlike the parish clergy, who supposedly instilled moral virtues in their flocks, cloistered religious did not, in the philosophes’ view, perform any useful functions at all. The very idea of lifetime vows of celibacy struck Barnave as “incompatible with the rights of man” and with the prescriptions of nature itself. The revolutionaries were convinced that nuns, especially, were unwilling victims of families eager to avoid the cost of dowries for their daughters. Caricaturists churned out pictures of smiling young women throwing off their habits and joining hands with liberated male monks, and Olympe de Gouges wrote a melodramatic play about a young novice saved from a life of celibacy by her gallant lover. Protests such as that of the Carmelite nuns of Paris, who denied indignantly that they were “victims slowly consumed by regrets,” failed to move the deputies. After all, the deputies expected, as the economist Dupont de Nemours said, that taking over the property of the convents and monasteries would be “an excellent operation from the financial point of view.” Initially, about half the male members of religious orders—and an even higher proportion of women religious—tried to take advantage of provisions in the Assembly’s decree that would have allowed them to continue living in voluntary religious communities. As the pressures on them mounted, however, increasing numbers melted into the general population. A conservative Catholic complained that “women who had vowed to espouse Jesus, monks who had voluntarily sacrificed themselves to chastity… prostituted their hearts with adulterous oaths” by leaving their orders and marrying.⁸

The abolition of the religious orders made it urgent for the Assembly to find new ways to carry out the charitable works for which the Church had been responsible. In a report to the National Assembly that he delivered at the end of May 1790, the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a liberal noble known for his philanthropic concerns, laid down the basic principles for a secularized welfare state administered by the government. Instead of accepting the existence of poverty as an inevitable aspect of society, he argued, the goal should be to eliminate it entirely. “Society owes all its members subsistence or work,” he announced. While he and his colleagues expressed no sympathy for able-bodied individuals who refused employment, they envisioned a comprehensive system that would “aid the indigent, the weak and the infirm of all ages, in all social situations, and in every part of the kingdom.” This would include creating jobs for those who could not find them on their own. The Church had used the “humiliating word ‘alms’” to describe aid to the poor, Rochefoucauld-Liancourt stated. The new terms of “assistance and obligation should ennoble both the nation that gives and the unfortunate person who receives.” Poor citizens were “an integral part of the nation,” another deputy, Jacques-Guillaume Thouret, insisted, and their needs therefore ought to be covered by “the revenue of the nation.”⁹

Implementing the lofty goal of protecting all citizens through a comprehensive safety net of welfare measures, the Assembly recognized, would be a massive challenge. The deputies promised the newly created departmental administrations the funds they would need to set up workshops for the unemployed, maintain hospitals, and care for the aged, orphans, and the insane, but the money they appropriated was far short of the need. The actual effects of these idealistic reforms fell very unequally on men and women. Although the ongoing crisis in the country’s largest industry, textile manufacturing, put more female spinners and lacemakers than male weavers out of work, little was done to provide women with employment; moreover, the committee’s calculations of what constituted a living wage paid no attention to the fact that women’s pay was invariably much less than men’s. Legislators praised the “precious citizennesses” who served as wetnurses for abandoned children, but their reforms disrupted the sources of funding that were supposed to pay for this care. To make sure hospitals remained staffed, the decree abolishing the religious orders actually required that the nursing sisters who worked in them continue performing their functions, but under the administration of male doctors.

This takeover of welfare functions by the state caused less controversy in the Assembly and among the public than issues concerning the Church. Two months after the decree abolishing religious orders, the Assembly carried through on its decision to expropriate all church property. Forced to resign themselves to this loss, the Church’s supporters in the Assembly rallied behind a proposition put forward on April 12, 1790, by Christophe Antoine Gerle, one of the first members of the clergy to join the National Assembly as a deputy in June 1789. The proposition declared Catholicism the “dominant” religion in France, and the ensuing debate showed once again how the subject of religion drove speakers on both sides to take extreme positions. A clerical deputy demanded that his colleagues bear witness that if the motion was defeated, he did not deserve to be cursed by God, since he had done his utmost to oppose it. Mirabeau countered with a reminder of France’s past history of religious intolerance, pointing out that “from this tribune from which I am speaking to you, one can see the window from which the hand of a French monarch… fired the arquebus that signaled the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre.”¹⁰ The final vote was 495 to 400 against Gerle’s motion.

The deputies who had voted against declaring Catholicism the state religion justified their position by arguing that “the word ‘dominant’” implied “a superiority contrary to the principles of equality, which are the basis of our constitution.”¹¹ They denied any hostility toward Catholicism and pointed out that the Catholic Church would continue to be the only one receiving public financial support. Nevertheless, many Catholics concluded that the Revolution was turning against their most cherished beliefs. Particularly in regions where there was a significant Protestant minority, Catholics saw the rejection of Gerle’s motion as a renewal of the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century. “Calvinism has taken charge of the committees,” one pamphleteer insisted. “It is drawing up speeches, it is seizing control of the forces of the National Guard, and it is furiously propagating… the sentiments of hate, intolerance, and vengeance which animated Calvin, its founder.” Passions boiled over in several southern cities where the Revolution had allowed prosperous Protestant merchants and manufacturers to gain control of local governments and National Guard units. The worst outbreak was in the city of Nîmes, a major center of textile production, where peasants from the countryside joined Catholic artisans in attacking the Protestants. Three days of violence in mid-June claimed some three hundred lives, a larger number of casualties than in any other episode of the Revolution up to that time. The National Assembly’s official report took the side of the Protestants, blaming the bloodshed on “a party that was formed to oppose the constitution, at the time of your [the National Assembly’s]… first decrees on the property of the clergy.”¹²

The troubles in Nîmes seemed like a revival of religious violence from the past, but the revolutionaries’ own actions were rapidly creating a new conflict within the Catholic Church. The Assembly’s decision to take over the entirety of the Church’s property made it imperative for the legislators to agree on new arrangements to govern the country’s largest institution. Known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the law, hammered out in debates extending from late May to early July 1790, radically restructured the French Church. An American-style separation of church and state was hardly conceivable in France, where members of a single denomination made up the overwhelming majority of the population. Government and religion there had been deeply intertwined since the establishment of the kingdom more than a millennium earlier. Just as they had been unwilling to concede the king any voice in determining what powers he would have under the new constitution, on the grounds that to do so would be to undermine the sovereignty of the nation, the deputies were also unwilling to negotiate with the Church about the reforms they had in mind. They were even less disposed to allow the pope, a foreigner, to weigh in on issues that, as far as they were concerned, were strictly national concerns.

Many advocates of government-dictated reform had been inspired by the arguments of the Jansenists, a party within the Church that had regularly turned to the king and to the parlements for protection from hostile bishops and even the papacy. “Your decrees will not carry any attack on this holy religion: they will only return it to its primitive purity, and you will truly be the Christians of the Gospel,” one advocate of reform told his colleagues in the Assembly. Deputies imbued with the rationalist ideas of the Enlightenment were happy to see the institution literally cut down to size as the Assembly suppressed many parishes as well as fifty-two bishoprics, redrawing the boundaries of dioceses so that they matched those of the newly created departments. For Catholics who regarded bishops as divinely consecrated continuators of the work of the original apostles, this was much more than a “mechanical and purely temporal operation,” as one apologist called it. The same theologian endorsed the Civil Constitution’s provisions for bishops to be elected by the departmental electoral assemblies (which were also to choose deputies), and for priests to be named by the lower-level district assemblies. The plan simply “exchanged an arbitrary government for a communal one, so conformable to the church’s true spirit,” he wrote.¹³ Opponents objected that the electoral assemblies selecting Catholic clergymen might include Protestants, nonbelievers, and even Jews.

Although the Assembly insisted on its authority to enact the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, it now had to face the question of whether the clergy and the population would accept these sweeping changes. At first, the signs seemed favorable. Many parish clergy were willing to support reforms that elevated their status and their income at the expense of monks and priests who had little contact with the laity. A long tradition of loyalty to the French government and a genuine enthusiasm for the Revolution’s project of national regeneration worked in favor of acceptance. This enthusiasm had been shown by the willingness of many members of the clergy to participate publicly in the federation festivals held while the debate about the Civil Constitution was under way. The French Church’s “Gallican” tradition of independence from the papacy, embodied in the concordat signed in 1516 between the monarchy and the Vatican, limited the pope’s power to intervene in its affairs. The current pope, Pius VI, not wanting to provoke the revolutionaries into annexing the papal territory of Avignon in southern France, said nothing about the Civil Constitution during the legislative debates. In view of the pope’s silence, Louis XVI approved the measure on July 22, 1790. A dutiful Catholic, he accepted the argument that the new rules for the Church did not affect the substance of religious belief. He was deeply pained a few days later, however, to receive a letter from the pope warning that the law might “lead the entire nation into error, the kingdom into schism, and perhaps be the cause of a cruel civil war.”¹⁴ The king now found himself caught between his loyalty to the Church and his public duty as head of the French government.

The first half of 1790 was also marked by controversies involving France’s relations with its colonies and with other countries and with a major extension of the campaign against the nobility. After the night of August 4, defenders of the colonial system warned plantation owners that the French were “drunk with liberty” and might take steps to undermine slavery. The fact that so many leaders of the revolutionary movement were members of Brissot’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks made such fears plausible. In late August 1789, slaves on two plantations in Martinique “refused to work, saying loudly that they were free,” according to the colony’s governor, who forwarded to France anonymous letters purporting to come from black conspirators. When news of the fall of the Bastille reached Saint-Domingue, blacks were reported to have interpreted it to mean that “the white slaves had killed their masters and that now they are free.”¹⁵

The news of the uprising in Paris inspired not only the slaves in Saint-Domingue but also the white colonists. The latter staged a colonial version of the municipal revolutions that had swept metropolitan France, setting up local assemblies in the different parts of the colony and forcing the royal intendant to flee. By this time, plantation owners living in Paris had created the Club Massiac, a group dedicated to lobbying for their interests. Free men of color in Paris formed their own movement to protest their exclusion from representation. Since the wealthier free men of color were often slaveowners in their own right, they initially thought they might be able to persuade the members of the Club Massiac to work with them; Vincent Ogé and Julien Raimond, wealthy men of mixed race from Saint-Domingue, addressed the club in early September, only to be told that its members were determined to limit the organization to whites.

After this rebuff, the free men of color sought allies among the white revolutionaries. Although few members of the Friends of the Blacks had ever visited the colonies, and they had said nothing about the situation of free men of color in their numerous pamphlets, they were happy to embrace their campaign. Defending the rights of men like Raimond, who had three white grandparents, spoke and wrote French fluently, and was wealthy enough to meet the new constitution’s criteria of active citizenship, was simpler than challenging slavery itself; indeed, many whites in France could not understand why those in the colonies did not see how advantageous it would be for them to ally with the free people of color to form a single bloc of property-owners opposed to the more numerous slaves. The white colonists, who claimed that any concession to people of mixed race would lead inexorably to the overthrow of slavery, were stigmatized as “aristocrats of the skin.” It took an all-out effort for them to defeat a proposal advanced in late November 1789 to grant the free people of color in Saint-Domingue two representatives in the National Assembly. Despite this success, colonists and merchants remained on their guard. Mirabeau, the Assembly’s most effective orator, was known to be corresponding with the British abolitionist leader Thomas Clarkson, and he had told his speechwriting team to work on a proposal to abolish the slave trade. “We live in perpetual fear of the effects of a metaphysics that extends to everything with a truly dangerous exaggeration,” a proslavery trader in the French port city of La Rochelle wrote.¹⁶

News of the white revolts against the colonial administration reached France at the end of February 1790. “Letters from Martinique and Saint-Domingue report that these colonies have declared their independence from the metropole,” one newspaper told its readers.¹⁷ The reports created a frenzy in trading centers like Bordeaux, where supporters of slavery organized a deputation to Paris. The city’s merchants claimed to accept the principles of the Declaration of Rights, a local chronicler noted, “but cannot conceive that the Africans, like others, are born and remain free and equal in rights.”¹⁸ Such pressures drove Mirabeau to tone down his long-anticipated speech to the Jacobin Club on March 2. To the colonists’ great relief, he stopped short of urging immediate measures against the slave trade, calling instead for negotiations with the British on the issue. In the National Assembly, another patriot firebrand, Barnave, in his capacity as chair of a hastily created committee on colonial affairs, concentrated his efforts on conciliating the white colonists. They were promised that the Assembly would not pass any measures concerning “the status of persons”—a circumlocution referring to slaves and people of color—without the prior approval of the colonists themselves.

Barnave brought forward decrees on March 8 and 28, 1790, endorsing the assemblies that had sprung up in the colonies. The abbé Grégoire, a strong supporter of the cause of the free men of color, demanded assurances that members of that group who met the property qualification for voting would be allowed to participate in colonial elections. Barnave privately reassured him, but the absence of any mention of the issue in the decrees allowed the white colonists to exclude their rivals. This ambiguity set the stage for further troubles. Fearing that the French legislators might change their minds, an all-white colonial assembly meeting in the city of Saint-Marc drafted its own constitution for Saint-Domingue, asserting its power to make its own laws without approval from the French legislature. Recognizing the determination of the whites in the colony to exclude them from power, free men of color on both sides of the ocean began organizing to demand the rights they thought the decrees of March 1790 were meant to give them.

The colonies, vital to the French economy, were also part of the kingdom’s global competition with other imperial powers. The issue of who would decide when the country’s interests required resort to war suddenly flared up in mid-May 1790, when Spain came into conflict with Britain over rights in the Nootka Sound in the northern Pacific. Spain had been allied to France through a “family compact” since Louis XVI’s ancestor Louis XIV had succeeded in installing a Bourbon relative as king there in 1713. When Louis XVI prepared to back Spain if the dispute over this remote territory led to conflict, the patriot deputies in the Assembly objected. Declaring war was a privilege of the nation, not the monarch, they insisted. “It is in a minister’s interest to declare war,” Barnave warned, “because then one is forced to let him manage the immense subsidies that are required, because then his authority is increased without limit.” In contrast, an elected assembly representing the people would be naturally inclined to peace. “Each of us has properties, friends, family, children, a whole set of personal interests that might be compromised by war,” the Jacobin leader concluded.¹⁹

Fifty thousand Parisians crowded the streets around the meeting hall on May 22, following the debates through handwritten bulletins passed out the windows. Inside, the Jacobin triumvirate of Barnave, Duport, and Lameth were battling Mirabeau, who once again was defending royal powers while secretly trying to persuade the king and queen to commit themselves to the basic principles of the Revolution. Mirabeau, who wanted the king and the Assembly to share the authority to declare war, “was incredible yesterday,” one noble deputy, Gaston de Lévis, wrote to his wife. “He pulverized the aristocrats, brought down the kings, elevated the peoples, vexed the extremists and won the admiration of all.” In the end, it was decided that the king could propose a declaration of war, but that only the Assembly could officially make the decision. The Jacobins regarded the outcome as a victory: they confidently assumed that France would never again engage in a war of conquest or send soldiers into battle merely to gain glory for its ruler. They brushed aside warnings like those of the conservative marquis d’Estourmel, who prophetically foresaw two dangers: either France’s rivals would “profit from our enthusiasm for philosophical reveries” by seizing territories and commercial advantages for themselves, or France, deciding that its democratic principles required it to intervene when other powers committed aggressions, would “be at war with every nation that we consider unjust, or which will not accept our system.”²⁰

What d’Estourmel saw as a danger—the possibility that France would commit itself to bringing its revolutionary principles to the rest of the world—inspired others, who hoped that the ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy would soon spread beyond the country’s borders. Already in late 1789, the journalist Camille Desmoulins and other French revolutionaries had welcomed the start of a revolt against Austrian rule in the Belgian provinces just north of the French border. Although the Belgian rebels were deeply divided between traditionalists, who opposed the rationalist reform program that the Habsburg emperor, Joseph II, wanted to impose from above, and democrats, who sought a reduction in the privileges of the local nobility and the Catholic Church, Desmoulins assumed that the movement would follow in the footsteps of the French one. The Belgian movement overthrew Austrian rule in December, but by the following March, the traditionalist party, led by Hendrik Van der Noot, had driven out the rival supporters of the democrat, Jean-François Vonck. Vonck’s followers took refuge in France and lobbied for intervention against the aristocrats in their own country.

Vonckist exiles from Belgium were just some of a growing number of foreigners inspired by the spectacle of the French Revolution. Others included the Dutch Patriots who had been forced to flee their country after the defeat of their movement in 1787; the Polish Jew Zalkind Hourwitz, who had competed against Grégoire in an essay contest about Jewish emancipation in 1787; a German journalist, Konrad Oelsner, who joined the Jacobin Club in 1790, and who translated Sieyès’s writings into his native language; and the Spanish colonial military officer Francisco Miranda, who would later help start an independence movement in his native Venezuela. The American poet Joel Barlow had arrived in 1788 to promote a land-speculation scheme, the Scioto Company, that attracted the attention of Brissot and other revolutionaries. The Englishwoman Helen Maria Williams, who settled in Paris in 1790, welcomed a stream of visitors over the years, including the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, whom the French revolutionaries regarded as a hero, because of his role in promoting American independence. Through their personal contacts, their correspondence, and their publications, the members of this foreign colony in France helped spread revolutionary ideas abroad and encouraged the French revolutionaries to believe that they had support in other countries.

Pro-revolutionary foreigners obtained public recognition when a group of them, dressed in exotic costumes, appeared at the National Assembly on June 19, 1790, asking to participate in the upcoming Festival of Federation. The delegation included “Arabs, Americans, Chaldeans, Indians,” and representatives from over a dozen European countries. Their spokesman, a Prussian baron named Anacharsis Cloots who called himself “the orator of the human race,” introduced them as “free men whose countries are in irons, whose fatherlands will be free someday thanks to the influence of your unshakable courage and your philosophical laws.”²¹ The Assembly welcomed them but stopped short of promising any concrete support to revolutionary movements in other countries; nevertheless, the incident underlined the conviction of the French revolutionaries that their principles were universal and encouraged the activists hoping to transform their homelands. Many of them believed that France would support them.

On the same day that it welcomed Cloots’s delegation, the Assembly voted to abolish the institution of hereditary nobility and outlaw titles such as count, baron, and marquis. Their use, asserted one liberal noble, Charles de Lameth, Alexandre’s brother, “offends the equality that forms the basis of our constitution; they come from the feudal regime that you have destroyed.” Lafayette and other prominent nobles supported him; only the abbé Maury, the counterrevolutionary priest of commoner origins, tried to head off the decision. Maury protested that social distinctions were an essential aspect of French life, and that “if there is no more nobility, there is no more monarchy.” The marquis de Ferrières tried to downplay the significance of the measure, telling his wife that, after the abolition of feudal rights the previous August, “the nobility was already gone for all practical purposes.” In any event, he continued, the decree was “absurd, since one cannot keep a son from descending from his father.” Even as he promised to try to persuade the other nobles from their province to submit to the new law, however, he hedged his bets by instructing his wife to “save our family titles… and put them in a safe place.”²²

The Assembly’s measure drove an increasing number of members of the former privileged class to take the step of emigrating from France. The phenomenon of noble emigration had begun during the summer of 1789: immediately after the storming of the Bastille, courtiers associated with the unsuccessful effort to replace Necker, including the comte d’Artois, the younger of Louis XVI’s two brothers, had sought refuge abroad. In the face of the peasant uprisings that followed the fall of the Bastille, many other nobles also decided to cross the nearest border. Some revolutionaries initially claimed that “it is a good thing for the nation to see its bad citizens flee,” but before long, the émigrés began to be seen as a threat to the Revolution.²³

By September 1789, the comte d’Artois had taken up residence in Turin, the capital of his father-in-law’s kingdom of Savoy on France’s southeastern border. There, he gathered other exiles around him. Assisted by the former minister Calonne, who had fled after his dismissal in 1787, and who hoped to win back royal favor by helping to restore the monarchy, Artois wrote to other European rulers, claiming that Louis XVI was not acting freely in appearing to accept the Revolution. He urged military action to rescue the French monarchy. Emigration thus took on the appearance of a deliberately counterrevolutionary act intended to thwart the will of the French people. By mid-1790, a number of military officers and aristocratic members of the upper clergy had also joined the emigration. The prince de Condé, another high-ranking member of the royal family, had emigrated to the German city of Coblentz. He began organizing émigré officers into an army, while émigré clergy stirred up opposition to the National Assembly’s church reforms. The emigration movement embarrassed Louis XVI, who was acting as though he accepted the Revolution while privately hoping that the movement’s internal conflicts would hasten its collapse. He appealed to Artois and Condé to return to the country, but they ignored his instructions, which led others to suspect that he secretly approved of their actions. Inside the country, disgruntled nobles took the lead in organizing a counterrevolutionary federation of their own in a town called Jalès in the southern department of the Gard near the city of Nîmes, where religious violence had broken out earlier in the year. Reports about this “camp of Jalès” heightened patriots’ fears of counterrevolutionary plots.

The French military was one of the institutions most affected by the growing distrust between commoners and former nobles. Officers’ ranks in the prerevolutionary army and navy had been almost exclusively limited to aristocrats; the ordinary soldiers and sailors they commanded could never expect to rise to higher positions. The promise of “careers open to talents” proclaimed in the August 4 decrees and the Declaration of Rights appealed to the commoners in the military but offended their superiors, who saw a gentleman’s profession being thrown open to less educated and sophisticated competitors. The morale of the army was also undermined by the creation of the National Guard, whose members’ claims to be the truest patriots often offended soldiers from the professional line infantry. That the National Guards were often better paid than the regulars added to the soldiers’ grievances. The growing number of noble officers who abandoned their posts to join Condé’s émigré army fueled distrust of those who remained. Justifying the resistance that soldiers often showed to their superiors, the Révolutions de Paris asked, “Don’t nobles, privilege-holders, occupy all the places of officers? Should one think that they are loyal to the Revolution?”²⁴

The seriousness of the tensions between soldiers and officers became evident on August 31, 1790, when a mutiny broke out among troops in the garrison of Nancy, a major military stronghold near the border with Austrian territory. For months, soldiers in Nancy had complained that they were not receiving their full pay; moreover, they said, men who protested were being unjustly punished. The soldiers found support among the local authorities, but reports of the soldiers’ insubordination led the National Assembly in Paris to order an aristocratic general, François Claude Amour, marquis de Bouillé, to assemble a force of loyal units and quash the disturbances. As his expedition of five thousand men approached the city, soldiers from the Châteauvieux regiment prepared to defend themselves and handed out weapons from the Nancy arsenal to their civilian supporters. Bouillé’s forces suffered some three hundred casualties; the losses on the rebels’ side were probably even higher. The courts-martial that followed resulted in twenty-three executions and the sentencing of several dozen soldiers to long terms in the galleys. The majority of the National Assembly saw the loss of life and the severe repression as the price that had to be paid to restore discipline in the army, and the king and queen warmly congratulated Bouillé. Democratic radicals such as Robespierre and the journalist Marat, however, deplored the harsh line taken against the soldiers.

Less bloody than the conflict in Nancy but equally disquieting was the naval mutiny that broke out in France’s Atlantic fleet in the port city of Brest in Brittany in September. Loyal to their traditions, the members of the aristocratic naval officer corps angered their crews by resisting the replacement of the white flag of the Bourbon dynasty with the new tricolor of the nation. In addition, the officers rejected proposals to open their ranks to merchant captains, who, in their view, had made their careers pursuing profit rather than being “uniquely concerned with glory,” as one veteran captain put it.²⁵ Sailors protested the maintenance of the severe disciplinary regulations handed down from the old regime and resisted orders to sail for the Caribbean, an unpopular assignment that could easily keep them away from home for more than a year. The Brest city government, distrustful of the aristocratic naval officers, took the side of the men and encouraged their movement. The mutineers were further fired up by the arrival from Saint-Domingue of the warship Léopard, whose crew had sided with the Colonial Assembly when the royal governor had opposed its demand for autonomy from France. Convinced that the white colonists were patriots whose rights were being trampled on, the Leopard’s sailors ejected their captain and took eighty-five members of the Colonial Assembly on board, bringing them to France so they could carry their protest to the National Assembly. While the colonial deputies went on to Paris, the Léopard’s sailors encouraged the other sailors in the fleet to resist their officers. The local Jacobin Club promised them that the unpopular disciplinary regulations would be revoked, and the National Assembly decided it had no alternative but to give in to their demands. Like the revolt in Nancy, the mutiny at Brest revealed the deep distrust between officers and the lower-ranking men and raised serious questions about the revolutionary government’s control of the military.

The National Assembly’s reaction to the naval mutiny provided the German visitor Gerhard-Anton Halem, one of the many foreigners drawn to Paris to see the extraordinary spectacle created by the Revolution, with an opportunity to see how the new French political system worked. By the time he arrived in early October 1790, Halem, a great theater fan, already knew that the National Assembly was the best show in town. Admission to the spectators’ galleries was free, but he had to get to the Manège, the former riding school converted into a meeting hall for the deputies after the October Days in 1789, by 6:30 a.m. to be sure of obtaining a good seat. On October 20, the patriots seized on the navy crisis to demand that the king dismiss his ministers, whom they accused of deliberately remaining inactive in order to let anarchy overwhelm the Revolution. Halem was particularly impressed by Barnave, who, as he put it, “combined energy and precision with ease and elegance in his speeches.” But he also praised the eloquence of the conservative deputy Jacques Cazalès, who defended the king’s right to choose his own ministers. Halem, who came from a German principality where, as in all of the rest of Europe at the time, public political debate was unknown, was struck not only by the performance of the deputies but also by the active role of the spectators. Those looking on regularly interrupted the speakers with applause and murmurs. He also remarked on the presence of journalists, who by now had a loge reserved for them behind the president’s desk. From that vantage point, they recorded not only what the deputies said but how the galleries reacted.²⁶

After eight hours of debate, the Assembly defeated an attack on the ministers by the deputies on the right. But Halem soon learned that this was hardly the final word on the matter. He could see that the population of the city took an active interest in politics: he visited the Palais-Royal, the center of public discussion, and listened to an orator denouncing the distinction between active and passive citizens as a violation of the principle of equality, because it kept the lower classes from influencing decisions. He overheard a “well-dressed man who read long passages from the Ami du peuple, full of invectives against the ministers, to an attentive crowd,” and he observed the impact of the evening papers, which published summaries of the day’s parliamentary debates within a few hours of the end of the Assembly’s sessions. Exhausted though he must have been, at 6:00 p.m. Halem joined a thousand other people who were prepared to listen to more oratory at the meeting of the Jacobins. As he looked at the dusty volumes of theology that lined the walls of the meeting room, Halem reflected that their authors would have “trembled with horror” if they could have heard the revolutionary politicians’ speeches. Listening to the reading of letters from provincial Jacobin clubs that opened the session, he realized that the club was building up a nationwide network. After hearing the stars of the revolutionary left, including Mirabeau, Barnave, the Lameth brothers, and Robespierre, Halem went home assured that the club session had given the left-wing deputies, who had temporarily been outvoted earlier in the day, “a new enthusiasm” to return to the fight.²⁷

In 1790, the Jacobin Club was still limited to fairly wealthy and respectable members. Would-be admittees needed to be recommended by existing participants and pay dues equal to several days’ wages for an ordinary worker. Not everyone shared Halem’s impression that this requirement kept the club’s debates sensible. Invited to address the Jacobins on the subject of British policy toward the Revolution, another foreign visitor, William Miles, acknowledged that the members had listened to him with interest, but he was still unnerved by their “wild and dangerous effervescence”; he feared that the Jacobins “may soon provoke a spirit that will deluge the country in blood.”²⁸ Even if they had doubts about the Jacobins, the two foreign visitors both saw that moderates were having a hard time competing with them. A more elitist group founded at the beginning of 1790, the Club de 1789, had never attracted a popular following. This club brought together celebrities from the first few months of the Revolution, such as Sieyès, Lafayette, Mirabeau, and Condorcet, who were concerned about the growing radicalism of the Revolution. By the fall of 1790 its members had returned to the Jacobins in the hope of recovering some influence there. Meetings of an openly royalist club, the Amis de la constitution monarchique (Friends of the Monarchical Constitution), were harassed by supporters of the Revolution, who denounced its attempts to win support among the members of the lower class by giving out bread at below-market prices and stirring up agitation against shops that sold imported British goods.

Realizing that “we are now in the season of clubs,” as the Paris bookseller Nicolas Ruault, himself a Jacobin member, put it, both Halem and Miles visited another, much less exclusive gathering, the Cercle des amis de la vérité (Circle of the Friends of Truth), whose weekly public sessions, held in the circus arena at the Palais-Royal, drew crowds of four thousand or more. Whereas the Jacobins focused on the political issues confronting the National Assembly, members of the Cercle kept alive the utopian spirit that had inspired Brissot’s Gallo-American Society in 1787. They dreamed of remaking the universe and creating a new religion of humanity. The Cercle’s founders were Nicolas Bonneville, a religious mystic with democratic beliefs, and the radical priest Claude Fauchet, who preached a gospel that combined elements of Christianity with lofty ideas about universal human fraternity. Halem recognized some of Fauchet’s ideas as coming from the Masonic movement. The French Revolution, Fauchet proclaimed, was the opening of new era: “The moment approaches when the veil of mystery can be safely lifted, when the statue of humanity will be brought to life by the Prometheuses who have kept the celestial flame alive.” A Paris journalist was bemused by “this mixture of apocalyptic phrases, Oriental expressions, Jewish parables, political terms and words of love, bound together in poetic fashion,” but he admitted that it “marvelously astounded the audience.”²⁹

Later renamed the Cercle social (Social Circle), the club eventually absorbed the members of the antislavery Society of the Friends of the Blacks and opened itself to new ideas about the public role of women. In March 1791, the Dutch-born Etta Palm d’Aelders, one of the militants working to change the relations between the sexes, congratulated the group for having been “the first to have admitted us to patriotic sessions.” She used its platform to call for the creation of a nationwide network of women’s clubs that would defend the Revolution by keeping its enemies under surveillance; in addition, it would take over tasks formerly performed by religious establishments, such as the regulation of wetnurses, the provision of schooling for young children, and the distribution of aid to the poor.³⁰

Foreign visitors also found their way to the most radical of the Paris clubs, the Cordeliers. From its origins in 1789 as the district assembly in a neighborhood peopled by journalists, printshop workers, and actors from the nearby Théâtre français (now known as the Odéon and still a feature of the Paris landscape), this group developed a reputation as “the terror of the aristocracy and the refuge for oppressed political activists in the capital,” as one radical newsman put it. The first president of the Cordeliers was Georges Danton, a lawyer whose oratorical skills were often compared to those of Mirabeau, although Danton’s radical democratic principles struck even many Jacobins as “absolutely impossible in a big city like Paris.” The journalists Marat and Desmoulins were also active members, and when Marat ran afoul of the municipal authorities in 1790, the Cordeliers helped him evade the police. “About three hundred persons of both sexes filled the place,” one visitor to the club reported. “Their dress was so unkempt and so filthy that one could have taken them for a gathering of beggars. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was stuck on the wall, crowned by crossed daggers. Plaster busts of Brutus and William Tell were placed on each side, as if to expressly guard the Declaration.”³¹ The club’s symbol was an all-seeing eye, a sign of the surveillance its members intended to exercise on the people’s behalf.

A network of “fraternal societies” spread the Cordeliers’ influence. These had originally been founded to explain the principles of the Revolution to uneducated members of the lower classes, whom the Jacobins firmly excluded from their sessions. Political factions of all sorts tried to reach the common people through cheap pamphlets and newspapers attributed to the fictional Père Duchêne and similar characters. The early months of 1791 were the high tide of pamphlets attributed to “Mère Duchêne,” whose vigorous voice was a match for that of her voluble husband. Among the most industrious journalists churning out this populist literature was Jacques-René Hébert, the son of a provincial bourgeois family. Hébert had ruined his prospects in a messy sex scandal and eked out a living before the Revolution on the fringes of the Paris theater world. He was not the most inventive of the Père Duchêne journalists, but he developed political instincts that his competitors lacked. Before long, his newspaper made him a genuine force as the voice of the ordinary people.

The “season of clubs” was not limited to Paris. By the end of 1790, every French town of any size had at least one political group; some sixty cities had clubs for women. Club mania even reached the colonies, where local patriots in Cap Français, the largest city in Saint-Domingue, gathered to denounce royal officials; after their meetings, they “exited inflamed with a divine fire,” according to one newspaper account.³² Provincial Jacobin clubs attracted local officials, journalists, members of the professions, and military officers; as in Paris, they required membership fees, which discouraged artisans and workers from joining. Besides keeping their members abreast of political developments in the capital, provincial clubs took it on themselves to keep the local authorities—both those who had won municipal elections at the beginning of 1790 and the departmental officials chosen later that year—under close surveillance; they denounced any signs of “aristocratism” to the Paris club.

The spread of the Jacobin movement reflected a strong current of support for the Revolution in most of the country in spite of the many controversies its reforms were generating. Protests were as likely to come from groups that wanted to push the movement even further as from conservative opponents. Those in the former camp included the peasants, particularly those who refused to pay compensation for abolished feudal rights; the radical democrats of the Cordeliers Club; and some of the white population of the colonies, who proclaimed themselves “patriots” even as they demanded greater autonomy and protections for slavery. Unable to establish a public club movement to counterbalance the Jacobins, opponents of the Revolution relied on informal networks of former nobles, clergy, and their supporters. Counterrevolutionaries proved as adept at using the press as their opponents, however. The earliest monarchist periodicals had specialized in satire and leveled personal attacks against leading revolutionaries; indeed, the counterrevolutionary forces were more likely in these years than the supporters of the Revolution to single out specific politicians and incite violence against them. By 1790, royalists could count on daily papers that followed the National Assembly’s debates as closely as their pro-revolutionary rivals, even though one of their editors complained that doing so was a “truly sad, truly humiliating task.” It involved nothing but recording “assaults, arson, murders, ravages, imprisonments, atrocious acts of vengeance,” he wrote.³³

For all the vehemence of their language, the counterrevolutionary journals lacked a coherent philosophical perspective to match the ideas that the revolutionaries had inherited from the philosophes. The most cogent critique of the Revolution in its early phases came not from a French polemicist, but from the British politician and publicist Edmund Burke, who published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790. Burke had followed events in France closely for many years. He knew the weaknesses of the old monarchy, but he was convinced that its institutions should have been reformed rather than being completely overthrown. “You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you,” he told the French. Above all, he criticized the revolutionaries for trying to create an entirely new system based on abstract philosophical principles defined by reason. In Burke’s view, human reason was too fallible to serve as a guide in politics, and society was too complex to be remade overnight. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small,” he wrote. “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity.”³⁴

The theory of natural rights, in Burke’s view, was bound to lead to destructive anarchy. “Their abstract perfection is their practical defect,” he insisted. The real purpose of government was to satisfy human wants or needs, and “among these wants is to be reckoned the want… of a sufficient restraint upon their passions,” which required an authority that could stand up to public opinion rather than following its dictates. The exercise of such authority was made tolerable, according to Burke, by time-honored rituals and beliefs—such as the sacredness of monarchy—even if they were in the category of “pleasing illusions.” His indignation rose to a peak in a celebrated passage about the assault on Marie-Antoinette during the October Days of 1789: “I had thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult,” he wrote. “But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”³⁵ Convinced that the principles of the Revolution contradicted the realities of social life, Burke predicted that the French would end up executing their king; that their new paper currency, the assignat, would become worthless; and that they would succumb to a military dictatorship, prophecies that would all eventually be fulfilled.

Burke’s real audience was in Britain: he wanted above all to counter the enthusiasm of many reformers there who saw revolutionary France as a model to be imitated. His lasting achievement was to found a tradition of conservative political philosophy that has lasted down to our own day. At the time, however, most reactions to Burke’s Reflections were negative. The work was considered scandalous, not only because of its denunciations of reason and democracy, but because it seemed to represent a repudiation of Burke’s own principles. “Burke had been warmly loved by the most liberal and enlightened friends of freedom,” the British libertarian theorist William Godwin wrote, “and they were proportionably inflamed and disgusted by the fury of his assault, upon what they deemed to be its sacred cause.” Godwin was attempting to explain why his wife, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had rushed into print to refute him. Burke had defended the American Revolution and denounced corruption in the British political system; in the years before the French Revolution, he had fought a lonely campaign against abuses in the administration of Britain’s establishments in India. “One can hardly imagine how Mr. Burke could have dishonored his own judgment by the production of such a work,” Brissot opined in his newspaper.³⁶

A much greater concern for French supporters in the last months of 1790 and the first part of 1791 than Burke’s polemic was a new phase of the conflict over the reform of the Church that further widened the distrust between supporters and opponents of the Revolution. The National Assembly had assumed that priests would accept the Civil Constitution peacefully, but on October 30, more than 120 clerical deputies signed a document protesting its provisions about the election of bishops and the redrawing of dioceses. This stand by church leaders encouraged local parish priests to resist the implementation of the reform, which in turn provoked local authorities in anticlerical regions to take stronger measures to enforce it. “No one could doubt any longer that most bishops have formed a seditious league in order to light up the torch of fanaticism everywhere and attempt a counter-revolution by this means,” the administrators of the Bouches-du-Rhône department asserted.³⁷

The patriot majority in the National Assembly saw its entire work in jeopardy as a result of the resistance to the Civil Constitution. Among other things, religious protests threatened to disrupt the sale of church properties, on which they had pinned their hopes of climbing out of the financial abyss that had precipitated the Revolution. On November 26, 1790, one of the deputies, Jean Georges Charles Voidel, read out a long catalog of incidents in which members of the clergy had opposed legislation affecting the Church. He warned the recalcitrant members of the clergy that “now all the citizens of the empire must bow their heads before the majesty of the laws,” and exhorted them to “pacify the people, irritated by your resistance, by a prompt submission.” At his urging, the overwhelming majority of the deputies voted to require all priests and bishops who wanted to remain in their posts and continue drawing their salaries to swear a public oath of obedience to the new national constitution and the new laws governing the Church. When some deputies representing the clergy tried to square the Civil Constitution with their consciences by stating that they would obey its provisions except with regard to “spiritual questions,” the Assembly insisted that all oaths had to be “pure and simple,” without any qualifying language.³⁸

THE CLERGY OATH: This engraving, issued in 1791, captures the divisions stirred up by the controversy over the clergy oath. Several men dressed in the clothes of respectable provincial bourgeois are using ropes and pulleys to make a priest raise his hands, while young altarboys and some older women look on in dismay. Two uniformed National Guardsmen, holding their muskets, watch the proceedings with satisfaction, and two pretty young women smile at the soldiers. Two older gentlemen, who appear to be ci-devant (former) nobles, seem disgruntled. The prominent role of the women in this picture corresponded to reality: observers noted that female congregants often took the lead in opposing the oath. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Legally speaking, only the curés and vicars who actually led church services had to decide whether to take the oath, but their flocks often had a crucial influence on the choices they made. The public ceremonies in which priests either accepted or rejected the law were often explosive occasions, as an engraving titled “A New Method to Make Curés Take the Oath” illustrated.

Nationwide, slightly more than half of the fifty thousand parish clergy initially swore the oath; they were called jureurs (jurors, a term related to jurer, “to swear”), or “constitutional clergy.” The percentage, however, varied widely from region to region. Oathtakers were a clear majority in most of the departments of the Paris basin and in the southeast, between the Rhône River and the Alpine frontier, and in parts of the southwest, where one conservative Catholic observed sourly, “Half the diocese will take it because self-interest, vile self-interest, is the great mover.”³⁹ “Refractory clergy,” or non-jureurs (non-jurors)—those who refused to accept the new arrangements—dominated in western France, in the country’s mountainous south-central region, and in peripheral departments in the north, east, and southwest. The close division between supporters and opponents intensified the conflict. If a clear overall majority of the clergy had accepted the Civil Constitution, there might have been less pressure to force recalcitrants into line; if its opponents had had a convincing edge, the Assembly might have had to modify its policy. As it was, neither side was willing to concede victory to the other. The heavily aristocratic upper clergy, who lost far more from the reform than the ordinary pastors did, were overwhelmingly hostile to the Civil Constitution. Because of these divisions, the question of who would ordain new priests and bishops became even more crucial.

The rhetoric on both sides of the oath controversy was heated. For the opponents of the reform, Catholicism itself was in jeopardy, and the basic rights of its followers were being suppressed. Women were as divided as men about the issue. In Paris, according to Adrien Colson, “the marketwomen punished the Gray Sisters and the nuns of Miramiones the way one treats children,” by publicly whipping them on their bare buttocks. “The crime of the Sisters was to have taught their pupils a catechism of hatred, contempt, and revolt against the clergy who have sworn the oath… and that of the nuns was to have insulted and mistreated their new curé.” Political opponents of the Revolution seized on the opportunity to turn Catholics against the whole movement. Gaston de Lévis, who had always known the king’s brother, the comte de Provence, as a devotee of Enlightenment ideas, remarked ironically that the prince had suddenly become an expert on church law: “He knows every passage from the church councils, he bores me to tears with evangelical citations.… [T]here isn’t a refractory priest who knows more about the Civil Constitution and its defects.” But Lévis also understood that the sale of church lands had created many supporters for the Civil Constitution. “Every acre sold makes a convert and a man who wouldn’t be moved by liberty or intrigue will fight like a hero to save his acre,” he wrote. Backers of the Civil Constitution accused their opponents of “preaching, from the pulpit of peace and truth, lies and the principles of fanaticism”; they demanded that “the guilty be given over to the vengeance of the laws.”⁴⁰ Surprised by the number of priests who refused to take the oath, local authorities had to scramble to find replacements, and violence often broke out when congregations refused to allow these “intruders” to take possession of their churches.

Local authorities were drawn into the oath controversy, either attempting to enforce the law in the face of resistance or, if they themselves were sympathetic to non-juring priests, trying to avoid having to take action against them. When Talleyrand and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel, the only two bishops in the National Assembly who had agreed to swear the oath, took the initiative of consecrating new bishops according to the procedures established in the Civil Constitution, Pope Pius VI broke the cautious silence he had maintained on the subject. His condemnation of the Civil Constitution and his threat to suspend priests who swore the oath deepened the conflict in France and drove some clergy to retract the oaths they had sworn.

No one anguished more over the conflict caused by the Civil Constitution than Louis XVI. Although he reluctantly endorsed both the Civil Constitution and the clerical oath, his dislike for the Assembly’s religious policy led him to consider proposals secretly presented to him in the fall of 1790 to organize his escape from Paris. Marie-Antoinette was equally determined to see her husband and the royal family freed from their humiliating and dangerous situation, even if it meant calling on other European powers, particularly her Habsburg brother Leopold II, for help. Leopold had inherited the throne when their brother Joseph II had died at the beginning of 1790. From the French royal family’s perspective, the situation in Paris was becoming increasingly critical in the early months of 1791. When the king’s two elderly aunts tried to leave the country in February, local authorities arrested them en route. It took a forceful intervention by Mirabeau to get them freed and allow them to continue their journey. On February 28, a rumor that the king was in danger inspired several hundred royalists to rush to the Tuileries to defend him, provoking a backlash from patriots, who demanded closer surveillance of the palace. The king’s opposition to the Civil Constitution provoked another confrontation on April 18, a day after Louis XVI had shown his opposition to the religious oath by taking communion from a non-juring priest. When the royal family attempted to travel to the palace of Saint-Cloud, outside of Paris, a crowd blocked their carriage for several hours; the National Guards responsible for their security joined the demonstration, saying that “the friend of our enemies cannot be our friend.” “Now you can see we are not free,” Marie-Antoinette told the soldiers as she reentered the palace.⁴¹

On April 11, the departmental administration of Paris tried to find a compromise on the religious issue by announcing that it would let non-juring priests rent church buildings that were not being used for the officially sanctioned services of their “constitutional” colleagues and hold services. On the following Sunday, a hostile crowd gathered outside the “aristocratic Sanhedrin,” where one such gathering had been announced, and prevented Mass from being celebrated. The incident alarmed even some of the National Assembly’s strongest supporters of the Civil Constitution. Talleyrand, who had sworn the oath and defied the pope by consecrating new constitutional bishops, reminded the deputies of the promise of religious freedom enshrined in the Declaration of Rights, but more radical deputies were unwilling to support any compromise on the issue. “If you allow this exception,” the deputy Jean Denis Lanjuinais said, “the oath law that has cost us so many troubles, so many perplexities, so many millions and above all so much anxiety… will have been useless.”⁴²

By the spring of 1791, as local authorities became increasingly embroiled in the quarrels caused by the Civil Constitution and the oath, the deputies of the National Assembly were approaching the point of exhaustion. For nearly two years, they had been meeting daily, both to hammer out the new constitution and to deal with the innumerable immediate problems confronting the government. Overwork, combined with the flamboyant private life he persisted in pursuing, was blamed for the premature death of the great orator Mirabeau on April 2. Mirabeau’s efforts to create a strong monarchy that would defend individual liberty and social equality had undermined his influence with the more radical Jacobins, but the force of his personality had made him the one figure who could still rein in their most dangerous impulses without being accused of siding with the counterrevolution. Despite his best efforts, however, Mirabeau had been unable to convince the king and queen to sincerely embrace the new constitution. Without their support, his vision of a democratic monarchy could not be realized.

As news of Mirabeau’s illness spread, the street in front of his house was covered with straw to keep the noise of carriage wheels from disturbing him. Nevertheless, the dying man “heard the whole people talk of his illness as an event that threatened the Revolution,” a journalist wrote. To honor Mirabeau, the National Assembly decided to convert the huge domed church of Saint Genevieve, which Louis XV had ordered constructed on the hill dominating Paris’s Latin Quarter, into the Pantheon, a secular monument to the memory of “great men” who had served the nation. Previously, only French kings and queens, laid to rest in elaborate tombs in the basilica of Saint-Denis north of Paris, had received such public honors. With the Pantheon, which remains one of France’s national monuments, the Revolution created its own way of conferring immortality on its heroes. In the village of Meudon, where he had settled and joined the local Jacobin Club, Jean-Marie Goujon gave a eulogy of Mirabeau. It was “so beautiful and full of the warmest patriotism” that the municipality had it published, launching him on a political career. A good head taller than the average Frenchman of the day, with “a majestic appearance and a decisive attitude,” according to his intimate friend Pierre-François Tissot, Goujon was beginning to discover that he had the qualities to actively promote the revolutionary spirit.⁴³

With the death of their sparring partner Mirabeau, the Jacobin triumvirs, Barnave, Duport, and Alexandre Lameth, and their allies took over his policy of attempting to rein in the growing radicalism of the Revolution and prevent the total destruction of royal power. Throughout the spring, they promoted a series of measures aimed at keeping poorer members of society, the passive citizens, out of politics. Confrontations with urban artisans and workers increased after the Assembly took up the issue of the urban guilds and workers’ organizations, the institutions that had played such a large role in the prerevolutionary life of Jacques Ménétra and other artisans. Economic reformers had long condemned the guilds as obstacles to free enterprise, and Turgot had tried to eliminate them in 1776. On August 4, 1789, however, the deputies had not dared to do away with the organizations that had traditionally kept urban workers under control. Throughout 1790, the status of the guilds remained unsettled. Many journeymen, kept under the thumb of their masters, now claimed the right to set up their own shops, and business entrepreneurs, who had already found ways around guild privileges before 1789, were emboldened to openly ignore them. When it passed a new occupational tax law that explicitly permitted any citizen to practice any profession, the National Assembly realized that it had to make a decision. On March 2, 1791, the deputies abolished the guilds. “These dispositions should be regarded as one of the greatest benefits that the legislature has yet extended to the nation,” one newspaper proclaimed. “The guilds [enjoyed] exclusive privileges that deprived the vast majority of citizens of one of the foremost rights of man, that of working.… All men will have the means to make use of their skills; they will not need considerable sums to establish themselves.”⁴⁴

The guilds had been legally recognized corporate bodies that included both employers and workers. Their abolition raised the question of the status of other workers’ organizations, such as the compagnonnage to which Ménétra had belonged. In the minds of the deputies, these entities—through which workers tried to impose standardized rates of pay on employers, sometimes by means of strikes—were even more dangerous than the guilds. Three months after the guilds had been outlawed, the deputy Isaac René Guy Le Chapelier, originally one of the Third Estate firebrands from Brittany, brought forward an extraordinarily harsh law against them. “Citizens who practice a particular profession must not be allowed to assemble for their supposed common interests,” he asserted. “There are no more group interests within the state, there are only the private interests of individuals and the general interest.” Even mutual-aid societies that helped unemployed or sick members of a given trade violated that principle, Le Chapelier insisted, and were contrary to the public interest. “It is up to the nation… to provide work for those who need it for their existence and aid for the infirm.”⁴⁵

The Le Chapelier law is often cited as proof that the legislators of the National Assembly were bent on furthering the interests of the bourgeois class, from which so many of them came. When he introduced his law, Le Chapelier defended himself against such accusations by calling for salaries that would be high enough so that workers would be able to escape “that absolute dependency that comes from being deprived of basic necessities”; he also claimed that collective groups similar to modern trade unions violated the individual freedom of workers as well as employers. In fact, the Assembly had already applied the principles in Le Chapelier’s law to a number of middle-class occupations. The Paris bar association had been dissolved, its members were forbidden from using the label avocat (lawyer), and the same law that broke up the guilds made it legal for anyone to offer medical services, without any requirement for training or licensing. Looking back with a shudder after the end of the Revolution, a leading nineteenth-century lawyer wrote that “this was one of the first abuses of freedom, that the right was left to anyone, without scrutiny, nor any apprenticeship, to practice the liberal professions, especially the profession where confidence should best be proven before handing over the honor of families, the fate of the widow and the orphan.”⁴⁶ In practice, middle-class professionals did fare better than manual workers in the individualistic society created by the Revolution, but not all members of the bourgeoisie were enthusiastic about the changes imposed by the movement.

Even though the Le Chapelier law against associations affected bourgeois professional groups as well as manual workers, there is no doubt that he and his allies—including the Jacobin triumvirs in the Assembly and Bailly and Lafayette, the two officials most involved in maintaining order in the streets of Paris—were primarily concerned with the behavior of the lower classes. Lafayette’s National Guards, even those who came from relatively poor backgrounds themselves, encountered increasing hostility in the streets as they tried to enforce the crackdown on workers’ groups and break up crowds hostile to non-juring priests. A month before he introduced the law with which his name would remain associated, Le Chapelier had also been the spokesman for another piece of restrictive legislation. This law, passed on May 10, 1791, proposed banning collective petitions, and on that occasion, he had allowed himself a truly violent outburst against the passive citizens. According to their defenders, they would be prevented from expressing their views by the prohibition. But, according to Le Chapelier, “the men who are separated from society by their restlessness, their laziness, their refusal to practice any useful occupation” did not deserve rights, since they were “a burden on society rather than serving it.” His message to the poor was clear: “Do something useful with your limbs, find work, cultivate this fertile soil, and you will receive the title of citizen.” Robespierre and his closest ally in the Assembly, Jérôme Pétion, answered Le Chapelier powerfully. Pétion asked, “How can there be men, other than slaves, who are not legally allowed to protest against laws that oppress them?” The Assembly’s support for the ban, however, showed that fear and hostility toward the lower classes was widely shared.⁴⁷

The word for “slaves” (esclaves) may have come to Pétion’s mind because the consideration of the ban on petitions interrupted the Assembly’s most tumultuous debate on the colonies, another piece of business still unaddressed as it neared the end of its work on the constitution. When the eighty-five deputies from the Saint-Domingue assembly who had come to France with the mutineers of the Léopard reached Paris, they were severely dressed down by the National Assembly, which reminded them in no uncertain terms that they had no right to make laws for themselves. Even as he scolded the colonists, however, Barnave, the head of the colonial committee, renewed his promise from March 1790 that they could decide on the rights of both slaves and free people of color. For the colonists, this was the crucial issue, and they treated the Assembly’s statement as a major victory. Within the Jacobin movement, however, it marked the beginning of the downfall of the triumvirs, Barnave and his allies Duport and Lameth. Brissot lambasted Barnave for leaving the fate of the slaves to their masters. “A patriot wants liberty for all men. He wants it without exception, without modification,” Brissot proclaimed.⁴⁸ Just as the triumvirs had outflanked the monarchiens in the early months of the Revolution, by accusing them of compromising the movement’s basic principles of liberty and equality, Brissot now put the spotlight on the limits of Barnave’s commitment to those ideals.

The determination of Brissot and his supporters to challenge the colonial racial order increased at the end of 1790, when disturbing news from Saint-Domingue reached France. Vincent Ogé, a free man of color and an officer in the Paris National Guard, had gone to the colony to insist on the extension of political rights to members of his group, which he claimed was the clear intention of the National Assembly’s decree of March 8, 1790. “He made it clear that he did not make any demands concerning slavery,” Brissot’s Patriote français reported.⁴⁹ When the white colonists rejected his demands, he raised a rebellion among the free men of color in the northern part of the colony. Ogé’s movement was quickly put down, but it profoundly shook the white plantation owners. After a hasty trial, Ogé was broken on the wheel, the most painful of France’s forms of capital punishment, and a number of his followers were hanged.

Reports about Ogé’s rebellion intensified debates about race in metropolitan France. Supporters of the white colonists resorted to overtly racist arguments, claiming that blacks were a separate species intermediate between humans and apes. In response, the spokesman for the free people of color, Julien Raimond, became the first writer to assert that racial prejudices were social constructions with no roots in reality. When the news of Ogé’s execution reached France, Brissot wrote, “In Saint-Domingue, it is the heads of the defenders of liberty that fall on the scaffolds.”⁵⁰ A few days later, news of more violence in that colony arrived: soldiers sent from France and sailors from the French fleet had joined white colonists in Port-au-Prince in murdering Colonel Thomas-Antoine Mauduit, the military commander who had dispersed the Colonial Assembly the previous year. The National Assembly concluded that the only way to restore order in the colonies was to decide once and for all how they would be integrated into the new order.

For more than a week, from May 7 to 15, the deputies clashed over whether a nation devoted to freedom and equality could tolerate slavery and racial discrimination in its colonies. “The question concerns both Europe and America,” a leading proslavery newspaper wrote. “The assembly’s decision could be a decree of life or death, or slavery or freedom for millions of men, and the signal of the prosperity or the downfall of commerce.” It was clear from the outset that the majority was not prepared to decree the immediate abolition of slavery, because of the economic repercussions such a drastic step would cause. Nevertheless, some colonists, such as the deputy Élie Médéric Louis Moreau de Saint-Méry, insisted that, in order to reassure plantation owners, the promise of white supremacy incorporated into the Assembly’s previous decrees needed to be written into the constitution. When other deputies hesitated to preclude the possibility of abolishing slavery at some later date, by protecting it in the constitution, Moreau de Saint-Méry challenged them directly: he moved to decree that “no law on the status of slaves in the American colonies, no change in the status of men of color be made except in response to a precise and spontaneous request from the colonial assemblies.”⁵¹

Moreau de Saint-Méry’s motion set off one of those firestorms that had regularly marked the Assembly’s contentious debates. The idea that the word “slavery” (esclavage) might appear in a constitution that proclaimed that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” outraged many of the deputies. Paraphrasing a line from the Encyclopédie’s article on the slave trade, Robespierre exclaimed, “Let the colonies perish rather than abandon a principle!” These became the words for which he was best known until the height of the Reign of Terror two years later. Nevertheless, the most that he and the other radical deputies could achieve was to get esclaves changed to the euphemistic expression non libres (unfree persons).

The debate then shifted to the issue of free people of color. Over the vehement objections of the pro-colonial deputies, Julien Raimond was allowed to address the Assembly. It was the first time a man of African descent was allowed to speak in the debates of a Western legislature. Raimond argued that men like himself, who owned property and slaves, met all the requirements for active citizenship laid down in the constitution, and indeed, that they were essential to keeping the slaves in the colonies in subordination. Defenders of the colonists replied that allowing anyone descended from slaves to achieve equality with whites would fatally undermine the racial distinctions on which plantation society depended.

Raimond’s appeal for rights for all members of his group was rejected, and the pro-colonial side appeared to have won the debate. Then, however, the Alsatian deputy Jean-François Rewbell offered an amendment that he claimed would assure white supremacy while making a small concession to the free people of color. Rewbell’s proposition granted citizenship rights to free men of color whose parents had been free and legally married. Only a small minority of the free colored population in the colonies met these requirements, but the colonial deputies in the Assembly objected that Rewbell’s seemingly minor amendment contradicted the promise just made: that no changes to the status of nonwhites would be allowed unless they were initiated in the colonies themselves. When the majority of the deputies nevertheless endorsed the Rewbell amendment, Moreau de Saint-Méry and his colleagues announced that they were resigning their seats.

This angry debate had forced the deputies to confront the contradiction between their idealistic principles and the unpleasant reality of slavery. Perhaps it was still in the deputies’ minds the next day, when they overwhelmingly endorsed a motion by Robespierre that barred any of them from holding seats in the new legislature that would be elected once the constitution was completed. This “self-denying ordinance,” meant to demonstrate that personal ambition to remain in power had played no role in the design of the constitution, would be “a great example of love of equality, of pure devotion to the good of the country,” Robespierre told his colleagues.⁵² Few of them dared to oppose his motion and appear to be expressing their personal ambition; many were no doubt also happy to make sure their opponents were excluded from the next assembly, and others were simply worn out by the all-consuming task they had imposed on themselves two years earlier. The end of their labors appeared to be in sight, even though the feeling of unity that had been generated for the Festival of Federation the previous July had become a distant memory.

As the deputies struggled to complete the constitution, they were hit by an unexpected blast of criticism questioning whether they were truly accomplishing the goals of the prerevolutionary philosophes. The abbé Guillaume Raynal, whose History of the Two Indies, first published in 1770, had sparked Enlightenment debates about colonialism and slavery, publicly denounced the Revolution as a “false interpretation of our principles.” In France, he claimed, he saw only “religious conflicts, civil debates, the consternation of some, the tyranny and presumption of others, a government enslaved to popular tyranny… soldiers without discipline, leaders without authority, ministers without resources,” and, above all, “a king, the first friend of his people… outraged, threatened, stripped of all authority.” Power now rested with “clubs where ignorant and uneducated men dare to pronounce on all political questions.”⁵³ In Marseille, Raynal’s home, members of the Jacobin Club responded by carrying Raynal’s bust from their meeting room to the local insane asylum; in Sevrès, the young Jacobin Goujon followed up his successful oration in honor of Mirabeau by writing an address to the National Assembly denouncing the abbé. Raynal’s diatribe reflected a growing disillusionment with the results of the Revolution even among devotees of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, even as Raynal unleashed his denunciation, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were plotting an initiative that threatened to scuttle the movement altogether.

10

A NEW WORLD DIVIDED

January 1790–June 1791