Mortal Politics in 18th-Century France 088898071X

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MORTAL POLITICS

IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE GEORGE ARMSTRONG KELLY

UNIVERSITY 01 WATERLOO

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Copyright University of Waterloo Press 1986 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form by any means - graphic, electronic or mechan¬ ical, including photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems - without written permission of the University of Waterloo Press. ISBN 0-88898-071-X University of Waterloo Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 Printed in the United States of America

Canadian Catologuing in Publication Data Kelly, George Armstrong, 1932Mortal politics in eighteenth-century France Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88898-071-X 1. France - Politics and government - 18th century. 2. Death - Political aspects - France - History 18th century. I. Title.

DC131.K44 1986

944’.034

C86-093136-6

To MARILYN GILLET

sine qua non

TABLE OF CONTENTS

xiii

Introduction

Mortality and Felicity

Chapter

1

1

Chapter

2

24

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

Chapter

3

50

Eulogy: Celebrating the New Hero Tales Told by the Dead

Chapter

4

75

Chapter

5

103

The Point of Honour

Chapter

6

126

War: The Paths of Glory

Chapter

7

155

War: The Darkling Plain

Chapter

8

184

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

Chapter

9

208

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

Chapter 10

235

The Music of Mortality

Chapter 11

261

The Republic of Death: One and Divisible

Chapter 12

292

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

Conclusion

313

Bibliographic Note 318 Index

319

Acknowledgements

The study offered here is indeed an “historical reflection,” for it is the result of more than a decade of work and pondering. Serious research began in Paris in 1974-1975: my gratitude to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for this. There are partic¬ ular indebtednesses to two other institutions: The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in whose peaceful but mentally chal¬ lenging surroundings some preliminary writing was done in 1979-1980; and The Johns Hopkins University, my happy home for the past five years. Among the many persons whose wisdom has helped to guide me in grasping eighteenth-century France from a number of angles, I should like to mention especially Judith N. Shklar, Dale Van Kley, John Heilman, Melvin Richter, Patrick Riley, and my colleagues Robert Forster, Orest Ranum, and Nancy Struever. The support of my family and friends has been, as always, generous and indispensable. I owe more than I can briefly express to my editors Stan Johannesen and Evie Hill, architects of a sane and cheerful collabo¬ ration and true friends besides, among so many I have made across the border. Without the precious comradeship and advice of Emmet Kennedy and Lionel Rothkrug there would probably have been no Mortal Politics. Both these distinguished scholars read the entire manuscript and gave unstinting encouragements and shrewd criticisms. I would like them to know how much their contribution has meant. Some of the material contained in Mortal Politics was adapted for seminar or lecture purposes in presentations to the American Historical Association, the French Historical Studies Society, audi¬ ences at The Johns Hopkins University, the Columbia University Seminar on Political and Social Thought, and the McGill-Concordia Universities Seminar on Mentalities. Versions of the following chapters have been previously published: Chapter 2, as “Mortal Man, Immortal Society? Political Metaphors in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Political Theory 14 (1986):5-29. (Sage Publications, Inc.)

x

Mortal Politics

Chapter 3, as “The History of the New Hero: Eulogy and its Sources in Eighteenth-Century France,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 21 (1980):3-24. (Texas Tech Press) Chapter 5, as “Duelling in Eighteenth-Century France: Archaeology, Rationale, Implications,” in ibid. 21 (1980):236-254. Chapter 9, as “From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation: Treason in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981):269-286. Chapter 12, as “Conceptual Sources of the Terror,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980): 18-36. (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) I am indebted to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint these parts of my work. Finally, I have the joyful opportunity to express deepest gratitude to my long-suffering partner, Madame Marilyn Gillet, of Orleans and Paris. Her sensitivity in extracting obscure information from French libraries and in fathoming the drift of my project saved me many trips to France. She was far more than a research assistant; for she suggested ideas and paths of inquiry that will be found in the texture of my work. It is to her that Mortal Politics is respectfully and affec¬ tionately dedicated.

G.A.K. Baltimore, April 1986

...civitatibus autem mors ipsa poena est, quae videtur a poena singulos vindicare; debet enim constituta sic esse civitas, ut aeterna sit. Itaque nullus interitus est rei publicae naturalis ut hominis, in quo mors non modo necessaria est, verum etiam optanda persaepe. Civitas autem cum tollitur, deletur, extinguitur, simile est quodam modo, ut parva magnis conferamus, ac si omnis hie mundus intereat et concidat.... (“But for states death itself is a punishment, while seeming to offer individuals escape from it; for a state ought to be so founded as to live forever. Thus death is not natural for a state in the same way as it is for a human being, whose death is not only necessary but often very much to be preferred. On the other hand, there is some simi¬ larity, if we may compare small things with great ones, between the downfall, destruction, and extinction of a state and the decay and death of the whole world....”) Cicero, De Republica, bk. 3, sect. 23.

Introduction

Dying is, first of all, a part of the natural order; and that is how most modern historical accounts of it are framed. As our period opens, established doctrine has it that the king’s death is like a crip¬ pling natural catastrophe;1 as it closes, Joseph de Maistre will treat the Revolution as a providential pestilence.2 In the meantime, we will have witnessed “nature” exerting her health and strength against “tyranny.” Exceptions to this sort of discourse are no less important than its persistency; but we will say something about the familiar perspective of nature before moving to other terrain. The age of Voltaire was the first space in history when men achieved a certain optimism to think about stemming cataclysms. Western Europe was commencing to surmount its recurrent cycles of catastrophe, partly as a cause, partly as a consequence of new breeds of mentality. Empirical and clinical medicine was making a certain desultory progress: gradually the doctor was less a harbinger of death, more a minister of cure. Dynastic wars seemed less brutal and less a threat to the non-combatant populations, especially in France. Public services-of health, security, and the movement of foodstuffswere improving, though still grossly inadequate. There was more to eat: more babies were born and lived; the populations, especially in England and France, commenced their takeoff (though Britain, its Celtic parts excepted, knew far greater prosperity).3 Also, diet was better in the more organized living sites: although the average Parisian of 1786-1789 consumed many fewer calories than his Mediterranean cousin and was suffering from bad harvests and rising prices, he had begun to eat significant quantities of protein, which now accounted for more than a quarter of his diet.4 Stimulated by foreign trade (despite the loss of the Seven Years’ War), the economy, especially in the port and entrepot cities, 1. See Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, La politique tire'e des propres paroles de I’Ecriture sainte, ed. Jacques Le Brun (Geneva, 1964), p. 189. This is a very old theme which can be traced back to Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 248-266. 2. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations sur la France, ed. Rene Johannet and Francois Vermale (Paris, 1936), p. 19. 3. See, for example, Albert Soboul’s analysis of Strasbourg, in La societe fran^aise dans la seconde moitie du XVIIIe siecle: structures sociales, cultures et modes de vie (Paris, 1969), p. 217. 4. Pierre Chaunu, La civilisation de I’Europe des Lumieres (Paris, 1971), p. 81.

xiv

Mortal Politics

was lively during much of the century; and local markets expanded into regional ones. Harvests were, on average, good between the terrible year of 1708-1709 and the onset of the Revolution. Mentalities adapted to new expectations. With a number of especially glaring exceptions, like Brittany, Nature’s God was kind.5 This comparative bounty made the exceptions even more intolerable, especially since the “community of death” was retreating as a univer¬ sally felt Christian reality and the ensuing “privatization of death” had little consolation to offer for death in large numbers. When the advanced philosophes combatted death as an enemy, they were indig¬ nant over any major defeat. If the French of the eighteenth century, from their different social vantage points, feared and hated cataclysmic death, they were becoming less exposed to it. But they were not yet confident enough to pass it off as an ancestral nightmare. They continued to endure ravaging illnesses and hunger. The famine line, especially, was too close to a majority of the peasantry for comfort; and the consumption-oriented city dwellers suffered the same threat from the angle of supply, demand, work, and wages, despite government paternalism in an as yet infantile market economy. Local fluctuations could cause great hardship. Yet the French recaptured a quality of diet that they had not, it seems, enjoyed since the thirteenth century.6 This age was naturally less sepulchral than those that had gone before. For one thing, it had disposed of its most dreaded enemy, the plague. Pestilence was both a Biblical and a classical theme, par excellence. The Scriptures were full of these visitations (cf. Sennacherib’s army in 2 Kings 19:35-36), and classical authors had described them with even greater power. In book 2, chapter 5 of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides had, many centuries before, depicted the hideous effects of pestilence in purely clinical and civic terms: “The catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law....As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its 5. God was not kind to certain provinces, especially Brittany, ravaged by epidemics and dislocations and losing population during most of the century. It is estimated that in 1741 an epidemic cost 80,000 victims in Brittany. See Antoine Dupuy, “Les epide¬ mics en Bretagne au dix-huiti£me si£cle,” Annates de Bretagne 2 (1886-1887):33-34. Even in Paris, as many as 20,000 may have died of smallpox in 1723. Voltaire was almost one of these victims: he made confession and wrote a will. See Robert Favre, La mart dans la litterature et la pense'e fran^aises au siecle des Lumieres (Lyons 1978) dd 46-47. FF' 6. Chaunu, La civilisation de I’Europe, pp. 79-80.

Introduction

xv

laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy the name for it....No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influ¬ ence.”7 Describing the same catastrophe in Athens, Lucretius reiter¬ ated: “Now there was no reverence for the worship of the gods or for the gods themselves; the present sorrow overwhelmed all this. The funeral customs of the city...no longer prevailed.”8 That anomia was true horror. The black plague and other virulent epidemics had decimated Europe from time out of mind. In the preceding century, the Thirty Years’ War had been widely accompa¬ nied by scourges of pestilence, accounting for vast areas of misery and depopulation. However, the eighteenth century saw the last convulsions of the plague in western Europe. The final onslaught of this “archaic” disease was in Marseilles in 1720: out of a total munic¬ ipal population of 92,000 it claimed 40,000 lives between the begin¬ ning of July and the end of October, and 10,000 more elsewhere in Provence.9 The story is a passionate and terrible one; it reads like the last revenge of the “baroque” in Europe. At this time, Marseilles was already a great city and port, a cosmo¬ politan enclave of sailors and travellers with many foreigners perma¬ nently settled. It was a bustling centre of activity, a little bit smug about its success; a centre of faith, also, counting at the end of the seventeenth century some 771 priests and 752 nuns and possessing a “Mediterranean piety, exuberant and sincere.”10 The plague had struck at Marseilles in 1630, and again in 1649. But by the eight¬ eenth century nobody remembered this or thought about it. Marseilles, a city of exotic comings and goings, had “the best public health organization of the Mediterranean.” Yet, “in that month of May 1720...death made its entrance to the Infirmaries.”11 Something unsettling was afoot. The empirical physicians made various diagnoses. But no one as yet breathed the notion of plague. On 20 June, in the rue Belle-Table, a poor part of the city, a woman named Marie Duplan died in a few hours, her lips as black as coal. She is the first recorded victim of the great pestilence.12 By 9 July it had spread so widely in the densely packed municipality that 7. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, 1954), pp. 126-127. 8. Lucretius, On Nature (De Rerum Natura), trans. R.M. Geer (Indianapolis, 1965), lines 1275-1280, p. 245. 9. See Charles Carri£re, Marcel Courdurie, Ferreol Rebuffat, Marseille, ville morte: la peste de 1720 (Marseilles, 1968), pp. 15, 302. 10. Chaunu, La civilisation de I’Europe, p. 161. 11. Carri^re, et al., Marseille, ville morte, p. 50. 12. Ibid., p. 55.

xvi

Mortal Politics

the Parlement of Aix delivered a decree “forbidding the Marseillais to leave the limits of their territory, the dwellers of all other towns and places in Provence to communicate with them or receive them, and mule-drivers, carters, and all others to go to Marseilles for any reason, under punishment of death.”13 Thus the isolated destiny of Marseilles was sealed; the city was turned over to the “curse of God,” and all provisions had to arrive by water. By 9 August, it is reported, a hundred a day were dying; a week later, three hundred. “The priests were besieged by the faithful: death could not wait, and pretenses and hypocrisies were no longer fashionable....” The rich could escape no more easily than the indi¬ gent from the Great Equalizer; man regained his original equality. It scandalized the archbishop of Marseilles, Monseigneur de Belsunce, to see “the bodies of rich men wrapped in single sheets, mixed together with the poorest and most wretched, thrown just like them into vile and infamous graves and dragged without distinction to a profaned burial ground outside the city walls.”14 At the end of August, “death was everywhere. The churches, one after the other, closed their doors. In their plazas, in the midst of public places, along the streets, the living came each night to discard their corpses....The sick beseeched the wagon-drivers...to carry them off, too....The stench was intolerable. A thousand a day were then dying.”15 From the beginning of September, a stiff mistral began to blow, increasing, if this were possible, the crescendo of death and suffering. By now, all the notables who were still alive made every effort to flee Marseilles: the city was left with a courageous or resigned handful of authorities. And in this chaos and terror “the honnete homme, the beggar, the Christian, the heretic, the priest, the Turk” all suffered their common and anonymous burials.16 The ulti¬ mate in baroque mortuary fright had come to abolish the aristocratic seemliness of baroque obsequies. It was not until mid-December that the rampancy of the pestilence was finally curbed, once and for all. The decontamination of the city proceeded, and contacts with the outside world were resumed, although only very gradually and hesitantly with other trading ports. It is reported that a “frenzy” of marriages followed the disaster. But on 22 October, at Sacre-Coeur, Monseigneur de Belsunce had drawn the moral lesson of the cataclysm: “Woe to you and to us, dear 13. Ibid., p. 66. 14. Ibid., pp. 72, 75, 76, 79. 15. Ibid., p. 84. 16. Ibid., pp. 84, 87, 95.

Introduction

xvii

brothers, if all that we have seen and experienced for so long of the wrath of a God who avenges crime cannot still teach us, in these days of dying, to take stock of ourselves.”17 The “dechristianization” of Marseilles, as Vovelle calls its recession from piety, did not assume major proportions until after 1755,18 and its connection, if any, with this frightful souvenir of the encounter with a “Dieu vengeur” remains obscure. But the experience of a city half wiped-out cannot have failed to leave deep traces on a generation of survivors. The ambiguity of the Age of Reason is well illustrated by the fact that while the Archbishop thundered about sin, a number of medical hypotheses (especially proceeding from the School of Montpellier) sought to account for the causes and nature of the contagion. What the doctors could not know was that this last of the great European plagues, as opposed to the usual kind, was not carried by rats or by rat-fleas, but directly by infected fleas that spread from human body to human body. This is why the morbidity was so extreme and the mortality so violent at the height of the contagion. Scarcely one epidemic in ten will take this form. But at virtually the same time that Marseilles and adjacent Provence were suffering their abomi¬ nable anguish, today’s familiar gutter rats were descending from northern Europe to chase out the black rat, traditional carrier of the “curse of God,” thus removing one of life’s awesome perils.19 The providential conquest of the black rat by the grey rat during the Regency cannot but remind us of Montesquieu’s account of liber¬ ty’s climate, and its descent from the North: Jornandes the Goth called the North the factory of the human race. I prefer to call it the factory of the tools that break the chains forged in the South. For it is there that those valiant races are formed that leave their lands to destroy tyrants and slaves, and to teach men that since nature has made them equal, reason could have made them dependent only for their happiness.20 Perhaps the northern rat was the avant-garde of nature’s other liber¬ ations to come. But common sense will tell us that the ideas which human beings frame about their politics are not precisely, as Marx puts it, naturwiichsig (imbedded in nature). No doubt we can detect resemblances 17. Ibid., pp. 106, 117, 121. 18. Michel Vovelle, Piete baroque et dechristianisation en Provence au 18e siecle: les atti¬ tudes devant la mort d’apres les clauses des testaments (Paris, 1973), pp. 124, 129, 135f. 19. Chaunu, La civilisation de I’Europe, pp. 166-167. 20. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, bk. 17, chap. 5.

xviii

Mortal Politics

between natural panic and the behaviour of social movements. As Lebrun writes of Anjou: “familiarity and resignation [in the face of death] could turn to panicky terror if mortality assumed catastrophic proportions. In time of epidemics, death ceased to be a spectacle of inevitability: it became a direct and personal menace.”21 Rene Baehrel has written two interesting articles where he argues that the transmissions of epidemic fear and political panic (like the “Grande Peur” of 1789) have similar properties.22 On the other hand, Richard Cobb rejects the connection: “I think it is wrong to want to find the origins of the Terror and the approval with which the revo¬ lutionaries greeted the sweeping measures of repression in obscure psychological wellsprings of the traditional popular mentality where the fear of pestilence creates an atmosphere of panic and mutual fear between bourgeois and artisans.”23 The position taken here supports Cobb. Eighteenth-century political discourse about dying and killing tends to lift us out of the natural, to be far more selfreflective than apprehensions of famine or epidemic. At least a great deal else is added. Medical contagion must run its course or be halted, like a forest fire. Hunger must be contained with barricades of grain. Political contagion and famine-and the core meanings of political mortality-go beyond these images. Politics means power, command, and authority. Obedience and rebellion are its poles. Death at its behest is charged with a voluntary significance for which natural explanations are inadequate. Under the rubric of obedience (“A good man favours the prince’s life above his own and risks his own to save it”), Bishop Bossuet cites 2 Samuel 15:19-22: “Then said the king [David] to Ittai the Gittite, wherefore goest thou also with us? Return to thy place, and abide with the king; for thou art a stranger and also an exile.” The alien answers (as a Swiss guard might have): “As the Lord liveth, and as my lord the king liveth, surely in what place my lord the king shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant be.”24 This political command unto death is not only a command to famil¬ iars, but to the faithful: such as the state might issue. For Ittai was not an Israelite; he had followed David out of trust, not consan21. Frangois Lebrun, Les hommes et la mart en Anjou aux I7e et 18e siecles: essai de demography et de psychology historiques (Paris and The Hague, 1971), p. 430.

22. Rene Baehrel, “Epidemie et terreur: histoire et sociologie,” Annales historiques de la Revolution fran^aise 23 (1951): 113-146; and “La haine de classe en temps d’epi-

demie,” Annales E.S.C., July-September 1952, pp. 351-360. 23. Richard Cobb, Terreur et subsistances, 1793-1795 (Paris, 1965), p. 31. 24. Bossuet, La politique tire'e, pp. 191-192. Translation from the King James Version.

Introduction

xix

guinity. A century later, for the quite opposite purpose of revolution, Saint-Just uses a metaphor of nature, but uses it awkwardly and mal a propos. “Citizens,” he declares, “tyranny is like the reed which bends with the wind and rises again. What do you call a Revolution? The fall of a throne, a few blows levied against a few abuses? The moral order is like the physical; abuses disappear for an instant, as the dew dries in the morning, and as it falls again with the night, so the abuses will reappear. The Revolution begins when the tyrant ends.”25 In asking the Convention to judge and kill Louis XVI as a tyrant, as an enemy in the state of nature, Saint-Just is not commending a natural process in which the dryness of the day is always followed by the dew at night. He wants to stop nature so that there may be no more dew, no more tyranny. Then only can the Revolution begin. Our present task will be to study death in the idiom of politics, not of nature. For amid the fecundity of research in the history of death, much of it bearing on the French eighteenth century,26 poli¬ tics as a focus or agency of death has been largely neglected. Political theory has not shown as much interest in death as it might, especially since politics regularly sponsors the threat or reality of violent death, and engrafts motives of shame or glory to them. Here I will try to explore the context or macrocosmic shape in which political mortality was perceived in the siecle des Lumieres, and to follow a number of edifying strands-texts, mentalities, and institutions-as they developed against this background. Death may be said to inhere in politics, not simply as an anomaly to be corrected but as a part of the bargain. For politics, being itself mortal, is obliged to use the power of life and death as a means toward its production and maintenance of the preservative state. It has been ceded this right as the agent of those who entered the state wishing to preserve themselves as long and as bountifully as possible. Thus political dying and killing ensue, almost exclusively in two realms if the polity is rational: death in combat against foreign 25. Antoine-Louis-Leon de Saint-Just, speech of 27 December 1792, translated in Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (Cambridge, 1974), p. 176. 26. Other than the works by Favre, Vovelle, and Lebrun, already cited: Philippe Ari£s, L’homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977); Vovelle’s anthology Mourir autrefois: atti¬ tudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1974); Pierre Chaunu, La mort a Paris: 16e, 17e, 18e siecles (Paris, 1978); and John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in EighteenthCentury France (Oxford and New York, 1981).

xx

Mortal Politics

enemies and death at the hands of one’s own justice in the case of irredeemable criminal and anti-social acts. Death in civil war, which might seem a third type, partakes of both these features. Our point of departure is therefore quite simple. Externally, war and, internally, capital punishment are the two major instances where politics throws off its “preservative” mask and reveals its mission of executing the “law of nature.” Hereupon, we leave simplicity behind. Not only are these themes-international relations and criminal justice-unseemly for benign politics, but they lose their original clarity amid the contingencies of history-the reasons, ideolo¬ gies, and usages of particular nations at particular times. History stuffs a good bit of chaos into pristine designs. There is also the problem of theory and practice. Alasdair MacIntyre has written: “Abstract changes in moral concepts are always embodied in real, particular events....There ought not to be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one popu¬ lated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a political and moral action.”27 I have tried here to convey a deeper understanding of eighteenth-century France in a combined medium where instances of action that are quite unremarkable in the idiom of theory nevertheless feed on it and are vital to the framing of any theory at all. The present work is not a theory: it is, among other things, an inquiry into how theory and practice worked in the “mortal politics” of eighteenth-century France. It is both an attempt to explore politics from its dark side and an elaborate case study of the demands that dying and killing make on politics. If politics can be understood as both dark and bright, it must also be seen as evolving. Eighteenth-century France was a great episode of change. We are faced then with the matter of change and constancy super-added to our “irreducible condition.” Death limits change. Politics violates constancy. Within approximately one century, death, the most conservative of all our practices, took on a new public, or revolutionary, image which was, nevertheless, controlled by a stubborn human decorum. At the same time, politics and a new conception of public order, which helped to create the world we live in, were engaged in translating death into an experi¬ ence less bonded to a God who disposes, more to a society of men 27. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (South Bend, 1981), p.

Introduction

xxi

who propose. That gigantic shift of emphasis could do little to alter the fact of death or even the state’s relationship to it; but, by investing the human project with a new morale, it vastly altered perceptions of legitimacy, responsibility, and salvation, creating a changed attunement toward the powers of life and death, one that gradually became normative. What is this central phenomenon? Call it secularization, desacralization, or modernization as one pleases. What is certain is that it replaced one myth with another. A second, rather different sort of mutation also deserves mention from the start. Not so cosmic in scope as the foregoing theme, it was nonetheless deeply entangled with the propriety and meaning of mortal politics. This was the progressive encroachment of a new system of manners in French society in which the traditional “honour” and “pride” of the aristocrat were tempered by the bour¬ geois values of “merit” and “reward,” finally producing a good deal of motivational confusion in the Revolution. None of this had any direct religious significance, but it touched heavily on such matters as morale, calling, and obligation, on ranks and services. While God and Society, the monarchy and the democracy, wrestled for supremacy at the highest level, a struggle for symbols and values of authority and respect went on beneath. This study begins, then, with the social and political macrocosm, the vision to which all else is related. First I briefly trace the char¬ acter of the reign of Louis XIV and the possibilities latent in it, with a specific eye to questions about the mortality of the realm and the role of political ideas in that determination. Here we see a first instance in which politics divides-and must divide-its functions between the preservative and the lethal. A second, more substantial chapter then analyzes the diminishment of regalo-divine power in eighteenth-century France, with particular attention to metaphor changes introduced to express sensibilities of life and death in and of the body politic. These chapters set the larger framework of the inquiry. A second portion of the book-chapters 3 and 4-discusses two revealing literary genres (academic eulogies and “dialogues of the dead”) in which questions of history and the processing of history by intellectuals abut on the interpretation of personal and corporate dying, on immortality, and on judging lives. I illustrate how certain classical models were adapted, in both sophisticated and more ordi¬ nary hands, to undermining royalist ideology and to asserting new claims of moral and political refereeship by the literary estate. The reader might wish to compare my treatment of funeral rhetoric in

xxii

Mortal Politics

the Revolution (chapter 11) with the findings disclosed here. My chapter 5 on duelling then introduces the theme of manners and the role of aristocratic behaviour to the study, taking us out of the institutional realm of the intellectuals and into those of the magistracy and the military. The treatment of the duel and its meaning for a more generalized “mortal politics” branches in two directions: legislation, the courts, and prevention; and the warrior ethos of the nobility. My choice has been to pursue the matter of war first. I devote two further chapters to it, structuring my analysis on institutional meanings and perceptions of dying in battle as they evolve throughout the century. Both from psychological and institu¬ tional perspectives I attempt to explore both deformity and reform in the French military up to the point where these questions stood on the eve of the Revolution. I do not, in this instance, carry my investigation of war into the Revolution: that is a well-worked topic which, if taken up here, would add bulk but little of new interest to this study. Moreover, I deal with some of these same themes in my research on Revolutionary music (chapter 10). In chapters 8 and 9 I return from the subject of valour and aggression to that of crime and punishment, the second of the state’s irreducible functions of mortal politics. The first of these chapters examines the nature of the judicial apparatus, the doctrine of the state’s right to take life for various crimes, the evolution of that doctrine, the spectacle and moral expectations of the public execu¬ tion, and the consequences wrought by the Revolution. In the second, notions of sovereign majesty, raised in the first chapter, are reviewed as they apply to the century’s radically shifting interpreta¬ tion of the supreme crime of treason as it passes from royalist to republican doctrine and is used against the former source of lex animata. In the final three chapters, I deal almost exclusively with the origins and results of the Revolutionary death mentality. Much, it goes without saying, could be written about all the points at which death and revolution touch; and the consequence of such a canvassing would be very disproportionate to present intentions. My strategy has been to evoke the revolutionary ethos of death and killing from some of our most immediate documents; songs and speeches having wide public exposure. We could not have under¬ stood practices of the Old Regime by such a method; in itself it marks a change in mortal politics. Yet there are continuities and constraints that political upheaval could not efface. I envelop my treatment of the novelties with an explanation of how they could

Introduction

xxiii

coexist with rooted attitudes. Continuities and influences are espe¬ cially stressed in my Final chapter on the conceptual sources of the Terror, where I see that drastic episode principally as a closure of the aristocratic style of politics and an uncompromising assertion of the sovereignty of man. Since men, as Pascal wrote of the libertins, “could find no cure for death, they determined, in order to make themselves happy, not to reflect on it at all. This inquiry will oblige readers to reflect on the death that politics inflicts in return for the organized life it bestows. Since my subject is the politics of yesteryear, I hope to be able to show how these issues, now discarded or internalized and passed on to us, were presented then. “To philosophize is to learn how to die,” as Socrates, Cicero, and Montaigne believed. Perhaps a better grasp of how and why men died can teach us something of political philosophy. 28. Blaise Pascal, Pense'es, ed. C.-M. des Granges (Paris, 1964), no. 168, p. 119. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

Mortality and Felicity Chapter 1

Sovereignty and Death

No history can be generated without presuppositions. In the humblest sense, this means that there can be no eighteenth-century history unless the seventeenth century is there to launch it. More pertinently, when we write of “mortal politics” in the French Enlightenment, it means that we need some prior understanding of this problematic in the age of Louis XIV. But first a generalization is in order. Politics is radically about both life and death. It reserves death in the last resort for internal and external enemies of the state, incorrigible persons whose actions threaten the social experiment. Conversely, it promises a higher probability and duration of life, with a certain share in life’s commodities, to all who huddle lawfully beneath its umbrella. While the state is often conceived as a comprehensive instrument of public welfare or happiness, it cannot be ignored as an agency of violence possessing the right to punish, in the last instance by death, or to ask the sacrifice of life in its behalf. For simplicity’s sake we may call the state’s preservative agency “administration” and its punitive or death¬ dealing resources the “judicial power” and the “war-making power,” while granting that administration itself may be lethal, justice vivi¬ fying, and armies purely admonitory. The developed state, whatever its regime, is a balance of these forces or powers working as a system. The right and the capacity to extinguish life presuppose the duty to maintain and enhance it. Since the following study concentrates on deadly politics, the nature of this fundamental tradeoff should be made clear from the outset, and we shall refer to it. Still, our main focus will be on questions such as these: the appraisal of who (or what) dies and who (what) does not; who, if anyone, is entitled to exact the supreme punishment for the

2

Mortal Politics

public welfare, and under what circumstances; who, if anyone, is deserving of death, and for what reason; who may be obliged to risk premature death for the state and why; when killing is base and when it is noble or heroic; how dying and killing functioned in eighteenth-century French politics. We shall be observing continu¬ ities and contrasts appropriate to these themes extending, roughly, from the age of Bossuet to that of Robespierre. In the Louisian ideology (generally considered ripest around 1678), justice, war, and administration were all conceived as proceeding from the royal person. This is one of the several things that absolutism meant. Of course the calm repose of absolutism was itself an ideal abstracted from a dynamic process. Beneath its supremacy, conflicting and countervailing forces and doctrines, some of them expressing the divisions just cited, were gathering strength to take on a life of their own. Indeed, the most recent interpreta¬ tions of the Sun King’s reign almost unanimously stress (I think overstress) the fragility, even the defensiveness, of that grandeur isolated from the nation at Versailles.1 Be that as it may, we shall begin with the self-perceptions of absolute royalist ideology, and then pass to the institutions disclosing its lines of stress. Whether or not Louis XIV possessed a power as supreme and unified as tradition has it, the assumption of absolutism facilitates our point of depar¬ ture. At very least, we might say that this absolutism was more concerned with the perils of the past than with a threatening future. It regarded its doctrine of sovereignty as a newly constructed bulwark, although (like all political ideologies of the time) it bonded many old bricks with its fresh mortar. It has been said, by Mannheim and others, that coherent political ideologies are constituted only when and if they have been forced by combat with new ideals to give a theoretical account of themselves. Mannheim believed that the older order reacted articulately only to the challenge of the French Revolution, and he masterfully analyzed this response in his essay “Conservative Thought.”2 What he did not see is that French royalist ideology (which still needs its historian) was penetrated deeply by wounds sustained in both the Wars of Religion and the Fronde, and forced, early on, into a posture of

1. See Jean-Marie Apostolides, Le roi-machine: spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1981); Louis Marin, Le portrait du roi (Paris, 1981); Joan De jean, Literary Fortifications (Princeton, 1984), pp. 20-75.

2. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in Kurt Wolff, ed., From Karl Mann¬ heim (New York, 1971), pp. 160-174.

Mortality and Felicity

3

intellectual controversy.3 Its major, but not exclusive, voice was Bossuet. Although the Bishop of Meaux veiled his arguments in a protracted appeal to Holy Scripture, he was not replaying an old beat on an antique drum. For he often spoke for political unity in the cadences of Bodin and Hobbes: “It is not enough for men to occupy the same land or to speak the same language, because having become ungovernable (intraitables) through the violence of their passions and incompatible by their different dispositions (humeurs), they could not be united unless they all subjected themselves to a single government ruling them all (qui les re'glat torn).”4 As is well known, Bossuet conceded different sorts of legitimate government in conformity with his Augustinian view of politics,5 but preferred monarchy as “the most natural, and consequently the most enduring, and therefore also the strongest.”6 This government should be “absolute,” a “state in the person of the prince,” but it should not be “arbitrary,” for that is “barbaric and odious.”7 The specially important attribute of absolute government was in respect to constraint (la force coactive) in right and in fact. Through the powers of a king such force could be exercized not only legitimately but, as it were, sacrally, as a commission from God. Moreover, “...public peace (repos) obliges kings to keep everyone in fear, the great even more than the simple citizens....”8 The king, as a lieu¬ tenant of God and cast in God’s image, must cultivate relentlessness as well as great mercy. And as for God: “He lives eternally; his wrath is implacable and always lively; his power is invincible; he never forgets; he never grows weary; nothing escapes him.”9 If this sounds not only-except in the first particular-10 like the way in which Louis XIV apprehended his semi-divine metier, but like the vigilant and

3. See on this Georges Lacour-Gayet, L’education politique de Louis XIV (Paris, 1923), esp. p. 261: “French patriotism was thinking of only one thing; to protect the head of the country against all foreign interference and especially the interference of Rome. Thus it fortified his power, gave him all rights, placed him above all condi¬ tions; but no one paid heed to the fact that Gallicanism, thus understood, was the radical negation of popular rights....” Despite feudal and other precedents to the contrary, ideology and public imagination agreed to make the monarch the lieutenant of God. 4. Bossuet, La politique tiree, p. 17. 5. Ibid., p. 59. 6. Ibid., p. 54. 7. Ibid., p. 292. 8. Ibid., p. 101. 9. Ibid., p. 113. 10. However, despite the mortality of kings, Tautorite ne meurt jamais.” Ibid., p. 22; and see below, p. 25.

4

Mortal Politics

omnipresent role that the Jacobins, a century later, would allot to the peuple, the resemblance is not totally a coincidence. Behind Bossuet’s magisterial prescriptions of the peace and order that monolithic royalism procures was not only a memory of recent disturbances but also a deep-rooted tradition of moral literature whose principal glory had been in the creation of the self-aware indi¬ vidual, the moi transported from politics to its inner kingdom. This privatization of sovereignty, beginning with Montaigne, asserted not only a very classical separation of otium and negotium; it removed the individual’s mental space from the reach of both his heavenly and his worldly sovereigns. Sometimes it was not very far from the commit¬ ment of the self to the trammels of self-conflict. At other times it was closer to a commitment of that self to the vistas of self-interest. But this self was itself a petty monarch of all it surveyed. The subject of death and how to die-a province where the church’s flag was planted-concerned all the moralists (sceptics, Jansenists, Stoics, and rationalists) a great deal. Among them death was treated and analyzed in innumerable figurations; and notions of la belle mort ranged from philosophical self-control and heroic gesture to materialistic resignation and frivolous scorn. This prepon¬ derate^ important subject was not, in the first instance, viewed on a public screen: the moralist’s proper topic is himself or oneself, the “moi qui vais mourir.”11 Yet the very nature of moralism, which, in its profusion of “pensees,” “maximes,” and “caracteres,” so intimately reveals the moi, is to canvass or sample the human condition. Wars, rebellions, executions, the vicissitudes of public fame or execration, libido dominandi-z\\ these vivid attributes of politics (the sphere that must purge to preserve)-could not pass unnoticed. Indeed, those affairs acquired new drama when used to illustrate the predicaments of the solitary moi. And vice-versa. La Rochefoucauld selected the familiar image of the public execu¬ tion in order to show how we disguise our fear of death: “Executed men sometimes affect steadiness, coolness, and contempt for death so as to avoid thinking about it and to stupefy themselves; we might say that this coolness and contempt do for their mind what the handker¬ chief does for their eyes.”12 La Bruyere, lamenting the death in battle of the two Soyecourt brothers, delivered a tirade against the madness of war that has scarcely any equal, except Vauvenargues,

11. Andre Malraux’s phrase, cited by McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, p. 4. 12. Francois, due de La Rochefoucauld, maxime no. 48, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Martin-Chauffier and Jean Marchand (Paris, 1964), p. 309.

Mortality and Felicity

5

until we reach the Second Discourse of Rousseau: “From the beginning of time, for some little piece of land or other, men have mutually agreed to despoil each other, burn each other, kill each other, cut each other’s throats; and to do this more cleverly and securely they have invented those lovely rules called the art of war....”13 But finally, the insatiable self-love of fallen man drives him into crime, threatening the lives of others and making the coercive apparatus of the state necessary. In the words of Nicole: “...by means of the wheel and the gibbet set up together, one stifles the tyrannical thoughts and designs of the amour-propre of each individual. The fear of death is thus the first link of civil society and the surest bridle on amourpropre; this it is that reduces men to obeying laws and makes them forget their vast dreams of domination.”14 Even La Bruyere, quoted a moment before in a transport of indignation, will, on this point, speak the common tongue of a society that feels precarious: “To say that a prince is the arbiter of human lives is only to say that men, through their crimes, are naturally subject to laws and justice, of which the prince is the repository.”15 The puny tyrant of Nicole’s amour-propre, restrained only by the sight of wheel and gibbet, would, in the course of the eighteenth century, lay claim to a promised portion of the sovereign powerincluding its ultimate instances-while the great wielder of Bossuet’s sword, “to whom alone belongs the force coactive, ”16 would be abased and destroyed as a tyrant in 1793. We begin, however, with the climate of opinion in which Thomas Hobbes declared to detractors of his theory that “tyrant” and “monarch” are simply partisan words that men assign to the person who makes the law, is above the law, and cannot rightfully be proceeded against with force.17 We are now so accustomed to the tame and “liberal” Hobbes that we have difficulty seeing him through the average perspective of those times. He is the man who wrote: “Revenge...belongs to God, and under God to the King, and none else.”18 Admittedly he is a 13. Jean de La Bruyere, “Du souverain,” in Les caracteres ou les moeurs de ce siecle, ed. R. Garapon (Paris, 1962), pp. 277-278. 14. Pierre Nicole, “De la charite et de l’amour-propre,” in Oeuvres philosophiques et morales, ed. C. Jourdain (Paris, 1845), pp. 180-181. 15. La Bruyere, “Du souverain,” in Les caracteres ou les moeurs, p. 290. 16. Bossuet, La politique tiree, p. 94. 17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (London, 1960), pp. 217, 447. All subsequent citations are to this edition. Cf. the discussion of this in Frederick G. Whelan, “Language and its Abuses in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981 ):62. 18. Thomas Hobbes, A Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England, ed. J. Cropsey (Chicago, 1971), p. 78.

6

Mortal Politics

slippery theorist, for he also wrote: “...the end of punishing is not revenge, and discharge of choler; but correction, either of the offender, or of others by his example....”19 There is a seventeenthcentury Hobbes and a twentieth-century Hobbes. However, it was the only Hobbes they knew that Bossuet and the absolute royalist ideologues guardedly accepted. Though this Hobbes refused all sympathy with Catholic theology, he was far from useless to Gallican political ecclesiology and political theory. It was not just that, according to Hobbes, “it belongeth of right [to the sovereign] to be judge both of the means of peace and defence, and also of the hind¬ rances and disturbances of the same; and to do whatever he shall think necessary to be done,”20 or that “to resist the sword of the commonwealth, in defence of another man, guilty or innocent, no man hath liberty; because such liberty, taketh away from the sover¬ eign the means of protecting us; and is therefore destructive of the very essence of government.”21 As we shall see, Hobbes was compelled by his own logic to withdraw an important element from his absolutism. However, Hobbes had a theory of “determined” free will (seamless with his politics) that could very well suit a monarchical and Christian notion of subjection: “...the will cannot be compelled; but the man may be, and is then compelled, when his will is changed by the fear of force, punishment or other hurt from God or man. And when his will is changed, there is a new will formed, (whether it be by God or man), and that necessarily; and consequently the actions that flow from that will, are both voluntary, free, and neces¬ sary, notwithstanding that he was compelled to do them.”22 This expresses very nicely the kind of voluntarism approved of by the acolytes of the Sun King. Neither is it so alien to Rousseau’s political project. There is of course danger for absolute royalism in Hobbes’s doctrine. It is not in the first instance his apparent agnosticism of regimes, nor is it his “liberal” sponsorship of a society based on economic contracts; rather it is his reservation to the individual (to the depersonalized moi) of the enduring right of self-preservation, however hemmed in it may be by empirical obstacles. For, because of the logic of society itself, “no man is bound by the [sovereign’s words of command] either to kill himself, or any other man; and consequently...the obligations a man may sometimes have, upon the 19. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 228. 20. Ibid., p. 112. 21. Ibid., p. 143. 22. Thomas Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance... in English Works (London, 1841), 5:287.

Mortality and Felicity

7

command of the sovereign to execute any dangerous, or dishonou¬ rable office, dependeth not on the words of our submission; but on the intention, which is to be understood by the end thereof. When therefore our refusal to obey frustrates the end for which sover¬ eignty was ordained; then there is no liberty to refuse; otherwise there is.”23 This not only tears a breach in the plenitudo potestatis; it appears to make each party to the social covenant a judge of “intention” in terms of “ends,” thereby infringing on what the “sovereign shall think necessary to be done.” More alarmingly, Hobbes asserts that it is the subject’s right of nature, anterior to the commonwealth, that is “the foundation of that right of punishing, which is exercised in every commonwealth. For the subjects did not give the sovereign that right; but only in laying down theirs, strengthened him to use his own, as he should think fit, for the pres¬ ervation of all: so that it was not given, but left to him, and to him only....”24 Hobbes is saying that an original right does not vanish in non-exercise; benign neglect cannot authorize the surrender of this right. Such a position menaces the philosophical reason by which a state might execute criminals (except by placing them in a state of war) or send armies into battle to be killed. Despite a prudent balancing of sentences, there is a serious problem in Hobbes’s doctrine of supreme power. If the sovereign possesses, and can possess, no right to command or compel a subject to lay down his life, because a mere command is not necessarily the “intention of an end” and because sovereigns exercise the ultimate sanction only when no original right is raised to controvert theirs, the state of nature is not eradicated. A power associated with omni¬ potence and above natural right must be summoned. It cannot be crime or sedition alone that engage the might of the secular sword, but rather the relentlessness that the sword displays, a might inter¬ preted in the image of God’s might. In this sense, might does make right. Hobbes illustrates this by the punishment of Job: “...though punishment be due for sin only [for secular purposes, read crime or injustice], because by that word is understood affliction for sin, yet the right of afflicting, is not always derived from men’s sin, but from God’s power.”25 The suggestion then is a kind of twist on the theo¬ dicy problem. Concerning this, Hobbes had written: “I cannot imagine, when living creatures of all sorts are often in torment as well as man, that God can be displeased with it: without his will, they

23. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 142. 24. Ibid., p. 213. 25. Ibid., p. 234.

8

Mortal Politics

neither are nor could be at all tormented. Nor yet is he delighted with it; but health, sickness, ease, torments, life and death, are without all passion in him dispensed by him....”26 If such is God’s way, then it is also the way of the earthly sovereign, who designates by law and right how God shall publicly be understood and worshipped. “The sovereign,” as Eisenach comments, “does more to his subjects than compel monetary restitution or its equivalent. Criminal law surrounds civil law. The sovereign does in fact punish crimes and treasons: he causes men to be locked up, beaten, or destroyed.”27 According to this interpretation, the sovereign needs not only the bundle of rights that others have laid aside in the scheme of natural politics, but also the stature of God’s lieutenancy which he rightfully assumes in the absence of Christ and true prophecy, if he is to punish crime and presumably also to commit men to perilous combat.28 There is evidently some perplexity involved in Hobbes’s position, obscure as the question must remain. French royalist theory had no such difficulty in absorbing Hobbes’s major doctrine of sovereignty, for any notion of retained natural right was alien to it (Bodin spoke instead of “fundamental law”). Not only was French Renaissance thought resplendent with images of kingly majesty, but it had assimi¬ lated the Roman law precepts of princeps legibus solutus est and quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem. The Bourbon dynasty adopted those maxims and that imagery. Though shaken by civil strife during the minority of Louis XIV, it emerged with its precepts intact, as they were not, and had never been, in England. Thus, when Bossuet added reinforcement from the Leviathan to an already vintage brew of semi-divine, imperial, and paternal kingship, he seemed to rebut all argument. There was an indubitable right of rewards and punish¬ ments concentrated in a real prince who was subject only to God. Bossuet could sound much like Hobbes: “All force is transferred to the sovereign magistrate, each upholding it to the prejudice of his own and even renouncing his life if he should disobey. Each one gains by recovering in the person of this supreme magistrate greater force than he gave up with his authorization, since he recovers the entire force of the unified nation for the aid of all.”30 But Bossuet 26. Hobbes, Liberty, Necessity, and Chance, in English Works, 5:213. 27. Eldon J. Eisenach, Two Worlds of Liberalism: Religion and Politcs in Hobbes, Locke, and Mill (Chicago, 1981), p. 45.

28. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 308. 29. See Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1980), pp. 56-61.

30. Bossuet, La politique tire'e, p. 20. Whether, or to what extent, Bossuet was influ-

Mortality and Felicity

9

asserted that this union would be impossible in natural politics; it would fail “unless the treaty were fundamentally made in the pres¬ ence of a superior power (puissance), like that of God, the natural protector of human society and the inevitable avenger of every breach of law.”31 Indeed, even the pagan societies had always chosen to give their laws the force of divine sanction. Bossuet’s king had God close by his side in his mystical process of natural succes¬ sion, coronation, and election. Hobbes began with purely rational principles, keeping his Dieu abscons completely at bay, and always on an Erastian leash, until an extra and mysterious might was needed to wield the heavy sword. Thus, generally speaking, Elobbes in France became a part of the royal armor, not so easily unmasked as a liberal.32 For the century

enced by Hobbes remains a subject of scholarly dispute: Gustave Lanson stressed their affinity in his Bossuet (Paris, 1900), p. 198; Robert Derathe tended to discount it in his Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris, 1950), p. 183n. Bossuet owned several Latin editions of both De Cive and Leviathan; he makes no explicit reference to Hobbes anywhere in La politique tire'e, but this would have been inappro¬ priate, besides. The question is treated rather mechanically in Ian M. Wilson, The Influence of Hobbes and Locke in the Shaping of the Concept of Sovereignty...in EighteenthCentury France, in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol.

101 (1973). It is more imaginatively handled in Lacour-Gayet, L’e'ducation politique, esp. pp. 280-289, where the importance of Samuel Sorbiere’s translation of De Cive (Leviathan was never fully translated into French, but was well known through Latin editions of 1668 and 1670) is explained. Also, in 1660, Francois Bonneau, Seigneur du Verdus, dedicated to Louis XIV his Elemens de la politique de Monsieur Hobbes. As Lacour-Gayet points out (p. 288): “The point of departure in the Gallican theory and the point of departure in the theory of Hobbes are radically opposed; but the point of arrival in both is the same...lieutenant of God or lieutenant of the people, the Gallican sovereign or Hobbes’s sovereign knows no superior but God.” 31. Bossuet, La politique tiree, p. 27. 32. There were no further translations of Hobbes in French until the eve of the Revolution. His principal exposure had always been by way of Francois Bayle’s Dictionary (1695). However, he had also been transmitted in the anonymous Essais de morale et de politique (Lyons, 1687) and in Louis Desbans’s Les principes naturels du droit et de la politique (Paris, 1716; 2d ed., 1765). There is also the interesting case of Isaac

Papin, a Calvinist convert to Catholicism. Papin greatly admired Hobbes’s secular theory of government, but deplored his embodiment of sacred authority in the prince. In La cause des heretiques discutee et condamnee par la methode de droit (Blois, 1707), he wrote: “It is surely very sad that so profound and fine a genius, among so many superb observations on the nature of the Republic and the sovereign power of princes, set forth with consummate perfection, should have ventured such a great absurdity....” Cited in Bernard Plongeron, Theologie et politique au siecle des Lumieres, 1770-1820 (Geneva,

1973), pp.

116-117. Probably because of his alleged atheism

Hobbes had been linked to Spinoza in the first half of the eighteenth century; see, on this, Wilson, Influence of Hobbes and Locke, pp. 60, 64. References to Hobbes in French literature pick up enormously in 1740-1760.

10

Mortal Politics

to follow “le hobbisme le plus parfait” stuck in the craw of the reformers. In his generous and often perceptive article on Hobbes in the Encyclopedic, Diderot gave just credit to Hobbes’s “hardiesse de penser,” although he accused him of failing to appeal to experi¬ ence.33 By that time empiricism had won major victories in French thought, and Hobbes, like Descartes, while “serving the progress of the human mind,” had come to be somewhat deplored as a “systematique.” Diderot accurately described Hobbes’s account of the state of nature as a “fable.” Despite the Malmesbury philosopher’s praiseworthy character, “simple, droit, ouvert et bienfaisant,”34 his political doctrine was to be reproved. Diderot ascribed this failing entirely to Hobbes’s horror at the English civil war: “Circumstances made his philosophy; he mistook a few momentary accidents for the invariant rules of nature, and he became the aggressor of humanity and the apologist for tyranny.”35 Needless to say, this was the tyranny of Cromwell or of Charles or of the Presbyterians, and not of Nicole’s private man criminalized by amour-propre. Bossuet and Hobbes create an intellectual point of departure for this treatment of death and politics in France. There is no doubt that the king “personifies” or “personates” the state. There is no doubt that he can command. May the subject resist? If so, who is to be the judge of that-except success? What is fealty? What is a right? How does God propose and man dispose? Although powerful forces of “life” are at work in the sphere we have called administration, death as ultimate sanction and ultimate sacrifice haunts our inquiry from the start. For even if kingship proves not to be eternal, the political problem of taking lives will not vanish.

Degenerative Politics In August 1742 the king of France, Louis XV, lay dying, it seemed without reprieve. Although France was then at war, “le roi bien-

33. This relationship is fully canvassed in Leland Thielemann, “Diderot and Hobbes, Diderot Studies 2 (1952):221-278. Diderot took a good deal from Brucker for the philosophical part of his article on Hobbes. Despite their manifest differences, Diderot is described by Thielemann as indebted to Hobbes to the extent that the latter was a sound critic of the individualistic theory of natural rights and of the opti¬ mistic doctrine of sociability” (p. 259). 34. Article

Hobbisme," Encyclope'die, ou dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et

des metiers, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751-1772), 8:241a.

35. Ibid., p. 233b.

Mortality and Felicity

11

aime” was widely regarded as a monarch who had sought by every honourable means to keep the country at peace, and he was far more popular than he would later be. Voltaire describes Paris as a scene of desolation, “beside itself”:

All the houses of the ruling class (des hommes en place) were besieged by never-ending crowds. All the crossroads were filled with people exclaiming: “If he dies, it’s because he came to our aid.” The public desolation had no connection with disorder, as might have been feared. People were too shaken to worry about that (pour rien prevoir). Love alone stirred them: they accosted and questioned each other in the churches, even though they might be strangers. In several churches the priest who was chanting the prayer for the good health of the king broke down in sobs, and the people answered with wails and weeping.36

As Bossuet had declared: “the death of a king is...God’s punishment of a state.”37 This was still widely felt to be the case when the life of Louis XV seemed to be ebbing, despite swellings of discontent that would break the old molds of conviction within two generations. At this moment in time the all-powerful viceroy of God and supreme dispenser of the state’s just punishment lay in peril of his own life and soul; the people joined their “pere” in a communion of calamity. Then a miraculous recovery gave the people back their monarch for thirty-two more years, and Te Deums were sung. Political emotions returned to normal. Yet a similar scene would return in 1757, when Damiens’s blade struck the royal person. Normal politics was, by all perceptive accounts, a degenerative politics. Whether the decline should accurately be traced from the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, from the costly War of the Spanish Succession, from the Unigenitus dispute that raged from 1713 on, or from the licentiousness of the Regency of Philippe d’Orleans is a matter of taste and conjecture. What is certain is the wide currency of the phrase “les moeurs de ce siecle” (first applied 36. Voltaire, Histoire de la guerre de 1741, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris, 1877-1885), 15:225. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 37. Bossuet, La politique tire'e, p. 189.

12

Mortal Politics

by La Bruyere to his own century), a sobriquet that could be uttered either cynically or prophetically. Louis XV was the personification of this new morality. Such moralists as had survived agreed that it filtered down into society through a proportionate cupidity for wealth, idleness, and pleasure. The fragile Stoicism of the “Burgundy Circle” had left small trace on the fibre of many who were now the favourites of France. France needed, of course, to be run beneath the omnipotent gaze of its consecrated king. Louis XV could not, nor did he wish to, in the words of his august great-grandsire, “[keep] an eye on the whole earth...[be] informed of an infinite number of things that we are presumed to ignore....”38 Absolutism was congenial to, but not tailored for, the lesser monarch. Had he entirely depended on cabals and favourites, the tragedy of the Bourbons might have befallen a good deal sooner. However, public morals were not utterly debased. France was adequately, if not amply, blessed with conscientious magistrates, diligent administrators, and brave generals whose obedient habits were tempered by a care for the state. Despite the “moeurs du siecle” one could live in eighteenth-century France, believe in duty and service, undertake improvements, and guard one’s place and reputation honourably. The kingdom, it was felt, could be sustained and reformed beneath the monolithic doctrine of monarchy that still commanded deep loyalty. The religious quarrels were especially vexing; but one could still live and die for as well as from such a politics. The dynastic state was still perceived as the motor of reform. It was also still the principal agency of glory; and, as the Encyclopedic put it; “Un trepas glorieux est preferable a une vie honteuse.”39 It was from the monarch himself-father of his people, lieutenant of God, roi thaumaturge, and indivisible sovereign-that ultimate lifesustaining and death-dealing power proceeded. But there were also satellites in orbit around this star. Theirs was not entirely a reflected glory; for the demands of governing, defending, and rendering justice for a complicated social and political conglomerate of more than 20,000,000 souls had brought forward special virtues and claims of the subaltern professions of justice, war, and administra¬ tion. All of these claims, while grounded in the prince’s majesty, were susceptible, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to amending absolutism. Their independency had not been treasonable 38. Louis XIV, Memoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin, ed. P. Sonnino (New York, 1970), p. 30. 39. Article “Trepas,” Encyclopedic 16:593b.

Mortality and Felicity

13

since the Fronde. However, it was implicit in both utility and in diverging interpretations of the royal constitution, and was capable of inspiring divisive ideologies for the future.

Justice, War, Administration

The specific moral claims of the magistracy at the end of the Grand Siecle had no more elequent or insistent voice than that of Henri d’Aguesseau, brilliant scion of an admired parlementaire, advocategeneral of the Parlement of Paris and later chancellor of France (1717-1750). He was a Platonic idealist of his caste and profession, yet staunchly loyal to the royal doctrine that he served. Regarding him, d’Argenson commented that he had “piety and all the virtues which derive from it, probity, erudition, a taste for letters, and great sense,” though he was too much ruled by subordinate magistrates and “too slow in deciding on great affairs.”40 Though much of the robe was self-interested and venal, d’Aguesseau and other honourable magistrates considered the sovereign courts “a kind of temple...where the ministers of the altars were constantly astonished to find a layman with not only more intelligence and knowledge, but more zeal for his calling, more ardour for the glory of the Church....”41 This zeal had been handed down from his father, who, “in a weak and delicate body [had borne] a robust soul worthy of a true Roman, loving his country with that affection which, according to Cicero, exceeds all other loves.”42 And he had been no less Christian than Roman: “Holy Scripture, on which he meditated night and day...had become so familiar that virtually every time he heard the beginning of a verse, his heart...would complete it.”43 Though this coherence would be shattered as the century wore on, in the life of a d’Aguesseau familial honour, Roman civic virtue, Christian piety, and deep interest in the new philosophy could abide together without apparent stress.44 Such men became or made themselves 40. Rene-Louis d’Argenson, Essays...written after the Manner of M. de Montague [«c] (Dublin, 1789), essay 34, p. 150; cf. essay 22, p. 95. 41. Henri d’Aguesseau, “Des causes de la decadence de l’eloquence,” Oeuvres, ed. M.E. Falconnet, 2 vols. (Paris, 1865), 2:47. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 42. D’Aguesseau, “Discours sur la vie et la mort de M. d’Aguesseau,” Oeuvres 1:446. 43. Ibid., p. 458.

14

Mortal Politics

heroes of a profession, almost allegorical figures in the moral geog¬ raphy of a political kingdom, bridging the stationary posture of “caracteres” and the dynamic eulogistic forms we shall note in a later chapter. In a series of brief addresses to his colleagues, d’Aguesseau insisted on the severe morals of the magistrate-"la sainte rigueur de son austere sagesse”45 -and on his “grandeur d’ame”: “Superior to all events, it seems that, having anticipated them all, he has also scorned them. Anger has never troubled the serenity of his face; vanity has never made it prideful; discouragement has never planted its trace of weakness....”46 Yet d’Aguesseau had some obvious concern about the “collapse of morals” in his time and the reverbera¬ tions of royal absolutism. He challenged the magistracy: “Haven’t we still powerful weapons (armes privilegiees) that make us see the inno¬ cence of the earlier ages of the senate [i.e., the Parlements], amid the corruption of our century?”47 When he further asked: “Will we have to search for love of country in republics (Etats populaires), and maybe even in the ruins of ancient Rome?”-he was nonetheless prepared to grant confidence to the reforms of the Regency.48 While never unbending from his aristocratic view of the magis¬ tracy or his absolutist view of the state, d’Aguesseau showed some tenderness for the common people. “Administrators of justice,” he appealed, “redouble your zeal: hear rather the cries of the poor and wretched who ask a prompt hearing of their grievances than the voice of your colleagues who want you to turn them aside.”49 He regarded the judge as the “sovereign arbiter of life and death” and enjoined him “always, to the end of his days, to approach with trem¬ bling and in remembrance of his original praiseworthy timidity the sight of an accused person whose fate he holds in his grasp.”50 This justice did not arise from “conscience,” as we would call it today, but from conscientiousness, a courage to examine and decide on the facts and the law as they were then understood. D’Aguesseau did not, for example, conceive of reducing the horrors of torture. Cruelty was not regarded as a deadly sin in the civilization that produced him: the campaign against cruelty has rather been a hall-

44. D Aguesseau, Etude sur la vie de d’Aguesseau,” introduction to ibid., p. 6. 45. “Troisieme mercuriale,” d’Aguesseau, Oeuvres 1:168. 46. Ibid., p. 171. Cf. d’Aguesseau, “Cinqui£me mercuriale,” p. 193. 47. D’Aguesseau, “Dix-huitieme mercuriale,” ibid., p. 319. 48. D’Aguesseau, “Dix-neuvi£me mercuriale,” ibid., pp. 324, 329. 49. D’Aguesseau, “Dixieme mercuriale,” ibid., p. 242. 50. D’Aguesseau, “Huiti£me mercuriale,” ibid., p. 223.

Mortality and Felicity

15

mark of secular humanitarianism.51 When, at the age of eighty-two, d’Aguesseau, the painter of the “perfect magistrate,” died, he directed that “his ashes be mixed and mingled with those of the poor in the cemetery of Auteuil, where his wife was buried.”52 He either ostentatiously shunned the lavish funeral appropriate to his rank or indulged in a gesture of civic piety.53 His idealization of the magistracy helped, unintentionally, to undermine the royal foundations on which his corporate status rested. War-making was a somewhat different matter. Almost reversing Clausewitz’s dictum in advance, Louis XIV had so staunchly wedded glory to belligerency that one could say that his politics was really a pursuit of war by other means.54 Despite our current portrait of a king blockaded within Versailles-as if within one of Vauban’s fortresses-he had dabbled at being a warrior-king, had gone/ to the front and commanded. Though this martial posture was deplored by some of the Enlighteners, the Louisian penchant for glory continued to echo in the eighteenth century. The talents and cool courage of the man of war suffered little degradation, although the “guerrier” image (e.g., the “Grand Conde”) had ceded to that of a more profes¬ sional militarism.55 Logistical and engineering improvements of Louvois and Vauban were influential. The “homme de guerre” was becoming not only a more technical, but a more reflective and responsible figure, more controlled by the ministry and its agents, while still every inch an aristocrat (see chapter 6). As the Encyclopedic writes at mid-century: “He should know himself, estimate himself severely; if he does not sense in himself the needed qualities, he is being less than faithful to the truth, to his country, to his king, and to himself....”56 By 1750, the rage was all for Saxe, and the Encyclopedic cited widely from his Reveries. Saxe was not only a glamorous commander but, as a mercenary, not a political threat. However, in their ideal of a “perfect captain,”57 French memories drifted back to two figures 51. Judith N. Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First,” Daedalus 111 (1982): 17-27. 52. Antoine-Ltonard Thomas, Eloge de d’Aguesseau, in Oeuvres diverses, 2 vols. (Lyons, 1767-1771), 1:137. 53. Aries, L’homme devant la mort, opts for the latter, maintaining that the decline of funeral pomp had firm roots in the Grand Si£cle (p. 332). 54. See Camille Rousset, Histoire de Louvois et de son administration politique et militaire, 4 vols. (Paris, 1872), 1:29. 55. Andre Corvisier, L'armee frangaise de la fin du XVIIe siecle au ministere de Choiseul, 2 vols. in 1 (Paris, 1964), p. 119f. 56. Article “Guerre,” Encyclopedie 8:995b. 57. The manual he parfait capitaine, ou abrege des commentaires des guerres de Cesar,

16

Mortal Politics

of a former age of glory: Vauban and Turenne. Their composite qualities were these: (1) a reflective and strategic vue d’ensemble; (2) an undissimulated devotion to sovereign and nation; (3) a Roman distaste for idleness and luxury; (4) Christian piety and moral virtues; (5) decency to subordinates and troops; (6) a care for the economy of life; (7) stamina in adversity and magnanimity in success; and (8) a professional pride passing under the rubric of “honneur.” Since Turenne (even though his memory was well alive in the eighteenth century)58 died of an accidental battle wound in 1675 while leading his army against the Austrians, I shall concentrate here only on Vauban, whose plain-dealing, often eloquently phrased in his Oisivetes, tempered valour with prudence and science. Best known today as a genius of sieges and fortifications and as a critic of the economic policies of Louis XIV,59 Vauban was still vege¬ tating as a captain (from the petite noblesse) at the age of forty-one (in 1674) when his exceptional talents were recognized by the modern¬ izing war minister Louvois. Quickly he became indispensable in the councils of the king.60 “Louis XIV,” it is recounted, “who had a precise mind...always, when he besieged a position, had Vauban at his side; and whoever had Vauban could infallibly declare: city besieged, city taken!”61 The marshal had other insights besides his works on fortifications and strategy that deserve notice for their blend of sensitivity and realism. For one thing, he had no heroic illusions about his profes¬ sion: War has interest for her father, ambition for her mother, and for her close relatives all the passions that tempt us to evil. She appeared in this world at the same time as the earliest men. She was born with them and, like them, she seized all the habitable parts of this universe, making them her heritage. She has manipu¬ lated them at her pleasure and will do so as long as there are men on earth with a despotic power over the goods and lives of everyone without exception. Her main occupations are, on the one hand, the destruction of human beings, the overthrowing of states, the annihilation of cities, the sacking of provinces, and the general desolation of all by Henri, due de Rohan, first published in 1636, was reprinted in 1744. 58. See, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ed. Francois and Pierre Richard (Pans, 1961), bk. 4, pp. 287-288. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 59. See Keohane, Philosophy and the State, pp. 327-330. 60. Rousset, Histoire de Louvois 1:242, 247. 61. Ibid., p. 453.

Mortality and Felicity

17

peoples of the earth. On the other hand, she establishes subordi¬ nation among all those whom she has civilized and has forced to live in society, making them fit for discipline.62 If this sounds like “philosophy” in advance (e.g., Voltaire or Kant), it is not; but it hits some of the keys of French moralism. Vauban was a military creature, but a creature well aware of honour, humanity, and self-preservation. Insights of the same kind abound in his inci¬ dental writings: a contempt for “luxe” and “gourmandise” and the general style of life at Versailles;63 a healthy regard for the true nobility, “more than 80,000 families of gentils-hommes capable of supplying a very large number of officers, the best ones in the world;”64 a complementary recognition that military valour was not the privilege of a caste (“God, the father and creator of all men, makes jest of our distinctions and plants bon esprit where it pleases him”);65 a hatred for the wave of irreligion then infecting the army;66 and a very d’Aguesseau-like loyalty to the state and a pref¬ erence for those who had not used high position to increase their fortunes.67 Vauban’s catalogue of virtues looks not so much ahead to the reformist age of Turgot as backward to the social balance of Henri IV. Yet it is accompanied by the idea of a totally new warfare, which, Vauban hoped, would be sparing of both military and civilian lives.68 Vauban summarized his military creed as follows: True glory does not skirl like the butterfly, it is gained only by real and solid actions. It always willingly performs its duties to the letter. Its first and real principle is devoted adherence to the truth. It is completely generous, prudent, and bold in its under¬ takings, firm in its resolutions, intrepid in perilous exploits, chari¬ table, disinterested, and always ready to pardon and to take the side of justice. Always sensitive in its actions, it is governed...by reason alone....It is religious; it is humble and modest in all that it does, and it cannot even abide direct praise....False glory is 62. Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, Vauban, sa famille et ses ecrits: ses oisivetes et sa correspondance, analyse et extraits, ed. Lt.-Col. Rochas d’Aiglun, 2 vols. (Paris,

1910),

1:267. 63. Ibid., p. 339. 64. Ibid., p. 269. 65. Ibid., p. 325. 66. Ibid., p. 343. 67. Ibid., pp. 616-617. 68. See Rousset, Histoire de Louvois 1:461; “Sparing the soldiers’ lives, preventing the useless flow of blood...that was Vauban’s major preoccupation: his honour and glory.”

18

Mortal Politics nothing but the surface appearance of these qualities....69

Vauban is ancient; Vauban is modern. We shall see ahead (chapters 6 and 7) the nature of his legacy, how it was both continued and violated by men of war and the demands of war. In a broad sense, administration encompasses both justice and war, but in its purest shape it is “reason” applied to the fundamental goal of state-building. It develops a different vocabulary and discours, based on more optimistic assumptions.70 If it is carried out by men of grim visage who say “cela ne se peut pas” to the nobles, by bour¬ geois prodigies lacking in bienseance, at least administration does not suffer from the tragic paradoxes of justice and war. Even when a Louvois causes deaths for the glory of the state, he can be shielded by an ideology of preservation. And most administrators do not have to kill in order to preserve; their specific devotion is to “bonheur” and “prosperite.” As Jacques Necker put it in a prize-winning eloge of 1773: “Its success is proclaimed by an increase of population: born from happiness, it proceeds to strengthen happiness.”71 The reign of Louis XIV produced “great administrators,” notably Colbert and Louvois, enemies and collaborators in the glory of the monarchy.72 Colbert was the “fox” of the ministry. With his genius for unremitting toil, he struggled to bring order to the finances of the realm, to the policing of Paris, the creation of a navy and sound naval training, to the regulation of internal commerce, to overseas trade and colonization, to the establishment of medical facilities and research, to the rationalization of employments by church and state, and to the support of architecture, literature, and science.73 Louvois was the “hedgehog.” He concentrated on the army, which was the primary instrument of the king’s glory. As brilliant second to his father Michel Le Tellier, then his successor, he was “the principal artisan in building up and maintaining for Louis XIV a supple and efficient instrument for the king’s foreign policy.”74 From 1662 on he effectively controlled the military operations of France: a chief of staff who had never gone to war, trusted by his sovereign. When he 69. Vauban, Oisivetes et correspondance 1:627. 70. See, on conceptual vocabulary, Keith M. Baker, “French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI,” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978):295-298. 71. Jacques Necker, Eloge de Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Paris, 1773), p. 28. 72. There is a concise summary of their hostility in Andrew Trout, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Boston, 1978), pp. 112-114. 73. See Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York, 1939), 1:108, 318f; 2:If, 466f. 74. See Jacques Hardre, ed., Letters of Louvois (Chapel Hill, 1949), p. 8.

Mortality and Felicity

19

launched his reforms of the 1670s, “the army belonged neither exclusively to the king nor to the state; it belonged, in parcels, to all the officers....”75 Louvois applied himself to cracking this scheme of partition, as well as carrying out numerous other rationalizing meas¬ ures.76 Eventually he had the better of Colbert, who became thought of as the minister of peace.77 Colbert did not object to war, but he often felt that a plantation in the Indies or a comedy of Moliere might be worth a Dutch fortress. According to his major biographer, “Colbert’s death [in 1683] was precipitated by the chagrin that he felt when the king compared his services unfavourably with those of Louvois....”78 Interesting as this hostility is to the biographer, the similarity is more interesting to the student of political thought, who seeks to define what it was to be an administrator under Louis XIV. “Louis was the kindly master, the generous benefactor, the stern ruler, the exacting sovereign, the royal despot.”79 His ministers, at their best, needed to be both valets and men of vision. They had to be hommes d’Etat with a consuming passion for the glory of the throne. As Louvois and Colbert collected high state honours and feathered the nests of their connections, they had to work grindingly hard at the royal business and know how to parry flattery, that deadliest of all poisons to an administrator. Colbert and Louvois were proficient at all these things, enough so as to distress the bienseance of Madame de Sevigne.80 Above all, to be a model administrator one needed always to bear in mind that his own brilliance was only reflected light and that he must take no false step between those rays and the public warmth. Administrators, too, had to die. There was a first death when their capacities were questioned by the sovereign; the second put them in the grave. The cold, work-driven Colbert died piously, partly, as we have noted, from chagrin at Louvois’s ascendancy. Louvois neither lived nor died with great scruple for religion; but he felt the first chill of disgrace in 1689 after a severe rebuff from his monarch, and perished, a few hours after another, on 15 July 1691. 75. Rousset, Histoire de Louvois 1:165. 76. Ibid., 1:95-99, 254f; Corvisier, Arme'e frangaise, pp. 289-290, 694, 714, 757. 77. See Hippolyte de Guibert, “Discours preliminaire” to Essai general de tactique, in Strategiques (Paris, 1977), p. 141. 78. Cole, Colbert and French Mercantilism 1:293. 79. Ibid., p. 289. 80. Marie de Sevigne, Correspondance, ed. Roger 1972-1978), 1:648, 650, 663, 667; 2:359, 749.

Duchdne,

3

vols.

(Paris,

20

Mortal Politics

Poison was rumoured, but it is more likely that Louvois died of apoplexy.81 Later ministries were no longer monitored by such men: the Regency, in particular, seemed to provide a breathing space of “politics,” with the more powerful dampers that Louis XIV had imposed on the sovereign courts and public opinion lifted. But the administrative drive toward state-building continued. It is an error, in any case, to set “politics” against “administration,” as we have grown accustomed to doing in more recent times when the major conflicts became those between representative and popular assem¬ blies and enrooted, non-responsible bureaucracies. “Politics” in that period was, on the one hand, the maneuvers of courtisans or at least of combinazioni in high places and their clienteles. On the other hand, it was administration itself (politics means policy): the radial control of the national territory by ministers and intendants; the management of public works and food distributions; the regulation of commerce and industry; and, at a higher reach, the search for that philoso¬ pher’s stone, “the science of government.” Politics here obeyed its age-old sense in a rationalized atmosphere: the exercise of the authority to give orders. Administration was welded, seemingly without fatal flaw, to the monarchical institutions that Bourbon France had developed: mili¬ tary power, overseas expansion, commerce, cultural flourishing, scientific inventiveness were all held to depend on the stability and largesse of the throne. The trouble was that the traditional monarchy and the expanding administrative monarchy (favoured by, among other elements, “philosophy”) were increasingly out of sorts. The view increased that the king’s legitimacy was functional and not by divine right or by indefeasible contract of submission. For the image of le parfait administrateur we shall have to wait for Turgot’s intendancy of Limousin in the 1760s. Yet the idea is simply and elegantly crafted by a single principle: utility. Utility is an earthbound and earth-absorbed science, presupposing a fundamental rationality of human behaviour that can either be perceived through self-interest, or be taught in schools, or be imposed by wise elites. It dispenses with the stickiness of old habits and customs, with multiple complicated extravagances and superstitions, with aristocratic honour and civic virtue. Or, rather, having pummelled the passions into

81. On Louvois’s death, see the Due de Saint-Simon, Me'moires, 43 vols. (Paris, 1899-1930), 28:74-85. On the suspicion of poisoning by the king, see Voltaire, Corre¬

spondence,

ed.

Theodore

67:14-15; 78:140-141.

Besterman,

107

vols.

(Geneva,

1953-1965),

66T57-158-

Mortality and Felicity

21

simple sensations of pain and pleasure, it then professes to show how the virtues it had shunned in its reductionist analysis can be recre¬ ated mechanically for the welfare of all. So far as the political uses of death are concerned, utility employs the arguments of the lesser evil and of deterrence. In his pure form, the administrator rebuffs the craft and the mystery of deadly politics, for he is the herald of life and its propagation. The great administrators of Louis XIV had not been philosophes. They had not been desirous in any way to shift the ground of monarchical legitimacy; nor had the rising oppositionists been espe¬ cially anxious to promote administration, except for the purpose of curbing economic profligacy. The real expositor of “perfect adminis¬ tration” was the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Long-winded, crotchety, repellent to all the referees of style, Saint-Pierre has often been put down as a fanatic bore. As the Marquis d’Argenson wrote: “My friend, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, dreams continually that he is reforming the state: I have a little more right than he has to form such dreams. He writes and publishes what he dreams of; I am tempted to do so likewise; but I answer for it, that my dreams should not be brought to light during my existence; first, because I do not believe the world disposed to make use of that which I think is for its advantage; secondly, because the example of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre frightens me.”82 Saint-Pierre’s works, written with the quaint orthographic reforms of his own invention, invited ridicule and are little read today. Yet two recent historians, Ira O. Wade and Nannerl O. Keohane, are surely correct to stress his seminal impor¬ tance in the development of the eighteenth-century political project.83 To understand political thought in France one must suffer through the bad writing of a man who was considered the holy fool of politics. No one in his time produced a more comprehensive set of trea¬ tises on what we would call political science. It was precisely Saint-Pierre’s main goal “to perfect the science of government.”84 He was strident about the primacy of politics: “The science (sience) of government is certainly much more important to the happiness of the state than all other sciences put together.”85 He wanted all 82. D’Argenson, Essays, essay 5, p. 9; cf. essay 23, p. 99. 83.

Keohane, Philosophy and the State, pp. 363-376; Ira O. Wade, The Structure and

Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1977), esp. 1:317-322. 84. Charles-Irenee Castel, abbe de Saint-Pierre, “Projet pour rendre les livres et autres monumens plus honorables pour les auteurs futurs et plus utiles a la posterite,”

Ouvrajes politiques, 17 vols. (Rotterdam, 1733), 2:217. 85. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, “Effets du nouveau Plan du Gouvernement des Etats,” ibid., 6:332.

22

Mortal Politics

politics reduced to rationality; and to do this he saw no objection to despotic government by a king, so long as that king could be made the incarnation of reason by way of his own sience. If there were one truly enlightened despot, people would not be plagued by the discord of petty despots.86 Moreover, the inauguration of his polit¬ ical science would (contrary to the individual genius of a Louis XIV) “discover or set up a form of government that will perfect itself without need of any gifted or toiling monarch.”87 Without renouncing Christianity, Saint-Pierre completely collapsed the diversity of the “two cities” into a single continuum of reason and utility. Esteem in the earthly city and bliss in the heavenly one were basically regulated by the practice of a quality he called bienfai¬ zance (beneficence). “Paradis aux bienfaizans” was the slogan that he unfailingly tacked to the end of his didactic letters. “Bienfaizance” (a kind of secularized charity that eliminated all the cruel paradoxes of Christian behaviour) was modelled on Saint-Pierre’s transitional image of the Christian God, “l’Etre bienfaizant,” “who leads us both toward the recognition that is charity or love, and to the imitation, which is the most powerful style of worship (culte).” That was a large step away from gesta Dei per Francos. “It is true,” wrote Saint-Pierre, that men love glory, but we feel that there is more perfection in loving the bienfaizance that deserves glory, than in loving glory itself....”88 Yet Saint-Pierre’s image of the past was almost as traditional as his sense of a future of consummated progress was extravagant. His modern heroes were: Descartes, Turenne, Lamoignon, Catinat, Vauban.89 He constructed a hierarchy of beings on this earth and discussed them at length in his essay “Discours sur la grandeur et la saintete des hommes.” In the first place, he argued: “We should not, like the common people, confuse the powerful man with the great man: power often comes either from birth or from different cross¬ ings of fortune, or, rather, from different external arrangements of Providence; but a man becomes great only by his internal qualities of mind and heart and the great benefits he bestows on society. The great men deserve our esteem, our praises, and our respect: external

86. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Ouvrajes politiques 9:279. Margaret C. Jacob’s imputation of republicanism to Saint-Pierre in her The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freema¬ sons, and Republicans (London, 1981), pp. 148-149, seems absurd. 87. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Ouvrajes politiques 12:202. 88. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, Oeuvres diverses de Monsieur I’abbe de Saint-Pierre (Paris 1730), 1:256. 89. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, “Projet pour perfectioner l’education,” ibid., p. 57.

Mortality and Felicity

23

respect is the privilege of the powerful man.”90 “The title of Great Man, simply speaking,” Saint-Pierre writes, “is appropriate only to the great geniuses of two kinds of celebrated and important profes¬ sions.”91 The first of these callings turns out to be that of specula¬ tive geniuses like Descartes; the other that of monarchs and rulers who, by their political power and judgement, make human progress possible.92 Higher yet on the scale of human accomplishment is the “Great Saint,” but the characterization of such a person is a bit murky: “It is possible for a great man not to be a great Saint, but a great Saint is always a great man.”93 Great saints are not exactly, in Saint-Pierre’s view, secular heroes practicing bienfaizance to the hilt, but neither are they apt to be found sequestered in a cloister; they are people who are of immense and direct service to humanity.94 Although shielded by the word “saint,” this greatness is not the summum bonum of previous ages. And the administrator’s spirit is one of a new sort of immortality. Man could perfect his arrangements on earth if guided by a superior intelligence informed by science and reason-an immortal political science, not to be confused with a polit¬ ical art perpetually needing renewal and refreshment. It harbours a relentlessness very different from that which Bossuet ascribed to his king: for it pursues social agenda, and scarcely stoops to punish. Neither the praise of the powerful ruler nor the agonies of the great minister are contained in it. In fact, Saint-Pierre’s intention is to create a perpetual motion machine. 90. Ibid., p. 269. 91. 92. 93. 94.

Ibid., p. 191. Ibid. Ibid., p. 311. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, “Ouvrajes de morale et de politique...,” in Ouvrajes poli-

tiques 13:111-113.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

Chapter 2

The God of the New Dispensation

Science has never found out how to create a frictionless machine of human government, constructed from logic, set in motion by an initial impulse, eternal in its regular rhythm, needing at best a spare part or an engineer with an oil can. The sober fact is that govern¬ ments are not clocks that can be elaborately constructed by a master artisan. Governments break down or die: presently we shall see how this

distinction

becomes

important.

But

is

there

not

something

beyond the scope of justice, war, administration, and lawmaking that might be enduring and have no fatal end? Men die. But might not men in their collective strength as a species, even men organized in nations, bear the flame of an earthly immortality? Might an eternal germ of life not be carried in the unfathomable fecundity of social relations? Would this not be a kind of perfection? Secular optimists of eighteenth-century France needed a faith that the phenomenal world, ruled by its human lord of creation, could go on forever, ripening in reason and beneficence. Some of the philosophes eventu¬ ally tried to formulate “indefinite progress.”

and

schematize

such

a

world

picture

of

In launching their effort they did not so much abolish as utterly transform the political and social faith of their elders. Consider the doctrine

of the

king’s

two

bodies,”

so

brilliantly

researched

by

Kantorowicz1 and recently well summarized by Marcel Gauchet: “In the person of the king two distinct beings are joined in one: on the one hand, the private person, provided like everyone else with a

1. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

25

natural body that is born, grows, suffers, and dies; and, on the other hand, the royal person, properly speaking, a perfect person incapable of doing or thinking evil, endowed with a body or body politic, invis¬ ible, immortal, and ubiquitous.”2 The

French

monarchy

had

never fully developed this English

doctrine. But the French had, at least since the sixteenth century, exploited

the

dictum

“the

king

never

dies”

(“Le

roi

ne

meurt

jamais ). Bodin had professed this in his Six livres de la Republique; and, closer to our period of concern, in 1662, Bossuet had preached at court: “...you are gods, even though you die; your authority is deathless:

that

spirit

of royalty

passes

complete

to

your

succes¬

sors....Man dies, it is true, but the king, we say, never dies: God’s image is immortal.”3 To symbolize that there was no mortal rupture in the royal being, kings’ funerals were ritually attended by four presidents of Parlement regaled in red robes, while all others wore deep mourning (“the Crown and Justice never die”).4 While it must have been obvious to the historically informed that the kingdom of France had had a beginning and that it might some day end, their symbolism was resolutely on the side of eternity.

Royal doctrine

made the Jung more than a mortal and the state itself was conceived “in the person of the prince.” This metaphysics mastered all homely reality and was supported by an ideological reading of sacred history. Since state (distributed into “estates” and functions) and society, in the sense that we now use the word, were, according to the official doctrine, majesty,

parallel there

and

could

inscribed be

no

in

the

quarrel

supreme

over

which

power was

of royal the

more

enduring or whether they had mechanical or organic resemblances. They were organically aesthetic, a work of art whose coordinating force was the immortal legatee of the master artist. Voltaire, who approached politics aesthetically,5 was, nevertheless, a proponent, if not a theorist, of the division of state and society. Even though, in his words, “France was born” with the majority of Louis XIV,6 the problem for him was to have a state where the culture of the Grand Siecle could be sustained, but where a Calas

2. Marcel Gauchet, “Des deux corps du roi au pouvoir sans corps: Christianisme et politique,” Le Debat 14 (1981):135. 3. Jean Bodin, Les six livres de la Republique, 1.100.8; Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, “Sur les devoirs des rois,” sermon preached on 2 April 1666. Both cited in Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, p. 409. 4. Ibid., pp. 415-417. 5. See Rene Pomeau, ed., Politique de Voltaire (Paris, 1963), p. 41, for an excellent series of remarks on this. 6. Voltaire, “Diatribe a l’auteur des Ephemerides,” Oeuvres completes 29:363.

26

Mortal Politics

could not be brutally executed. This meant having a sphere, soon to be designated by the phrase “civil society,” that was relatively protected against political force or incursion, an area beyond the truly “private” space of the ideas and opinions formed in the interior of the cranium, one which later ages would in fact call “the private sphere.” Society also meant a renewed notion of “sociability,” one presumed (though not by all: and the exceptions are among the better minds) common to the human race in its natural condition and, by extension, to those who might want to associate, for what¬ ever reason, outside of the prescribed forms of the ancien police? “Everything,” the Encyclope'die writes, “invites us to the condition of society: our needs make it a necessity, our inclinations make it a pleasure, and the dispositions which bring us naturally into it show us that it is surely the intention of our creator.”7 8 Society was intensely human, expressing a need that people had for each other, for the pursuit of their interests, and for the results of their volun¬ tary pooling of strength. But it was also metaphysical: for some it became the end of nature itself and, as such, the “God of the new order.” It was brashly and seditiously set over against the God-state of Louis XIV. In this combat, it was held to be immortal, or poten¬ tially so. Whether society was specifically political or not depended on the ideological or functional use to which the term was put. The limits of its political application could be quite porous: Several families in the same city, borough, or village form a more or less extended society, according to their number. They are bound together because of their mutual needs and by their recip¬ rocal relations; this union is called a civil or political society; and in this sense all people of a single country, or even of the entire world, form a universal society.9 From bourg to cosmopolis: the concept “society” was loosely defined and applied in eighteenth-century France. The basis was the indi¬ vidual with his needs and tendencies; the scope could go to the ends of the earth; and the usage was, as yet, more spatial than temporal. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, French society was

7. See Rene Hubert, Les sciences sociales dans l’Encyclopedic, Travaux et memoires de l’Universite de Lille, nouvelle serie, no. 9 (Lille, 1923), p. 191. 8. Article “Societe (morale),” Encyclope'die 15:252b. 9. Article “Societe (juris.),” ibid., p. 258b.

27

Mortal Man, Immortal Society mainly

not

political

(in

the

sense

of

persons

being

politically

involved), but it was political insofar as that word had not yet been separated

from

“civil,’

which

then

meant

“civil”

as

opposed

to

“ecclesiastical” and sometimes to “military.” The metaphysics of the God-society seems to have come from the fusion

made

between

doctrines of English Holland

Spinoza’s

philosophy,

freethinkers like John after

1790,

and

the

the

impact

of

the

Toland and Anthony

Collins

in

French

Huguenots who had sought refuge in that country.10 We

fertility of some of the

pick up the traces in an anonymous 1743 publication of earlier clan¬ destine manuscripts, entitled Nouvelles libertes de penser.

Here it is

affirmed that “the existence of God [never mind Louis XIV] is the most widespread and deeply engrained of all the prejudices.” The collection in which this provocative remark appears also contains an essay

that

has

been

attributed

to

Dumarsais

(although

Herbert

Dieckmann has shown good reasons based on Dumarsais’s intellectual positions to cast this in doubt),11 and it forms the source of the text of the article “Philosophe” published in the Encyclopedic many years later. Dieckmann has printed four variants in parallel columns:12 the Nouvelles libertes extract; the Encyclopedie article, apparently tailored by Diderot; and two versions included in editions of the collected works of Voltaire, although Voltaire is not a conceivable candidate for their authorship. The longer and bolder Voltaire text, reprinted from the Baudouin edition, is virtually identical in language with the Nouvelles libertes; the shorter one, used by Voltaire in connection with his play Les lois de Minos (1773), has been, like the Encyclopedie article, modified and discreetly scrubbed.13 It would also seem closer to Voltaire. In both Nouvelles libertes and the Baudouin edition, we have the passage: “The philosophe is a human machine just like any other man; but a machine which, through its mechanical constitution, reflects on its motions.”14 This is completely dropped in the Encyclopedie; in the tamer Moland edition Voltaire has changed it to read: “The philo¬ sophe is an organized being (etre organise) like other men, but who, by his

constitution,

reflects

on

his

motions.”15

In

these

cases,

the

10. See Jacob, Radical Enlightenment, p. 217. 11. Herbert Dieckmann, ed., Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretation (St. 1948), pp. 19-25.

Louis,

12. Dieckmann, Le Philosophe: Texts. 13. Voltaire, Oeuvres completes 29:41-46. Here designated as “Le Philosophe,” and attributed to Dumarsais. 14. Dieckmann, Le Philosophe: Texts, pp. 30-31. 15. Ibid.

28

Mortal Politics

heretical reference to man as a mechanical contrivance is muted. In Nouvelles libertes,

“in man thought is a sense like vision and

hearing, equally dependent on an organic constitution.”16 Voltaire (Moland) tries to muddy things a bit: “a kind of sense, if one may dare say for lack of terms....”17 The Baudouin text here adds: “when one reflects on the [type of] support, truth is not, for the philosophe, a mistress that corrupts his imagination....” But Voltaire (Moland) corrects this to:

“when one reflects on the infinite power of the

Supreme Being, author of everything....”18 The notion that thought is a sense, and a natural one at that, carries metaphysical radicalism too far for Voltaire, who chooses instead to express a deistic view of the matter. Nouvelles libertes writes: “Civil society is, so to say, the only divinity that [the philosophe] recognizes on earth.” Baudouin repeats exactly the same language.19 This is the key quotation for our demonstra¬ tion.

Voltaire

(Moland)

omits

the

passage

altogether.

The

Encyclopedie waters it down to: “Civil society is, so to say, a divinity for [the philosophe] on earth.” Nouvelles libertes clearly intends to say that

“society”

replaces

God

in

the

philosophe’s

respect;

the

Encyclopedie implies that the philosophe worships society, but not necessarily exclusively. A bit later on, we read in Nouvelles libertes: “If, for but a moment, you separate the philosophe from the honnete homme [the previous century’s model], what is he left with? Civil society, his only [unique] God, abandons him.” The same passage is in Baudouin. This

is

Voltaire

the

earliest

(Moland)

and

statement,

the Encyclopedie both

telle quelle,

of the

omit

substitution

it.20 of

Society for God that I am aware of, its origin seemingly going back to very early in the century. I would also call attention to the textual hesitation between “machine” and “etre organise.” A machine could be an organized being, but the latter term came increasingly to mean “self-organizing”: Buffon’s work is on the horns of this dilemma. It is in

no way remarkable that the mystique of the Bourbons

suffered grave injury in the Age of Reason. It is, however, fasci¬ nating that the metaphorical and symbolic process of demolition was in some ways parasitic on its victim. What is hardly less fascinating is the ensuing repertoire of metaphors of life and death, health and illness, and breakdown and repair that we are about to witness.

16. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., pp. 46-47. 20. Ibid., pp. 52-53.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

29

Making the Machine Go

The first notion, as I have suggested, was that of the machine built by a prodigious mechanic, an engineer of the science of government which had not yet named itself a “science of society.” In some ways, this mechanic was rather like Rousseau’s legislator-hero of the Social Contract, a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them.”21 However, as we shall see ahead, the notion of mechanism is tricky in Rousseau and also some¬ what out of date in his time. One may observe throughout the long history of political science that it periodically, perhaps even paradigmatically, attaches itself to root metaphors from other surrounding bodies of knowledge and achieves its discourse in them. To take but one example, Plato, in the Statesman, in guiding the Young Socrates toward a proper conception of royal rule, employs parallels taken from the arts of the weaver, the trainer, the physician, and the sea captain.22 We shall find here similar kinds of transfer. But we should remember that methodical parallelism was a vital part of the epistemological founda¬ tion of the Age of Reason. This is clearly the strategy behind Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois and it supplies some answers for its alleged stylistic mystery. In his article “Relation,” Diderot explained that ideas of relation are much more clear and distinct than those of the things having a relation, because they are simpler.23 The machine is the image with which the proponents of the administrative monarchy confront the aesthetic-mystical ideas of the traditional one. The exact nature of the machine is not specified. This all of course goes back to the Cartesian dualism of soul and body, where it was rather dogmatically asserted that human beings are amphibious, divided between mechanical-physical functions and spiritual-intellectual ones, and that lesser animals are, in fact, “machines.” The power of this explanation in the context of the new science should not be underestimated: it allowed man his space of spirit and freedom, allowed nature to be understood as existing under regular and discoverable laws, and allowed God to be worshipped as the author of both, as engineer of the universe and as higher will consenting to the free will of man. Physical man was, 21. Rousseau, Contrat social, bk. 2, chap. 7: “If it is true that a great prince is scarce, what would a great Legislator be? The first has only to follow the instructions that the second proposes.” 22. Plato, Statesman, 279a-283b, 292a-300c. 23. Article “Relation,” Encyclopedic 14:62a.

30

Mortal Politics

then, a composite of springs, wheels, resistances, pressures, tensions, actions and reactions, subject to shock and external impulsion. Great advances in the science of anatomy (encouraged by the popularity of dissections and the ingenious creation of anatomical models and automata), combined with the enormous reputation of Hermann Boerhaave, the author of the De usu ratiocinii mechanici in medicina, promoted this vision of man. It became fashionable to liken the world to a clock made by an omniscient clockmaker. No instrument known to man was so deli¬ cate, intricate, precise, or self-contained. A clock, according to the Encyclopedic, had “a motive force and a linkage of parts that deter¬ mines the equality of motion; from which it follows that a clock has always a weight or a spring to produce motion, and wheels and an escapement (echappement) to correct it: that is the part of the clock that the artist calls the movement.”24 This description seemed to suit the universe as learned people understood it, circa 1720. It did not particularly suit man, a creature that, by arbitrary choice, seemed unconstrained by such intricate necessity and whose heredi¬ tary characteristics were not easily explained by mechanics. But, at very least, man’s physiological, nutritive, and generative being might be so explained. Although in the earlier part of the century skilled medical investi¬ gators and naturalists were already running into vexing difficulties with the purely mechanical notion of man, the model had enough power and currency to keep a hold on what are now called the biolo¬ gical sciences. When Theophile Bordeu studied medicine at Montpellier in the early 1740s, it was the only faculty in France where “animists” contested the theoretical supremacy of the “iatromechanists.” “The human body,” writes the Encyclopedic, “...is an assembly of an infinite number of levers drawn by strings.”25 Mechanics had a greater purchase outside physiology, where much of the thought of the period was inspired by parallel metaphor or “relation.” The cosmos understood by intellectuals of that age could scarcely be imagined in nonmechanical terms. Fontenelle likened the scenery of nature to the scenery of opera. And the Marquis d’Argens wrote: “We see all the objects, all that is going on in the universe like a beautiful decor of opera, without perceiving the pulleys and weights behind the stage.”26 The deist’s God had “constructed the 24. Article “Horloge,” ibid., 8:301a. For a fascinating recent study of horology, its history and its impact, see David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). 25. Article “Corps (med.),” Encyclope'die 4:264a. 26. Quoted in Jean Ehrard, L idee de nature en France a Vaube des Lumieres (Paris, 1970), p. 96.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

31

machine with his own hands, down to the smallest details. Then, like a clockmaker who has built a time-piece, he set the pendulum going, and the machine worked all by itself, following the laws of motion.”27 Voltaire seemed often to be satisfied with this kind of explanation: “belle machine...bon machiniste,”28 Diderot’s earlier writings reflected the same vision of the universe: “Thanks to the works of these great men [Newton, Musschenbroek, Hartsoeker, Nieuwentyt], the world is no longer a god: it is a machine which has its wheels, ropes, pulleys, springs, and weights.”29 Gradually, he was to change his mind. Although intellectual man could be an appreciative, often profound, spectator at the Marquis d’Argens’s oper&, he could not quite feel himself, qua spectator and commentator, a part of the scenery. As late as mid-century, the physician La Mettrie carried the mechanical part of Cartesian dualism to its logical consequences: “The human body is a machine that sets its own springs: a lively image of perpetual motion.”30 And he went on to argue: “I make no mistake, the human body is a clock, but immense and built with such artifice and ability that if the wheel that serves to mark the seconds suddenly stops, the one that marks the minutes goes on turning without damage....”31 For La Mettrie, “machine” and “organisation du corps” have the same meaning.32 The so-called “soul” is the prin¬ cipal spring of the whole machine.33 The first parts of Buffon’s enormously influential Histoire naturelle were appearing at almost the same time as the Homme machine. Buffon adopted a critical and intermediate position with regard to mechanism. While he could write sometimes as a convinced mecha¬ nist, his conclusions pointed toward the inadequacy of mechanical laws in the study of higher animal life. “The consideration of the forces of nature is the object of rational mechanics,” according to Buffon; “that of sensitive mechanics is only the combination of our individual forces and it is reduced to the art of making machines....”34 In subsequent remarks he resorts very much to a

27. Jacques Roger, Les sciences de la vie dans la pensee franqaise du XVllIe siecle: la generation des animaux de Descartes a I’Encyclope'die, 2d edition (Paris, 1971), p. 446. 28. See Voltaire, Oeuvres completes 32:460. 29. Denis Diderot, Pensees philosophiques, no. 18, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Paul Verniere (Paris, 1961), p. 17. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 30. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine (Paris, 1865), p. 37. 31. Ibid., p. 140. 32. Ibid., p. 118. 33. Ibid., p. 128. 34. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle..., in Oeuvres philosop-

32

Mortal Politics

mechanical vocabulary: “choc,” “ressort,” “elasticity,” “impulsion,” etc.35 However, Buffon explodes his own groundwork: “The idea of relating the explanation of all phenomena to mechanical principles is certainly fine and noble, the boldest step that one could take in philosophy; and Descartes took it. But this idea is no more than a project, and is the project well based? Even if it were, could we ever possibly carry it out?”36 Matter, Buffon says, tends to organize itself.37 Finally he concludes: “to wish to explain animal economy and the different movements of the human body...by mechanical principles alone...is the same thing as if a man, giving an account of a picture, made himself close his eyes and told us all about what his touch made him feel on the surface of the picture; for it is clear that neither the circulation of the blood, nor the movement of the muscles, nor the strictly animal functions can be explained by impul¬ sion or any other laws of ordinary mechanics....”38 In brief, men were certainly animals, and very like other animals, but they were not exactly like machines that could be explained. The procedures of mechanism had to be extended far beyond the evidence of the senses or the possibilities of experimentation, while at the same time it seemed that if all nature were a vast mechanism, man must be a part of it, too, on terms compatible with the rest. This had made it far easier to imagine political machines created by human intelligence for human wants which, infallibly constructed, could direct man toward his rights or interests while regimenting him toward his duties. Administrators formed on the example of Colbert and Louvois began to see statecraft and engineering in parallel. As Pottier de la Hestroye wrote in 1698: “The state is, properly speaking, a machine, whose motions, though different, must be continuously regulated. Subjects cannot interfere with the motions without running the risk of destroying the machine.”39 Somewhat later, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre declared: “A great State can be thought of as a huge machine that the King should operate (faire mouvoir) by means of different springs of different sorts. It is therefore necessary for him who is to become king to know the main parts of his machine....”40 hiques, ed. J. Piveteau et al. (Paris, 1954), p. 40. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 35. Ibid., p. 41. 36. Buffon, “Histoire generale des animaux,” ibid., p. 249. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 252. 39. Cited in Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965), p. 104. 40. Abbe de Saint-Pierre, “Plan d’education des Daufins,” Ouvrajes politiques 6:162; cf. 3:81-85.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

33

D Argenson also wrote of the modern state as “a machine so compli¬ cated, composed of so many parts....”41 Montesquieu, sometimes imagined as sponsoring a mechanical politics of checks and balances, has astonishingly few metaphors of this kind.42 But the habit of calling the state a machine persists in writers like Mably and d’Holbach, almost as a turn of phrase; cf. d’Holbach: “Only the highest wisdom can give the different springs of the State the right amount of tension; only the most experienced reason can lead to the discovery of new springs which sometimes have to be substituted for the old ones.”43 Yet “machine” can become an epithet of scorn beneath their pens.44 The utopian Morelly uses machine imagery compulsively: this alerts us to the possibility that the state may seem a machine and society an example of natural growth. When the Utopians conjoin state and society as resolutely as any royal apologist, all becomes mechanical. Morelly writes in his Code de la nature: “All is compassed, all is weighed, all is foreseen in the marvellous automaton of society: its meshing of gears, its counterweights, its springs, its effects....In a word, this machine, although composed of intelligent parts, generally operates independently of their reason in quite a few particular cases....”45 Two points are important to grasp at this stage in our inquiry: (1) the machine metaphor was generally inadequate in joining the eighteenth-century conceptions of man and government; and (2) as an image of how states should be run, it later tended to distinguish state from society in a degenerative politics.46 Deist metaphysics had

41. Rene-Louis d’Argenson, Memoires et journal inedit..., ed. Charles-Marc d’Ar¬ genson, 5 vols. (Paris, 1857-1858), 5:266. 42. Notably with regard to passions in hot and cold climates: see Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 14, passim. Montesquieu also at least once used the musical meta¬ phor of consonance and dissonance: Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and of Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York, 1965), p. 93. 43. [Paul Henri Thiry, baron d Holbach], La politique naturelle, ou discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement, 2 vols. (London, 1773), vol. 2, disc. 7, para. 1, p. 108. 44. Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Systeme social, ou principes naturels de la morale de la politique, avec un examen de I’influence du gouvernement sur les moeurs..., 3 vols. (London, 1773), vol. 2, chap. 1, p. 3 (all subsequent citations are to this edition); and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen, ed. J.-L. Lecercle (Paris, 1972), pp. 14, 151. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 45. Morelly, Code de la nature, ou le veritable esprit de ses lois, ed. G. Chinard (Paris 1950), pp. 169-170. 46. Cf. d’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 2, chap. 1, p. 3: “Society in the hands of its chiefs becomes a machine whose motions oppose one another.”

34

Mortal Politics

become unhinged from political imagination. Although the vision of the cosmic clock had not entirely lost its appeal, the place of man in this horological universe had become more and more uncomfortable.

Body Language: Do Societies Function Like the Individuals Who Compose Them?

At mid-century Condillac had achieved an experimental theory of the human understanding and suggested “laws” by which, in the hands of d’Alembert, Turgot, and others, the progress of the human mind would be formulated. Even though society, like man, was “nothing but the sum of all it has acquired,” it had especially acquired knowledge.47 That human mind was the cumulative thought of the great thinkers: this was how d’Alembert conceived the matter in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia. Seen in this way, society was scarcely a fleshly entity. The sensationalist theory of knowledge was primarily an attempt to explain the generation of “ideas,” which ruled the Enlightenment world even more powerfully than those who possessed them. The ideas were typically the product of painful and pleasurable sensations and the signifiers of needs, passions, and interests; but they became, to a large extent, the conju¬ gating and spiritualizing force of the common literate society. Although it was convenient, indeed according to method indispen¬ sable, for the Enlightenment to inherit the word corps in both its physical and figurative senses in order to articulate its social philos¬ ophy, it was the captivating notion of a transpersonal and advancing human mind that truly disclosed the immortal claims of the “new God,” even in the face of the common mortality of all who thought thoughts or produced “ideas.” The personal body and the social body were, then, entities of different kinds capable of harbouring the same thoughts; and both of them (unlike God and man, who had classically shared “reason”) were inhabitants of the phenomenal world. The difference was, of course, that the first of these was surely mortal while the second seemed to display a kind of eternality, at least as far as Enlightenment metaphysics could allow.48 The breadth of that 47. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Condillac’s Treatise on the Sensations, trans. Geral¬ dine Carr (Los Angeles, 1930), vol. 6, bk. 9, treatise 3, p. 239. 48. Cf. Edouard Damilaville’s article “Population,” Encyclopedic 13:89a: “Why

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

35

eternality was most powerfully expressed in the conception of the progress of the mind, but it was also buffered by variants of natu¬ ralism (“pre-existing germs,” neo-Epicurean hylozoism, etc.). Three important questions were thus posed: (1) To what degree of compar¬ ability could the parallel between the individual and society (or the species ) be taken? (2) To what degree would this type of investiga¬ tion be a faith or ideology, rather than a science; and if the latter, what would be the scientific model chosen? (3) In what ways were the institutions of society-primarily political, but also economicimplicated in the imagery of the debate? Despite considerable recourse to its imagery, the concept of machine was clumsy in this perspective. Once virtually unchained from its clockmaker God, human society had to be seen as something living and propagating itself. The degree to which mechanics remained useful for the investigation of the physiology of the animal body (we have observed Buffon on this) had far less explanatory power for the corps social, if it was to be viewed independently from the designs of a master builder. By mid-century the scientific (and hence philosophical) paradigm had itself shifted away from Cartesian mechanics to the “sciences of nature” explored by Maupertuis and triumphant in the work of Buffon. Natural history would then cede some of its normativity to the vitalistic medical doctrines of the Montpellier school.49 Georg-Ernst Stahl, generally considered the founder of vitalist” theory, did not deny the role of mechanics in physiological explanation. But he was convinced that mechanics alone could not explain specific bodily functions or the source and activity of vital forces.50 The Swiss doctor Tissot protested against “les ouvrages medico-mathematiques”: “I agree that, given certain elements, the motions of our body can be marvellously demonstrated with as much certainty as those of the planets; but to find and iden¬ tify these elements is a difficult thing that remains undone....The most evident causes of [bodily] functions up to now resist all rules of arithmetic; and what use would there be in computations founded on uncertain and hypothetical data?”51 Bordeu fumed: “We must preserve medicine from all assaults of physics, anatomy, and chem-

would there have been an eternity without duration? And what is duration without existence?” 49. See Roger, Sciences de la vie, pp. 451, 473, 659, and passim. 50. See Sergio Eighteenth-Century (1978):49.

Moravia, “From Homme-Machine to Homme-Sensible: Changing Models of Man’s Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39

51. Samuel-Auguste-Andre-David Tissot, Oeuvres (Paris, 1769), 2:111-112.

36

Mortal Politics

istry....The anatomists have dissected the body down to its infinitely small fibres; and the physicists have transformed man into a machine of levers, pumps, springs, and presses.”52 For him, the body was better described as a beehive.53 Above all, it was felt that organic (especially human) beings were invested with a mysterious power called “life” inaccessible to mechanistic theory. From motors, springs, wheels, and shocks there is, then, a percep¬ tible shift to a more conventional concentration on the growing and aging process. The vocabularies are not mutually exclusive, and they can be joined by such terms as “harmony,” “equilibrium,” and espe¬ cially “organization.” But the metaphor shift also extends to the collective. Society, and even the state-insofar as it is not simply treated as a machine that represses society-participate in the new language convention.54 Though the eighteenth century popularized the notion of “humanity” (with its Stoic antecedents) and what Diderot called “the general society,”55 it was mostly compelled to think of particular political societies in parallel relationships. Rousseau derided “tel philosophe” (presumably Voltaire) who “loved the Tartars in order to be relieved of loving his neighbours.”56 But it was not this moral barb that determined the attitudes of the philosophes: it was their moderate appreciation of variety and their pursuit of the compara¬ tive method. Even though, as the old truism goes, there was some fundamental belief in a constant and fixed human nature, there were all sorts of factors to modify it greatly-climate, laws, extent of terri¬ tory, population, distribution of wealth and poverty, intellectual capacity, or, more simply, “a certain habitual disposition of the soul that is more common in one nation than another.”57 History did not seem to show that societies conceived as political or cultural units had high expectations of immortality. Montesquieu observed the inevitability of the Roman cycle from its earliest times to the fall of Byzantium (as did Mably, Condillac, and other writers). Diderot declared that “the average duration of empires is not more than two thousand years and that in less time, perhaps, the name Frenchman, a name that will endure forever in history, will be sought 52. Theophile de Bordeu, “Analyse medicinale du sang,” Oeuvres (Paris, 1818), 2:930. 53. Ibid., 1:187. 54. that of 55. 56. 57.

Of course, metaphors aside, the basic eighteenth-century idea of the state is an agency of protection: see article, “Etat,” Encyclopedie 6:19a. Article “Droit naturel,” ibid., 5:133b. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 1, p. 9. Article “Caract^re des nations,” Encydopedie 2:666a.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

37

after in vain over the surface of the earth.”58 Thus, as Jaucourt reasoned: “Government in general is like animal life: each step of life is a step toward death. The best government is not that which is immortal, but that which lasts the longest with the most tranq¬ uillity.”59 Hence, disregarding other factors, the widespread admira¬ tion for Sparta. And as Rousseau put it so poignantly, echoing Montesquieu: If Sparta and Rome perished, what nation could hope to live forever? This was hardly a new insight; it came from a long tradition of Platonic Christianity. As Fenelon (interpreted by Ramsay) had written: “As long as human nature remains feeble, imperfect, and corrupt, all forms of government will always bear within themselves the seeds of an inevitable corruption, and of their own downfall and ruin....The political body resembles the human body— Diderot, hardly a thinker close to Fenelon, was not less explicit: “[There is] a decree pronounced on all earthly things-the decree that sentences them to follow a sequence of birth, vigour, decrepitude, and destruction.”62 D’Holbach was not more optimistic: “Nature in her constant march leads every existing thing to destruc¬ tion: physical beings and moral beings observe this inevitable law grudgingly but finally.”63 From all points of the intellectual compass warnings against cosmic complacency were issued. “We must agree,” the Encyclopedic wrote, “that there is no absolute stability in humanity, because what exists immutably exists necessarily, and this attribute of the Supreme Being cannot belong to man or his works. The best-established governments, just like the best-constructed animal bodies carry within them the principle of their destruction.”64 It was Rousseau who made the most provocative, but perplexing, contribution to the question. There are traces of mechanistic imagery in Rousseau;65 but they are generally decorative. On the 58. Article “Encyclopedic,” ibid., 5:647b. 59. Article “Citoyen,” ibid., 3:464a. 60. Rousseau, Contrat social, bk. 3, chap. 11; Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois bk. 11, chap. 6. 61. Francois de Salignac de La Mothe Fenelon, Essai philosophique sur le gouvernement civil, in Oeuvres de Fenelon, 12 vols. (Paris, 1826), 10:137-138. All subsequent cita¬ tions are to this edition. 62. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Neron, in Oeuvres completes de Diderot, ed. J. Assezat and M. Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris, 1875-1877), 3:324. All subseqeunt citations are to this edition. 63. [D’Holbach], Politique naturelle, vol. 2, disc. 9 para. 1, p. 223. 64. Article “Gouvernement,” Encyclopedic, 7:791b. 65. E.g. in “Fragments,” in Charles E. Vaughan, ed., Political Writings of JeanJacques Rousseau, 2 vols. (New York, 1962), 2:171; Rousseau, Contrat social, premiere version, ibid., 1:448; and Rousseau, Lettres ecrites de la montagne, ibid., 2:171.

38

Mortal Politics

other hand, the imagery of birth, growth, decrepitude, and death is prominent. In the first place, Jean-Jacques believed that “society is natural to the human race in the same sense that decrepitude is natural to the individual: people need arts, laws, and government just as old people need crutches.” Given this shocking analysis, he nevertheless thought that human beings could exercise a voluntary control over the aging, and the inevitable death, of society: “Since the condition of society has an ultimate end (terme extreme), concerning which men have the power to decide whether they will arrive at it sooner or later, it is not useless to show them the danger of going too fast, and the wretchedness of a state which they take to be the perfection of the species.”66 This might be regarded as an injunction from which social optimism could spring, despite the most pessimistic of premises. If the political state was deformed “because it was almost the work of chance” where even the wisest legislation could not remedy its vices, all that was needed was a Lycurgus “to clean the place out and throw out all the old materials.”67 But still, according to Rousseau in an unpublished fragment, of all the peoples known on earth, only the Jews, with their Mosaic legislation, had proved their durability against the trials of time.68 Rousseau was not, then, cheerful about the chances of social immortality. He seems to have carried the parallel between individual and social further than any of his contemporaries. His passage from the Economie politique is well known, but it bears repeating here: The body politic, taken individually, may be thought of as an organic body (corps organise), similar to the human body. Sovereign power represents the head [this use of “sovereign” is obviously not the same as in the Social Contract]', laws and customs are the brain, the source of nerves and location of the understanding, the will, and the senses, whose judges and magistrates are the organs; commerce, industry, and agriculture are the mouth and the stomach, looking out for the common subsistence; public finance is the blood, which a wise economy, in taking on the functions of the heart, distributes as nourishment and life throughout the whole body; the citizens are that body, the members who make the machine move, live, and work, and who cannot be hurt in any part without a painful impression going to the brain if the animal is in a healthy condition.

66. Rousseau, “Lettre a M. Philopolis,” ibid., 1:223. 67. Rousseau, Discours sur I’inegalite, ibid., p. 183. 68. Rousseau, “Fragments,” ibid., p. 356.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

39

The life of each and everyone is the common self of the whole, the mutual sensitivity and internal correspondence of the parts. Should this communication cease, the formal unity disappear, and the adjacent parts no longer belong to one another except by juxtaposition, the man is dead, or the State is dissolved. Thus, a body politic is also a moral being with a will....69 The principal reason that Rousseau established his extended paral¬ lelism is that in so arguing he could endow his legitimate popular state with a will—a “general will.” To possess a will in the metaphy¬ sical sense was truly to possess that which is essential to a collective moral person. Other philosophes might argue that political societies were like human beings in that they had shared needs, desires, and interests that were demonstrably human. This halfway house did not satisfy Rousseau’s logic or project. Even though he refused to view the state as “natural,” he endowed it with an internal moral life of its own. The power of his theory is partly due to its resolute radicalism. Where others tinkered with secondary aspects of the person-society relationship, Rousseau drove to the core of the correspondence with an enlarged notion of the person and by endowing politically organ¬ ized society with a moral will and not simply a collective cleverness. This created terrible problems for all future Western political theory, but it resolved several dilemmas of Rousseau’s own period in a language still in touch with the past. It met Bossuet’s “state in the person of the prince” with a collective moral prince, and it met Hobbes’s “mortal God” with an equally defensible mortal God depending on the very clear physical fact of enduring continuity in the corporation of individual lives of the collective sovereign. The problem was not only that Rousseau’s solution was exotic. It was also that Rousseau was far more profoundly a pessimist than a cheerful propagandist. He, too, believed in the eventual corruption of all earthly things, because he believed with most of his fellow phil¬ osophes in a social life-cycle that more or less followed the features of the human one. His position on this score was even more vulner¬ able, because he had staked the life and health of the community on the persistent rectitude of that community’s will (less well shielded than the “other body” of the king), and not simply on functional adjustments (although he had tried to concede many of these in the third book of the Social Contract). It was clear to Rousseau that even the most perfect society had to die.

69. Ibid., p. 241.

40

Mortal Politics

This is made totally explicit in the chapter of the Social Contract, “De la mort du corps politique.” Rousseau begins this exposition in language almost identical to that quoted from other writers. “The body politic, just like the human body,” he writes, “begins to die as soon as it is born, and it carries within itself the causes of its destruc¬ tion.” A good constitution (understood here as a work of art or artifice) will prolong its life; but sooner or later it must perish, before its alloted time or, if fortunate, in ripe age. But, hereupon, Rousseau reminds us that the collective sovereign is the vital organ, the heart of the body: the assigned rulers are only the brain. “The brain can become paralysed without costing the individual his life. A man can live as an imbecile; but as soon as the heart stops beating, the animal is dead.”70 No matter how good a politics man can devise, the ending is always like that of a person: if the person has excelled, he will at least leave grateful and exalted memories. Still other French writers confronted the question. Condillac, in what is admittedly a hortatory work addressed to his pupil and patron, the Prince of Parma, took a far more optimistic view than had Rousseau. He begged the prince not to accept “the sad and false belief that everything is fragile and surrenders to the blows of time, that everything dies; that states have a fatal ending, and that when it approaches, there is nothing that either wisdom or prudence or courage can do to save it.” Although states die, according to the author, “each state can and should aspire to immortality.” A know¬ ledge of history can help to make the future so transparent that fatal errors will be avoided.71 Later on in this work he reiterates: “I must die, because time itself blemishes, wears out, and destroys in me all the organs and springs of life, and I cannot create new ones. But it is not the same with the social body, all of whose parts are unceasingly renewed by new generations.”72 Modest states, like the cantons of Switzerland, “can and should live eternally.”73 In his Belisaire, Marmontel comments: There is an age when man is obliged to renounce life, but there is never a time when one should renounce the possibility of saving an empire. No doubt the body politic is subject to convulsions that shake its foundations, to long illnesses that gradually consume it, to sudden attacks that reduce it to extremities...but none of these 70. Rousseau, Contrat social, bk. 3, chap. 11. 71. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, De l’etude de Vhistoire, in Oeuvres de Condillac, 23 vols. (Paris, 1798), 21:18. 72. Ibid., 23:87. 73. Ibid., 23:97, 163.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

41

accidents is fatal. We have seen nations rise again after the most desperate troubles, and restore themselves after the most violent crises with more strength and vigour than before. Their deca¬ dence, then, is not ordained as it is in the decline of our years, their so-called old age is only a chimera, and infinite range is left for that hope which sustains men’s courage.74 Although this statement seems inordinately bold when compared to the fatalism of Rousseau, Marmontel is not bursting with exuber¬ ance. He seems to be questioning the sanctified parallel as much as he is propounding the likely eternality of societies. He challenges the century’s mythology of “nature” and “relation.” The Marquis de Mirabeau had a different motive for reaching a similar position. The self-styled ami des hommes believed he had a formula for saving and perpetuating French society. For rhetorical effect, however, he first felt obliged to pronounce the familiar doctrine in all its severity: “A cycle is ordained for all moral as well as physical nature: birth, growth, prowess, decline, death. So it is with the days from morning to evening, the years in their solar revo¬ lution, the life of man from cradle to grave, that of States from their foundation to their fall.” “But who,” he tempts us, “can know how long a wisely led State might last?” Accidents always happen to human beings and to states. But states might be less vulnerable to these misfortunes if they possessed a science informing them of the right policies corresponding to their “age.”75 He then elaborates his own plan “to calculate and understand the age of a society.”76 His diagnoses are interesting in themselves, but they would draw us away from our main concern. His conclusion deserves report: “This is where we are, in a ripe age, and it is up to us to show that it is an age of prosperity, and to create an order of things which, followed continually, will make it last forever.”77 Since some intellectuals were capable of harbouring the belief that science could do for the durability of societies what it could not do for the lives of individuals, the optimism of the century, combined with its sense of being “ripe” or even “aged,” induced a certain predisposition for “cures.” While the disembodied “mind” might advance through eternities of world civilization, guaranteeing an 74. Jean-Francois Marmontel, in Oeuvres completes de M. Marmontel, 16 vols. (Paris, 1787), 4:130-131. 75. Victor de Riquetti, marquis de Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes, ou traite de la popu¬ lation (Paris, 1883), p. 317. 76. Ibid., p. 318. 77. Ibid., p. 328.

42

Mortal Politics

immortality that Turgot would glimpse and transmit to Condorcet,78 for many French the model was medicine, which has been hinted at occasionally but up to now neglected in this account.

Doctors on Call

“There are no books,” Diderot wrote, “that I would rather read than medical ones, no men whose conversation I find more interesting than doctors.”79 He made Theophile Bordeu, the Montpellier medical professor who had come to Paris, the hero of the Reve de d’Alembert; and he took life sciences, and physiology in particular, to be the most “philosophical” kind of investigation that persons of his time could pursue. Bordeu, together with his colleagues Louis de La Caze and Paul-Joseph Barthez, were no less impressed with the mission of the medecin-philosophe, who alone was capable of providing a rigorous “idee de l’homme physique et moral.”80 Doctors and medical researchers of the kind lionized by Diderot or celebrated in the eulogies of the Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Medicine were pre-eminent and wealthy figures, particularly in the period extending from about 1760 to the Revolution. Their (increasingly vitalist) theories about the func¬ tioning of the human body engrafted to the theory of mind that Condillac had bequeathed helped to create “Ideologic,” in Madame Helvetius’s salon and later in the reformed institutes of the post-Thermidorian republic.81 Of course doctors were not always wise, competent, altruistic, or even responsible: and it is safe to say that their theoretical virtuosity often outran their empirical talents. Rousseau, especially, was leery of doctors and the medical arts. 78. Cf. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l’Aulne, “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind,” in Ronald L. Meek, ed., Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics: A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind, On Universal History and Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth (Cambridge, 1973), p. 41, esp.: “The whole human race...goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection.”

79. Diderot, Elements de physiologie, in Oeuvres completes 9:427. 80. See Sergio Moravia, “‘Moral-physique’: genesis and evolution of a ‘rapport’,” in Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio, eds., Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker (Oxford, 1979), pp. 170-171. 81. See Martin S. Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton, 1980), pp. 16-18, 266-272.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

43

82

Nature, Rousseau argued, healed men better than medicine. Yet for him medicine, like all other appurtenances of polite culture, had its indispensable use: “to prevent greater corruption.” Using medical treatment as a generalized metaphor for all culture, Rousseau wrote: The man who has ruined his constitution through an indiscreet dosage of medicine is forced to run to the doctors in order to save his life; and so it is that, after having caused our vices to hatch, the arts and sciences are needed to keep them from turning into crimes....”83 This is one of many passages from the period that show how the medical image could be used for purposes of social diag¬ nosis. Behind Montpellier there was a whole science and practice of medicine, inherited from Hippocrates and Galen and surprisingly little altered in the course of the Christian centuries.84 Eighteenth-century medical faculties were filled with chairs of Hippocratic medicine; even in Cabanis’s time, the Hippocratic curric¬ ulum had not been much reduced.85 “Airs, waters, and places” (i.e., climate) was a large part of the legacy of Hippocratic diagnosis and cure: Jean Astruc had a famous “theory of airs” that prospered after the frightful Marseilles pestilence of 17 2 0.86 In a notable essay Judith Shklar examines how indebted Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois is to the Hippocratic medical paradigm, to “details of political illness [as] part of a general sense of man’s unfortunate situation in nature.”87 This approach, she shows, was basic to Montesquieu’s often bewildering treatment of variety: “Health is merely the absence of perceptible illness, and as such it is medically uninteresting. What is important is to recognize that disease is not an isolated phenom¬ enon. Every patient has a specific constitution and is liable to suffer diseases in a manner peculiar to himself and those who are like him.” There is no perfect political state of health for 82. Cf. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 1, pp. 29-30. 83. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Preface a Narcisse,” Oeuvres completes, ed. Marcel Raymond and Bernard Gagnebin (Paris, 1969- ), 2:972. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 84. See Moravia, “Homme-Machine to Homme-Sensible,” p. 51. 85. See Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Philosophy, pp. 95-97. 86. Jean Astruc, Dissertation sur I’origine des maladies epidemiques, et principalement sur I’origine de la peste, oil Von explique les causes de la propagation et de la cessation de cette maladie (Montpellier, 1721). For an account of the terrible ravages of the plague in

Marseilles, see Carriere, et al., Marseille, ville morte. 87. Judith N. Shklar, “Virtue in a bad climate: Good man and good citizens in Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois,” in Bingham and Topazio, eds., Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker, p. 316.

44

Mortal Politics

Montesquieu, just as there is a plurality of political diseases or disor¬ ders, some caused by the physical environment, some by the inner (“moral”) one88Politics is thus not the logical demonstration of the ideal state; it is the art of diagnosis and therapy. Legislative interven¬ tions in the life of a society bear a terrible resemblance to the abusive effects of eighteenth-century medicine on patients; still, they are not seen as futile or inappropriate. No longer the engineering science of building the frictionless machine, politics becomes the art and practice of ministering to a body aging or disordered in some particular vital function. The Encyclopedic states the situation as follows. Health “is the most perfect condition of life...the natural agreement and suitable disposi¬ tion of the parts of the living body....”89 Health is not, however, an ineffable, ideal state: its “perfection...does not suppose a single way of life in the different persons who enjoy it...but it allows for a quite extensive latitude in which may be found an undetermined, very considerable number of combinations that establish many versions of being in good health...”90 “Sickness,” on the other hand, “may be regarded as a middle stage (etat moyen) between life and death...an impediment to the body or one of its organs...in the exercise of one or more functions of the healthy life.”91 There is some obvious confusion here between the notion of aging (a process well described by Buffon and far more susceptible to the mechanistic imagery of breakdown) and illness (whether virulent or degenerative). It is not clear what is to be considered “natural” and what is not. As the article goes on to say: “Since the human body is subject to sickness only because it is susceptible to several changes that alter the state of health, some authors have defined sickness as a change from a natural state into an unnatural one (etat contre nature): but this definition is only, properly speaking, an explanation of the name.”92 Although, as Foucault has argued, the signals of death and sickness were “crisscrossed” in the eighteenth century,93 the philosophes, many of them venerable and some of them ill, most surely did distinguish between death due to sickness, accident, and natural breakdown; between “cure,” “prudence,” “regime,” and the natural process of aging. Their problem was not description; it was “relation.” It was 88. Ibid., p. 315. 89. Article “Sante,” Encyclopedie 14:628ab. 90. Ibid., 14:629a. 91. Article “Maladie,” ibid., 9:930a. 92. Ibid., 9:930ab. 93. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique, une archeologie du regard medical (Paris, 1963), p. 143.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

45

not clear to them how to relate the aging process to the terminal illness process by way of death, since death “removed” sickness and life indiscriminately. Nevertheless, the great significance of the medical model is, first of all, that it introduced the axis health-disease to complement that of birth-growth-degeneration-death that we explored earlier. Medicine occupied itself both with prolonging the vital forces of the sound but aging body and with attempting the cure or mitigation of pathological disorders. Thus it could be directly extended to political health and order-even, at the limits of the imagination, immortality. In the second place, the medical analogy (which of course had the authority of ancients like Plato and Thucydides behind it) seemed able to combine the discordancies of machine imagery and growth imagery within a single referential system. Although, as noted, there was a progressive shift from Saint-Pierre’s fixation on machinery to the Diderotian image of immanent vitalism, nobody reading much of this literature can fail to notice that terms appropriate to mechanism and vitalism were hopelessly mixed, in the same writers and often in the same political texts. This was most likely the result of a similar mixture or confusion of vocabularies in medical thought. The word “machine” is of course itself a case in point: where the emphasis is on anatomy (as in Barthez’s Essai d’une nouvelle mecanique des mouvements progressifs de I’homme et des animaux, which appeared in the Journal des savants in 1782), machine imagery remains standard. And a discus¬ sion of sleep by Tissot refers variously to “animal spirits,” “the compression of nerve endings,” “subtle humours,” and “thickening of the blood,” only to conclude that “the illness becomes its own remedy, and our machine becomes incapable of an exercise that would harm it.”94 If there was a confusion, it is certainly not one that has been resolved in our own time: persons are not, in our contemporary conception of human dignity, “machines,” but we do say that vital organs “break down” and we have advanced techniques of “replacing the parts,” parts indeed composed of machinery. Then, in the third place, both ancient practice and contemporary need induced the theorists of the Enlightenment to extend the model of medicine to politics and the diagnosis of society. “The body politic is like the human body,” the Encyclopedie wrote. “We distin¬ guish a sound and well-constituted state from a sick state. Its sick¬ nesses can come either from the abuse of sovereign power or from the bad constitution of the state; the cause must be sought in the defects of the governors or in the vices of government.”95 In an 94. Tissot, “Traite sur la petite verole,” Oeuvres 1:63. 95. Article “Etat,” Encyclope'die 6:19b.

46

Mortal Politics

extension of this same simile (here directed against Hobbes), the state of health was associated with nature and the condition of peace: “Like the physical body, the body politic is subject to cruel, dangerous, and drastic changes. Although these infirmities are neces¬ sary consequences of human weakness, they cannot be called the natural state. War...is a convulsive and violent sickness of the body politic, which is not healthy, that is to say, in its natural state, except when it enjoys peace....”96 The French king was traditionally believed to be a thaumaturgical prince: his touch could heal the illnesses of persons. Did his mystical power permit him to heal the illnesses of the realm? He might, as God’s deputy, be inviolable and unimpeach¬ able; but did he have the power of cure? The political science of the eighteenth century arose, first of all, as an effort to use the king as a more modern kind of doctor. Finally, it came to doubt his saving graces. Society could only be given health and long life if the monarchy itself were made subject to a “sound constitution.” A kind of social medicine (often interlarded with the more conventional language of the lawyers) was promoted for the healing of France. There were, to be sure, some intelligent sceptics. One of these was Grimm. He wrote, in 1757: I have sometimes compared politics and medicine. These two sciences seem to be the most necessary to society, and they are unmistakably the least certain and least developed ones. This reflection is sad, but experience reassures us. It teaches us that peoples without any skill in preserving themselves or healing themselves cede to those nations which are best cared for, or, if you wish, those who consult doctors the most frequently, where the public good, although very badly administered throughout Europe, still survives in its very weakness....[But] since these sciences have made no progress since the fine days of Greece, can’t one almost conclude that they have reached the highest point of genius and effort that men can attain?...How many doctors have we had between Hippocrates and Boerhaave! And who will dare name a [statesman] since Solon and Lycurgus? If I am right, we must agree that our writers are certainly wasting their time by wanting to teach us, by their reasonings, an art demanding talent and admitting neither method nor general prin¬ ciples.97

96. Article “Paix,” ibid., 11:768b. 97. J.M. Grimm et al„ Correspondance litte'raire, philosophique et critique..., 16 vols.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

47

Grimm opts here for the artist, not for the body of knowledge; for the superman, not for the routine healer: surely not for the esteem of the vulgar. In this, he was not far from Rousseau, who desired legislators (and presumably doctors) who would foresee specific illnesses and weaknesses in advance, and act to forestall them. They opt for the miracle. Rousseau is the writer whom lexicographers credit for first trans¬ lating the key medical notion of “crisis,” “the decisive point of an illness” (current in French since the sixteenth century), to the vocab¬ ulary of politics and society: “We are approaching the state of crisis and the century of revolutions.”98 Indeed he had done this as early perhaps as 1755, in the first draft of the Social Contract: “It some¬ times happens in the life of states that periods of violence and revo¬ lutions have the same effect on nations as certain crises do on indi¬ viduals: the horror of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and the state, set ablaze by civil wars, is, so to speak, reborn from its ashes, and renews the vigor of its youth in escaping from death’s embrace.”99 This passage was integrally retained in Contrat social, bk. 2, chap. 8. It is to be noted, however, that the relationship (“same effect...as”) is still that of simile. Robespierre repeats this usage of crisis in a speech of 1792, “Sur la guerre”: “In revolutions there are motions contrary to liberty as well as favourable to it, just as in illnesses there are salutary and mortal crises.”100 By the next century the full grafting of the medical term to political language has been achieved. But there were other expressions on the subject; one of these is especially peculiar and interesting. Much of the Abbe Mably’s writing contains no allusion whatever to medicine-especially his histories of France, Greece, and Rome. But the Entretiens de Phocion plunges directly into the matter: “Would you dare claim to be a doctor without having first studied the whole machine of the human body? No, probably you would want first to understand all the parts in detail; you would want to learn their functions, their different relationships, and would want to have examined the virtue and fittingness of every remedy. Politics, Aristias, is the medicine of states, and this medicine is not less needful than other knowledge and reflection.”101 But Mably does not leave the matter here. In his (Paris, 1877-1882), entry of 15 June 1757, 3:379-381. 98. Emile, bk. 3; see also Trhor de la langue franQaise: dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siecle, ed. Paul Imbs (Paris, 1971), 6:499. 99. Rousseau, Contrat social, premiere version, bk. 2, chap. 3, in Vaughan, ed., Polit¬ ical Writings 1:484. This is from the Geneva mss. frangais 225. 100. Maximilien Robespierre, Discours, in Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1956) 8:86. 101. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Oeuvres completes, 12 vols. (London, 1789), 10:37. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

48

Mortal Politics

treatise De la legislation, where his mouthpiece is a Swedish philosophe (Sweden was somewhat the same kind of beacon for him as for certain Western socialists today), we read: “I beg you not to compare the illnesses of the body politic to those of the human body. Medicine can furnish me no juice, no remedy, no diet which will restore ulcerated lungs that make it almost impossible for me to breathe: since it cannot cure me, it might as well just give me hope. But the politics that created for society the life-organs it lacked, and whose every remedy is infallible, would betray us if it hid the truth. Peoples resemble the sick who haven’t the strength to swallow a bitter potion, or to suffer through a painful operation: we must intimidate them to give them courage; we would betray them by hiding their situation from them.”102 Politics is power if only it will make an honest diagnosis. The agenda of revolution are prefigured, together with the justification for causing one. As Diderot announced at one point in a burst of zeal: “Since it is rare for a nation to disappear without a long succession of disasters, enthusiasm may be reborn in certain privileged souls....Frenchmen, feel your pulse.”103 The position of d’Holbach is also important. As a thoroughgoing materialist scarcely aligned to Mably’s metaphysical voluntarism, he was nevertheless also able, by way of the medical paradigm, to reach revolutionary conclusions. “The order existing in most political bodies,” d’Holbach asserted, “closely resembles what one finds in the body of a sick person, whom a fever thrusts at one moment into an overwhelming stupor, and then into delirium.”104 “States,” he writes, “like human bodies, carry in themselves the seeds of their destruction: like them, they may enjoy a more or less lasting health; like them, they are subject either to crises which carry them off rapidly or to chronic illnesses which sap them gradually, in attacking their bases of life without any noise. Like sick persons, societies experience transports, deliriums, revolutions....”105 D’Holbach’s medicine is legislation according to nature. He quite believes that “an always active nature sometimes brings to birth, all of a sudden, men who heal the State of its woes, and cause it, so to say, to be

102. Ibid., 10:132. 103. Diderot, “Fragments politiques,” Oeuvres completes 4:43-44. 104. D’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 1, chap. 9, p. 101. 105. D’Holbach, Politique naturelle, vol. 2, disc. 9, p. 224; cf. d’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 2, disc. 7, para. 2, p. 111.

Mortal Man, Immortal Society

49

reborn from its ashes; but even more often it hatches from the shell of nations destructive powers that send them into the abyss in the twinkling of an eye.”106 Such has long now been the wager of revo¬ lutionary medicine. Conceivably, these different conceptions gave hope to the political physicians of the Revolution that they might salvage long life if not eternity for their patient, the nation. The metaphor of medicine, optimistically interpreted, gave them some substance for this hope. If a human being could survive “convulsions and revolutions,” might a collective patient not come through alive and healed? Might the peuple not be in a state of health and youth compared to the sexage¬ narians to be expelled from power?107 Menuret de Chambaud had written in the Encyclopedic: “We dare to suppose...that one can heal death, that is, call back the suspended motion of the blood and blood vessels, until putrefaction convinces us that death is absolute...and we are obliged to forget nothing in order to succeed.”108 The revolu¬ tionaries conceived a similar daring with regard to society. But the results of the Revolution made their faith incoherent. Thus it becomes more appropriate to quote Saint-Just’s posthumous apho¬ rism: “I despise the dust I am made of and that speaks to you here; one can persecute that dust and cause it to die! But I defy anyone to rip away from me that autonomous life I have given myself [sic] in the centuries and in the heavens.”109 For that is what immortality really came to mean in an age focused more fixedly on the memory of deeds than on a metaphysics of the unchanging. Memory suggested perpetuating the human chronicle. And that chronicle is what we call history.

106. D’Holbach, Politique naturelle, 2:224. 107. See Maximilien Robespierre, Le defenseur de la Constitution, no. 4, in Oeuvres completes (Nancy, 1939), 4:113-115; also Lettres a ses commetans, in Oeuvres completes (Nancy, 1961), 5:20. 108. Article “Mort (med.),” Encyclopedic 10:726a. Menuret discusses here the difference between “mort imparfaite” and “mort absolue” and cites natural cases of resuscitation. Conceivably this “two-stage” theory of death influenced the doctrine of the Revolution in somewhat the same manner as the “seconde naissance" that Rous¬ seau recorded for Sparta and Rome. 109. Antoine-Louis-Leon de Saint-Just, Oeuvres choisies..., intr. Dionys Mascolo (Paris, 1968), p. 310.

Eulogy: Celebrating the New Hero Chapter 3

History and Biography To grasp how questions of death and immortality affected historical understanding in the literate consciousness of eighteenth-century France, we must examine the meanings and forms which that history took. Here, once again, we shall observe a parallelism between the individual and society, mediated, in this case, by a corporate immor¬ tality charged with removing death’s sting. Although the philoso¬ phies of Descartes and Locke had cast a considerable shadow over the reliability of all historical evidence, especially inasmuch as their methods of doubt and criticism were accompanied by a prevalent suspicion of history as Christian propaganda, by the mid-eighteenth century history was beginning to enjoy a philosophical rebirth.1 Voltaire and Montesquieu were of course the giants of that new effort, but there were also more obscure contemporary compan¬ ions.2 We cannot be concerned here with their specific contributions and differences: broadly it can be said that Montesquieu introduced causal-functional analysis, while Voltaire, trading more on the discredited teleology of Bossuet than he cared to admit, recreated history in a “universal” and “social” (i.e., laws, manners, arts, sciences, opinions, national characters, etc.) dimension that achieved a degree of philosophical integration. At any rate, in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of 1751, where he treated the particularity and connection of the different branches of knowledge, d’Alembert could state confidently: 1. This chapter was in part stimulated by exchanges with Judith N. Shklar: see her essay “Jean d’Alembert and the Rehabilitation of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (1981):643-664. 2. See Wade, Structure and Form of the Enlightenment 1:435-465, passim.

Celebrating the New Hero

51

“Excellent authors have written history; precise and enlightened minds have probed its meaning.”3 What was this meaning? Here d’Alembert is circumspect, but he plants two especially pregnant clues. First, he says: “The history of man has for its object either his actions or his knowledge, and consequently is civil or literary. In other words, it is divided between the great nations and the great geniuses, between the kings and the men of letters, between the conquerors and the philosophers” (a notion of prince and clerk, pugnator and orator, reaching back to the Carolingian Middle Ages).4 D’Alembert’s sentences are far from innocuous. Let us see why. In the first place, the proper object of knowledge is “the history of man,” meaning of course in this context chiefly European man but with problematic extensions to cosmopolitanism and the similitude of all nations, which have, in Voltaire’s phrase, “un air de famille.” Secondly, a series of contrasts is drawn: “civil/literary; nations/ geniuses; kings/men of letters; conquerors/philosophers.” This is important for two reasons. There is obviously a profound, implicitly antagonistic, dichotomy between the agents of politics and the torchbearers of learning, one which widens as the Enlightenment pursues its course and the gens de lettres exalt their own brand of priesthood, up to the revolutionary rupture. (At that time Robespierre will proclaim a new division and hostility within the intellectual compagnonnage, declaring that “the kings who decide the destiny of the world fear neither great mathematicians, nor great painters, nor great poets, but stern philosophers and defenders of humanity.”)5 But we should also notice an anomaly of d’Alembert’s antithesis: nations/geniuses. Nations are human social composites; geniuses are exceptional individuals. Nations are not kings; nor, in the mid¬ eighteenth century, were they perceived as conquerors. Perhaps the history of humanity is ideally to be written as an account of peoples and gens de lettres. Voltaire advances from his earlier conception of the monarchical unifying principle of the Century of Louis XIV to his Essai sur les moeurs, described in one of its versions as a “philosophy of history.” Condorcet completes the transformation in his Esquisse. Yet we must not exaggerate this point; for the monarchical principle was still adamantly rooted in 1750, not only as the central source of political action but also (by means of academic patronage) as the 3. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. R.N. Schwab (New York, 1963), p. 100. 4. Ibid., p. 53. 5. Maximilien Robespierre, “Report on Religious and Moral Ideas and Republican Principles,” 18 Floreal, an II, in The French Revolution, ed. Paul H. Beik (New York, 1970), pp. 300-301.

52

Mortal Politics

most efficient stimulus for the advancement of learning.6 In d’Alembert, then, there is a tension, not a rupture. Indeed, he credits the mixed model of Voltaire’s earlier work (1739) with the achievement of a novel breakthrough: “His Essay on the Century of Louis XIV is all the more precious because the author had no model for this type of writing, either from among the ancients or ourselves.”7 While the philosophes may have sought to substitute a broadly social history for political and military history, the more striking development was the civilian character of their enterprise. The second assertion of d’Alembert that we should remark closely is this: “It is from History that we learn to hold men in high regard solely for the good they do and not for the imposing pomp that surrounds them.”8 This sentence, too, has to be parsed. In the first place, it links up ambiguously with the earlier discussion, suggesting that the men to be held “in high regard” are principally the savants and writers as opposed to the potentates and aristocrats, although there will no doubt be exceptions (Pope Sylvester II, Francois I, Henri IV, etc.). Secondly, it declares that a main function of history is to teach good conduct by example: this means that there are valid criteria of truth in history, that there is a “good” (a human good, to be connected with the cultivation of the mind), and that history thus has a moral-didactic dimension. Bolingbroke had already written of history as “philosophy teaching by examples.” And Rousseau would come very close to assigning history that single function and advo¬ cating the censorship of “bad history” (at least for Emile).9 “Sensible men,” he wrote, “should look on history as a tissue of fables with very appropriate moral lessons for the human heart.”10 Of course this is pure Plutarch-Rousseau’s idol-and it is to be noted here that Plutarch wrote “lives” and not “histories.” But the didactic use of history had also been paramount in the Italian Renaissance-in the “civic humanist” tradition-and it had no doubt borrowed along the way from elements of Christian hagiography. At least d’Alembert is not willing to censor: he will leave the judgement to the reader for whom history, “uniting us with past centuries, presents the spectacle 6. For an earlier statement of this view, see Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Histoire...de VAcademie royale des sciences (1740; reprint Brussels, 1961), vol. 1, chap. 28; for a later one, see Condorcet, speech of 6 June 1782 to the Academie des sciences, in Oeuvres, 12 vols. (Paris, 1847-1849), 1:416-425. 7. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. 98. 8. Ibid., p. 35. 9. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 4., p. 281. And cf. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, De Vetude de I’histoire..., in Oeuvres completes, pt. 1, chap. 1, p. 7. 10. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 2, p. 172n.

Celebrating the New Hero

53

of their vices and virtues, their wisdom and their faults, and hands ours down to the coming centuries.”11 The notion of eighteenth-century history as “social” macrohistory involved mainly in methodological questions is breached by its very premises. For it is determined to illustrate the “good” and the “bad” (i.e., moral and personal) by past example; and it will posit “geniuses” (i.e., individual lives and works) against the policies of nations, “to which,” as d’Alembert puts it, “the principles of ordinary ethics can be accommodated only with much subtlety.”12 We do not sense this tension or split vision very accurately from reading the now-standard investigations of eighteenth-century historiography by Cassirer13 and Meinecke,14 although the latter does canvass Leibniz’s problem of reconciling individuality and universality, without, for that matter, developing the themes just mentioned.15 There is, then, a second strain of Enlightenment historiographythe history of the life and death of the person-that wants attention. In fact, the gens de lettres were deeply involved in questions of the “good life” and the “good death”-partly in reaction to the interpreta¬ tions provided by post-Tridentine Christianity, partly as a conse¬ quence of their own quest for a moral posture in the Newtonian universe. If the preoccupation of some of the philosophes with crit¬ ical historiography is manifestly a tendency of “individualist” society and the cosmologies or mentalities particular to a shift “down-grid” and “down-group,” as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has put it,16 it is no less the case that the commemorative vocation of “history teaching by example” is a kind of surrogate for the Christian imitatio and exemplum, with Diderot’s notion of “posterity” substituted for the Christian belief in the immortality of the soul.17 Moreover, this biographical vocation is by no means totally individualistic, for, as we

11. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, pp. 34-35. 12. Ibid., p. 36. 13. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F.C.A. Koelln and J.P. Pettegrove (Boston, 1964), pp. 197-233. 14. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J.E. Anderson (London, 1972), esp. pp. 54-155. 15. Ibid., pp. 17-22. 16. See Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper No. 35 (London, 1978), p. 30. 17. See esp. Diderot, “Lettres a Falconet,” in Oeuvres completes 18:94, 101. It should be pointed out that “posterity” (i.e., judgements framed from history by the living) was also a Christian theme of prudence. For example, kings, being above the reach of the law but not the rule of law, should hearken to this precaution. As Bossuet writes: “[The king] should especially respect the judgement of posterity, which hands down supreme verdicts on the conduct of monarchs.” La politique tire'e, p. 444.

54

Mortal Politics

shall see, it is engendered and reinforced by resonant corporate needs of the intellectual class and the academy. Except possibly for Rousseau, the gens de lettres had no wish to shrink history into the person. On the other hand, they had a more lively appreciation than is commonly held of the significant participa¬ tion of key individuals in the historical process.18 These key individ¬ uals were their own kind. Their biographies entered history. Their lives, both personal and corporate, ended in deaths that were of public consequence. Moreover, their writings were charged with a public mission of granting or withholding “immortality,” of pronouncing a last judgement.19 Their consecrated instrument was the academic e'loge, sometimes spun out to genuine biographical length, as in Condorcet’s Vie de Turgot.20

Anticipations

We must locate ourselves in this genre by means of some spadework in the classical and Christian traditions. Without mentioning Greek eulogistic practice (for Aristotle, eulogies were only a minor aspect of rhetoric),21 we shall, following an excellent summary by a recent writer, review some of the features of the Latin tradition of epideictic oratory.22 The classical training of most of the gens de 18. As with so many seminal ideas of the Enlightenment, the Abbe de Saint-Pierre seems to have been among the first to see and state clearly the unity of universal history and biography, specifically in his Ce que pent faire le ministre pour commencer a perfectionner I’e'ducation des colleges (B.N. nouv. acq. 11231, ff. 122-123), cited by Wade, Structure and Form of the Enlightenment 1:327-328. 19. Robert Favre, La mort dans la litterature et la pense'e frant-aises au siecle des Lumieres (Lyons, 1978), p. 525. Note the early (1727) proposal of Titon du Tillet for a “Parnasse franyais” with a section reserved for scholars. 20. Pure biography was not an unknown genre in France, but it was less devel¬ oped than in England. A good early illustration is Adrien Baillet’s La vie de M. Des Cartes (1691), which is truly informed and discursive for its time. In the eighteenth century, for example, Saint-Lambert contributed a Vie de M. Bolingbroke (1753) and a Vie d’Helve'tius (1773). These were elongated versions of academic eulogies; Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt's La vie de M. Leibniz (1747) is another example. The Abbe NicolasCharles-Joseph Trublet’s Memoires pour servir a I’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle (1756) is more like a scrap book. 21. See, on this, Nicole Loraux’s extensive reconstruction, L’invention d’Athenes: histoire de Voraison funebre dans la “cite classique” (Paris, 1981), pp. 15-75. 22. Sabine MacCormack, “Latin Prose Panegyrics: Tradition and Discontinuity in

Celebrating the New Hero

55

lettres was extensive; and though they were “moderns” and not “ancients,” they had a full appreciation of the rhetorical resources of antiquity. The great models of Latin prose panegyric were the orations of Cicero and the commentary of Pliny. Panegyrics were essentially spoken vehicles of persuasive praise and propaganda. As opposed to their Greek counterparts, the Latin forms tended to be “less biographical, and thus more clearly distinct from historical writing.”23 In republican Rome the eulogistic speech was character¬ istically loaded with political import (as everyone has learned from Shakespeare), developed independently of the Greek models. This was specifically true of the laudatio funebris:24 Roman tradition had it that Brutus, the first consul, was honoured with a state funeral, and a laudatio funebris was delivered by his colleague Poplicola. Polybius described the particular kind of funeral, when a laudatio funebris would be delivered as a thor¬ oughly Roman occasion, untouched asi yet by Greek influ¬ ence.... During the Roman republic laudationes at state funerals could provide a vehicle for political propaganda, for announcing a programme.25 Several matters of interest to us stand out here. The first is the use of eulogy for the promotion of a political or social program: the Enlighteners will carry this idea forward in the sphere of culture and bequeath it to the Revolution in the sphere of action. The second is the character of the laudatio funebris itself: we shall presently see how Christian and pagan ideals clash, and how this has impact on the Enlightenment. Finally, there is the question of truth and propa¬ ganda: unlike the growing Roman tendency, the Enlighteners will seek to reintegrate truth with partisanship by means of history. Political rhetoric of this sort decayed with the collapse of the Roman republic. In Pliny, “the panegyric was viewed firstly as a work of literature and only secondly as an instrument of politics.”26 And by the second century A.D. panegyric and history (laudatio and the Later Roman Empire,” Revue des etudes augustiniennes 22 (1976):29-77. 23. Ibid., p. 31. 24. As Loraux points out (L’invention d’Athenes, p. 98), Denys of Halicarnassus had already noted that Greek funeral elegy typically expressed the theme of arete in the act of heroic death itself, while its Roman counterpart expressed the nobility of the life of the defunct. 25. MacCormack, “Latin Prose Panegyrics,” p. 33. 26. Ibid., p. 36.

56

Mortal Politics

historia) seem to have become almost totally detached, veracity no longer being the handmaiden of praise. Lucius Verus, in submitting to the author Fronto materials for use in a history of his war against the Parthians, requested a panegyric magnification of his deeds; yet he wanted them “recorded in historia rather than laudatio for the very good reason that laudatio was in bad repute for disregard of truth.”27 Lucian, in How to Write History, cast scorn on this embel¬ lished kind of historical writing. Finally, by late antiquity laudatio and historia were specifically distinguished: the former was designated the “stilus maior.” “The position was that contemporary history, which began with the accession of the ruling emperor, was a subject for panegyric, past history for historiographical writing. Once a pane¬ gyric was out of date qua panegyric, it could be used as a source for history.”28 Christianity wrought immense changes in those perspectives. If panegyric was well suited to pagan public practice, it was out of sorts with an inward and personal religion. Christians were not supposed to vaunt their worldly acts, especially the success of their rulers in war, which, according to Orosius and Augustine, was at best a lamentable earthly necessity and never a subject for praise.29 As we know, the Constantinian form of official Christianity was, in many ways, a continuation of pagan imperial habits. Still, the Christian laudationes generally sought to underplay the martial virtues. When Paulinus of Nola composed a panegyric in honour of the defeat of Eugenius by the emperor Theodosius; he commended him “not so much as an emperor than as the servant of Christ, powerful not by the pride of dominion but by the humility of service, and emperor not because of his imperial authority but because of his faith.”30 But the nature of the Christian laudes clashed with the character of the religion: “No tradition of Christian panegyric developed, and in the panegyrics of the early sixth century...a few Christian comments were simply added to the existing pagan framework.”31 Yet, in the intervening millenium of the “age of faith,” and especially as moti¬ vated by the Counter-Reformation, the funeral oration, quite trans¬ formed from an immoderate laudatio to a reminder for the whole Christian community of the wages of sin and the pettiness of man, 27. Ibid., p. 29 and author’s references. 28. Ibid. 29. On Augustine’s distaste for panegyric as a rhetor in Milan (ca. 385 A.D.), see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp 109-110. 30. MacCormack, “Latin Prose Panegyrics,” pp. 65-66. 31. Ibid., p. 67.

Celebrating the New Hero

57

took wings as a memorable rhetorical style, achieving one of its great moments of power in the “baroque” preaching of the Grand Siecle. Thus we are obliged to make some investigation of the oraison funebre before returning to the replenished materials and motives of the secular eulogy. The philosophes wished to capture the valuation of life and death from the church, to substitute “reason” for “revelation,” amour de soi for mortification. Yet, in the eighteenth century, death was in the hands of the priests, as were baptism, education, and the regulated moral life of the community. The church was an arm of the law; and it was, in certain matters, its own law. If all French Catholicism (the state religion) did not share entirely similar attitudes toward this world or the approved formulas for quitting it, there was no theological dispute over the ultimate significance of death. Pelagianism and Augustinianism, Molinism and Jansenism did not contest the nature of the afterworld. And it was the office of the church to conduct all parishoners, of great or small estate, from mortal existence to immortality. This was done by the attempted inculcation of moral obedience during life and the pomps and presentiments of the burial service. A man’s death, or a woman s, was then regarded not only as the consummation of a life but as a caution to the moral practices of others. The lessons to be drawn from it were exemplary; and it was especially important in a society of great inequality and unrationalized privilege to stress the naked equality of all persons before God and their other-worldly destinies, as well as the obligations of charity and piety in this life. There were, however, various levels at which these communications were made. The most imposing was, necessarily, oral and public, and its supreme vehicle was the funeral oration, delivered to persons of quality. The oration is a symbol of existing beliefs raised exponentially for the sheer joy of rhetoric, didactic power, and the sense of the sublime. It is intended to transfigure speaker and listener at the same time in the bosom of the Logos. It is supposed to portray figur¬ atively for its audience the power of that moment when, in the words of Pierre Nicole, “the soul condemns all its thoughts, is aston¬ ished at its blindness, and changes its views and attitudes completely.”32 Since there can be no question here of extensive analysis, the method chosen has been to consider briefly the funda¬ mental traits of two of these orations delivered almost a century apart by well-known men of very different sorts of “Christian vigour.” We will discern small shifts of attitude within an extremely 32. Pierre Nicole, Essais de morale (Paris, 1753), 4:57.

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Mortal Politics

formulaic compass. Our first example is the oration pronounced for the funeral of Henriette-Anne of England at Saint-Denis on 21 August 1670 by Bishop Bossuet; the second is that delivered on the death of the Dauphin at Notre-Dame on 1 March 1765 by the archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne. One was the best-known Christian orator of his time, and apologist for royal absolutism;33 the other was a sceptic, man of the world, and politician, later the chief minister of Louis XVI during the ill-fated events of 1788 prior to the summoning of the Estates-General. We can accept the judicious verdict of d’Alembert that Bossuet’s funeral oration, one of the six that he delivered, was not up to his best standards: the subject was not worthy of the oratory, being nothing but “a pious princess, who hardly cut any figure even on the throne.” Yet in this production “we still find here and there, if one can speak thus, the shreds of a man of genius, disjecti membra orator is. ”34 In Bossuet’s discourse, the dominant theme, pursued with organ¬ like virtuosity, is the vanity of life and the inscrutable omnipotence of the Creator: “Health is but a name, life is but a dream, glory but an appearance, our graces and pleasures but a dangerous amuse¬ ment: all in us is vain except the sincere confession of our vanities made before God.”35 “In a single death,” Bossuet declares, “I would have you see death itself and the nothingness of any kind of human greatness.” After this prologue, Bossuet demands if there is any value whatever in human existence. He answers that we have dignity only because we are made for death. In knowing this, “we learn to scorn the estate that untroubled she left, so as to fix all our esteem on the [new] estate which she has so ardently embraced.”36 Moreover, death is the great leveller: it strikes at the high and mighty as well as at the humble: “all men have the same origin, and that origin is puny...all at the end are confused in the same abyss [of death].”37 As for Henriette-Anne, even the sweetness of her life and the upliftedness of her soul were still [a form of] vanity; for death disrupts everything and carries it off.” “Would you know in a word 33. Besides Bossuet, Flechier and Massillon, each with his particular style, were the ecclesiatical orators in vogue at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. 34. “Eloge de Bossuet,” in Eloges historiques de l’Academic■ franqaise, vols. 2 and 3 of Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s Oeuvres completes, 5 vols. (Paris, 1821-1822), 2:265. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 35. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Oraisons funebres (Paris, 1961), p. 46. 36. Ibid., p. 48. 37. Ibid., p. 49.

Celebrating the New Hero

59

what a man is? asks Bossuet. “His whole duty, his whole purpose, his whole nature are to fear God: all the rest is vain.”38 However cruel this death may seem, the orator declares, one should not fear for her, one should fear for oneself: “How blind we are, if, moving always towards our end and more dying than alive, we await the last sighs to adopt the feelings that the thought of death should have inspired in us in all our moments of life!”39 A century later, with Lomenie de Brienne, we find all the art of the funeral oration preserved but the tone sensibly altered. The archbishop’s principal theme is set at the beginning of his discourse: “The death of worthy Princes is a punishment sent from Heaven and a public calamity.”40 The Dauphin, amid seventeen hours of agony, died well in the composure of his religion. “This eulogy,” Brienne declared, “will be your condemnation, Christians, if it does not [by teaching the imitation of the dead prince’s last moments] make you more Christian and more virtuous.”41 Next, the lamentations of the stricken royal family, especially those of the mother, are added to give a fashionably pathetic tone to the performance: “Her gaze was fixed on his image...but soon the awful truth opened a wound in her heart, the lifeless image fell from her hands, leaving her sobbing and in tears.”42 A still more important theme is introduced in the second part of the oration, to wit: “Consider [this prince] in relationship to the century in which he lived; he knew how to cultivate its virtues and talents, while avoiding its faults.”43 Enlightenment has brought great benefits; but it has brought also a corrosion of Christian faith, which Louis-Ferdinand resisted, practicing instead “those sturdy and heroic virtues of our fathers.” In the bosom of eternity, Brienne suggests, “his sublime education continues.”44 The example of the Dauphin is still intended to teach the listeners and mourners how to die; “if the Christian dies with Jesus Christ, he will be resurrected with him.”45 But there is the hint of regret at leaving this life, where “the torch of sciences today casts its vivid and bursting light,”46 and there is a

38. Ibid., p. 64. 39. Ibid., p. 80. 40. nant la 41. 42.

Lomenie de Brienne, in Recueil sur la mort de Monseigneur Louis Dauphin, conteplus grande part des oraisons funebres (Paris, 1766), 2:2. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 11.

43. Ibid., p. 21. 44. Ibid., p. 29. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 21.

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Mortal Politics

sentimentality alien to Bossuet. A similar turn toward the eighteenth-century style can be detected in some slightly earlier eloquence commemorating the death of Marshal Maurice de Saxe, the great mercenary hero of the War of the Austrian Succession and a Protestant. A Protestant funeral oration, focused on the tale of David and Jonathan (i.e., Louis XV and Saxe), stresses the theme of “posterity,” not “immortality : Let God not permit that his death should cause to die in our hearts the glorious memory of his heroic actions and dispense us from raising in ourselves an eternal monument to him.”47 In fact, in parallel with the traditional recalling of the soul to its Creator and of the living to their Christian duties, there had developed a Christian literature of national heroism that dwelt especially on the example of military virtue. Amid Bourbon splendor, certain Augustinian admonitions had been forgotten. Given the French spirit of raillerie, it is not surprising to find the pattern of the funeral oration employed on occasion for satiric purposes. An illustration of this is an anonymous attack on the unpo¬ pular bull Unigenitus, which the Bibliotheque national describes as “denounced as a libel and ordered to be burned by an arret of the Parlement, 28 September 1752.” The mock oration runs in part: In fact, gentlemen, who among you was not seized with horror and fear at the view of the funeral ceremony? What thoughts did not cross your mind when you learned the frightful news a few months ago of the death of tres-haute, tres-puissante et tres-sainte Princesse Clementine Loyola Unigenitus, Patrice Romaine, Generalissime des armees de notre tres-saint pere le Pape, restauratrice de Veglise de France, protectrice et souveraine de la tres-Catholique Societe de Jesusf48 This long anti-Jesuit spoof concludes: “And you, illustrious Princess, who cause our tears and stir in our hearts the most sincere regrets, do not abandon your faithful worshippers....Rise from the tomb to encourage your ministers and shame your enemies. The kingdom of death is past.”49 From tears to scorn? No. But within the compass of the funeral oration there is discernible progress from the tragic didacticism of 47. M. Loventz, Oraison funebre de tres-haut et tres-excellent Seigneur Monseigneur Maurice de Saxe (Strasbourg, 1751), p. 7. 48. Oraison funebre de tres.-haute, tres-puissante et tres-sainte Princesse La Bulle Unigen¬ itus, prononcee dans I’Eglise Metropolitaine de S***, par M. I’Eveque de M***, le premier septembre 1752 (n.p., n.d.), p. 7. 49. Ibid., p. 20.

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Bossuet, with its contemptus mundi, to altered vistas of pathos and worldliness in the eighteenth century, a distinguishable motion from eternity to posterity. Turgot straightforwardly derided them as “plates capucinades.”50 Not only was the oraison funebre falling into decadence as a vehicle of profound communication, but it was being increasingly challenged by another form of utterance.

The Secular Eulogy of the Savants

The secular eulogy had its own style of rhetoric, affected by the civi¬ lization of the centuries and defined by individual taste as well; but it had none of the elements of the sermon and it was closer to biog¬ raphy. Although frequently exaggerative, it sought to espouse the truthful elements of historia within its frame of laudatio. There can be little doubt (as d’Alembert wrote in reaction to the panegyric strategies that had characterized royal historiography since time out of mind, as well as the annals of the great families of France) that the philosophes wanted to cleanse the melange of mythes and gestes on which classicism had ultimately imposed soaring and mendacious topoi. For centuries artful literary servants had “influenced the shaping and reshaping of the conceptions of the prince that pervaded the whole political culture” through their essential Budean treatment of the glories of the monarch. “The emotions of love, fear, and respect inspired by the kings of the past,” Ranum writes, “in no way diminished in the seventeenth century.”51 The “virtues” of the kings and grandees of France were not to be the philosophes’ own. The eulogists would refuse the immense and sublime distancing of the subject from common humanity and they would rejoin the early Christians at least in their distaste for military exploits and cruelty. Blood and breeding would cede to talent and benevolence. Lives would be given meaning in a new corporate setting. Yet the inculcation of respect would continue to be a large item. And the eulogists would not back away from a new strategy of myth-making. Withal, they would move closer to a formal genre of

50. Letter of 25 May 1780, Anne Robert-Jacques Turgot, baron de l’Aulne, Lettres de Turgot a la Duchesse d’Enville (Louvain, 1976), p. 138. 51. Orest Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in SeventeenthCentury France (Chapel Hill, 1980), p. 336.

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biography and would help to replace the memoire-which is of course autobiography-in this sense (despite its reflorescence in the wake of the Revolution). The eulogy would serve in part to fill the gap between a well-rooted Plutarchianism and the new problematic of relating individual lives to the historical process. The form of the eulogy depends on the audience of the academy. Its intent is to exalt the living through the earthly deeds and talents of a departed colleague, not excepting his moral qualities, which sometimes include the Christian virtues but more usually encompass secular and humanitarian merits. It gives orators an opportunity to use a more truthful rhetoric for contemporary purposes. We might note, finally, that whereas the Christian funeral oration is presum¬ ably addressed by the interpreters of the faith (the clergy) via the example of a departed communicant to the Church Militant, the secular academic eulogy breathes collegiality and restrictedness. It is the vehicle of a community of learned and creative men, intended for their edification, but also as a measure of distinctive solidarity. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following upon the inauguration of the Academie frangaise (1635) and the Royal Academy of Sciences (1663), a plethora of learned institutions and literary societies were founded in the larger French cities, almost always under royal or municipal patronage and regulation. Their sociology, their activities and impact, need not concern us directly, but a few basic comments are in order.52 If the academie arose as an adjunct to the absolute monarchy, directly related to the notion that the lumieres of a nation added to the monarchy’s splendor could be practically useful to its designs, the major institutions also partly filled the function of creative sponsorship and innovation (especially in the sciences); they were a counterpoise against the theological rigidity of the Sorbonne. Open to the lumieres and often a source of them, they also tended, because of their organizational imperatives and exclusivity, to become conservative forces in the corporate struc¬ ture of the late monarchy, from which they were not free of obliga¬ tion. Thus, when we consider the category “Enlightenment philos¬ ophy,” we instantly observe that the designations gens de lettres and academicians are not totally congruent and do, to an extent, describe a cleavage between the intellectual avant-garde and the more moderate savants. Diderot and Rousseau were most certainly not academicians in France (though Diderot was in Russia and Rousseau

52. This is covered extensively in an article by Daniel Roche, “Encyclopedistes et academiciens,” in Genevieve Boll^me, Francois Furet, et al., Livre et societe dans la France du XVIIIe siecle (Paris and The Hague, 1970), esp. pp. 81, 86.

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63

profited by an award from a provincial academy to launch his fateful career ). Yet d Alembert, Buffon, and Condorcet were the heart and soul of the academie, eclectic and influential. “By the middle of the eighteenth century,” as Hahn writes, “the Academy [of Sciences] had become the major symbol for the advancement of learning of the enlightened world.”53 No doubt the eulogy, too, had its evolution. In an earlier period it tended to be more flowery, less matter-of-fact, indeed less militant and programmatic. An illustration from Montesquieu will project its flavour: Death carries away titles, wealth, and dignities; scarcely anything remains of a celebrated soul (illustre mort) than the faithful image engraved in the hearts of those who have loved him....If the deceased still has any concern for things down here, may he know that his memory is forever dear to us! May he see us gathered here to transmit the souvenir of his rare qualities to posterity!54 Although there is the image of a dead man in a beyond, we may note that the praise is for his qualities as a philosophe and that the final invocation is to posterity. With d’Alembert, the great eulogist for the Academie franqaise, we reach a watershed. His important essay “Reflexions sur les eloges academiques,” as well as some of the illustrations that carry out its method, merits some passing consideration; for it shows us how a brilliant, but median, philosophe proposes to deal with the memory of dead men: It is through actions that we praise merit; thus the eulogy of a literary figure should be through the account of his works. But perhaps it is equally useful to make known the man he was, to paint the man as well as the writer, at the risk of changing pane¬ gyric once in a while into history. By showing, on the one hand, to educated readers the indebtedness of science and literature to their advocates, the gains they have achieved, and the explana¬ tions that can be given by their interpreters; one can interest phil¬ osophical readers, on the other hand, in the agreement or disa¬ greement of the writings and the morals of the writer. The

53. Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1663-1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p. 1. 54. Montesquieu, “Eloge du due de La Force,” completes, ed. R. Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1949), 1:58-60.

25 August

1726, in Oeuvres

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Mortal Politics character of famous men deserves our consideration as much as their talent.55

But, says d’Alembert at this point, there is no sense carrying impos¬ sible rules to the brink of idiocy: The analysis of the writings is indispensable in the historical eulogy of an intellectual; with regard to his character and morals, although the historian has the duty not to conceal the faults that link the intellectuals to ordinary humanity, it is even more impor¬ tant to draw the curtain upon those vices that occasionally tarnish the gleam of talent. The purpose of literary eulogy is to make literature respected, not to vilify it. If then, by a hardly unique mischance, personal conduct dishonours literary production, what position do we take? We praise the writings. And if, conversely, behaviour is spotless and the writings worthless, what do we do? We keep our mouths shut. It is forgotten that one should speak of the writer: one indirectly satirizes him in merely praising him for a virtuous nature, a trait meaning much in society but little in literature. What would one think of a general of the army, in whose eulogy one could find no victories, no cities captured?36 D’Alembert, who, although a “modern,” was a classicist of some distinction, having translated and commented on Tacitus, was assuredly not a writer to propose the restoration of the ancient laudatio. The praise of the worldly brahmins, who toiled not for the “cite” but for “humanite,” had to be of a different sort than the cele¬ brations of the Athens or Rome. Dying young was certainly in no way a good in itself. Conversely, the Christian “intervalle entre la vie et la mort” (in order to prepare) was totally submerged in the life of “useful” intellectual production.57 Of the great academic eulogists of the eighteenth century, it was surely d’Alembert who brought the most theory, the most wit, and the most controversy to the undertaking. His praise of Fontenelle, who preceded him, is generous. He expresses no wish to copy his illustrious elder; but he appreciates his particular quality, which is nowhere to be duplicated: “His style of writing is absolutely his own and could not but lose its force if written by another pen....[It] is the 55. D’Alembert, “Reflexions sur les eloges academiques,” in Eloges historiques, in Oeuvres completes 2:151. 56. Ibid. 57. On the Christian “intervalle,” see Dirk van der Cruysse, La mort dans les ‘Me'moires’ de Saint-Simon: Clio au jar din de Thanatos (Paris, 1981), pp. 65-115.

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65

kind of spirit nature gave him, and it would be deceitful copied by another.”58 In one respect, the eulogies of d’Alembert resemble those of Condorcet, his younger friend and ally. Their warmth is greater, but they are chiefly retrospective, meant to “catch up” on the lives of the earlier dead and bequeath them to posterity. In fact it is d Alembert who specifically affirms that his genre is an integral part of the history of philosophy.”59 This is important for two reasons: it makes biography and history part of the same mission, and it strives to bring laudatio and historia together, with the reserva¬ tions mentioned above. D Alembert’s intention in presenting encapsulations of the lives of celebrities is specified in his introductory essay: “I have tried to give each the variation in style and tone so necessary to break the monotony of this kind of work; at the same time, I have tried to create a greater harmony among the eulogies and, if I dare say, to conform them more nearly to the personality of their subjects.”60 This spirit breathes through his essays. He “apologizes,” rather than “eulogizes,” for the notorious Franyois de Clermont-Tonnerre, bishop of Noyon. He balances Bossuet’s nobility and force against his temper of intolerance, and he deftly treats his controversies with Fenelon.62 He generously concludes that “the Bishop of Meaux was

receives a balanced treatment: he blamed Moliere for the Misanthrope, wrongly believing it directed against himself, but he appreciated the unmasking of hypocrisy in Tartuffe.64 One could go on with these accounts; but it is perhaps adequate to make the point that d’Alembert saw his secretarial duty as a truly historical task. He customarily accompanied his eulogies with a set of explanatory notes even longer than the biography: often they are of service to today’s historian. The charm of d’Alembert’s eulogies is that, in accordance with his dicta, they are rarely without some touch that instantly personalizes the subject. For example, in the “Eloge de Campistron (1656-1723),” the author comments: “He died of a siege of apoplexy, caused, some 58. D Alembert, 2:151. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 153. 61. Ibid., p. 170. 62. Ibid., p. 257. 63. Ibid., p. 259. 64. Ibid., p. 489.

Reflexions sur les eloges,” in Eloges historiques, in Oeuvres completes

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Mortal Politics

said, by an outburst of anger and, according to others, by over¬ eating. But the truth is that the apoplexy that finished him off was innocent in nature and due to the excessive weight he carried. In the “Eloge de Claude Fleury (1640-1723),” d’Alembert refuses any stab at colour: “This respectable writer’s life, like his own person without show or noise, was always so monotonous and eventless that his history is only that of his writings.”66 D’Alembert sometimes carries prejudices into his memorials. Of the prolific Abbe de Saint-Pierre (1658-1743) he writes: “After becoming a member of a fraternity devoted to the perfection of style, he still felt no obligation to improve his method of writing. He composed many works where, totally absorbed in the substance, which infatuated him, he showed a complete neglect of the form.”b/ In the case of Montesquieu (1689-1755), he could approach his subject reverentially: “Our gratitude can do no more than trace a few lines at the base of his statue.”68 Yet, in the more substantive passages of the eulogy, d’Alembert took care to draw a critical difference between the “desordre reel” and the “desordre apparent of the Esprit des lois, while in general defending the work against its detractors. He produced one of the most just and informed of all interpretations of Montesquieu’s achievement.69 Vicq-d’Azyr’s eulogies for the Royal Society of Medicine carried on the program of d’Alembert in almost identical spirit. Indeed, many thought Vicq-d’Azyr to be the finest of the eulogists. He saw his biographical memoirs as fulfilling at least three important func¬ tions. In the first place, a worthy eulogist could ensure a lasting reputation for the virtuous lives and accomplishments of the men of medicine: “I cannot reproach myself for having overlooked the least circumstance contributing to their glory....I never spoke without emotion of their success and virtues....”70 Besides the really commanding figures, according to Vicq-d’Azyr, there were “so many others whose useful death gave them a right to the memory of post¬ al Secondly, and apart from the hagiographic mission, the enty.”'1 eulogistic reverence granted to the departed by the academies implied an engagement never to choose unworthy members and “to 65. Ibid., p. 580. 66. Ibid., p. 595. 67. Ibid., 3:252. 68. Ibid., p. 440. 69. Ibid., p. 450. 70. Felix Vicq-d’Azyr, Eloges historiques, in Oeuvres de Vicq-d’Azyr, 6 vols. (Paris, 1805), 1:5. 71. Ibid.

Celebrating the New Hero

67

stimulate emulation and honour talent.”72 Finally, there was the responsibility of framing a conception of history that would be philo¬ sophical. Where can one find a more abundant assemblage of materials for the history of the human mind?”73 “In the eyes of phil¬ osophies [these lives] are a part of the great problem that consists in perfecting ^society by the development of thought and the progress of reason. Like his confreres, Vicq-d’Azyr tactfully preferred a strong coalition between monarchy and learning: “Monuments are destined less to perpetuate the memory of great men than to honor nations and kings that knew how to pay homage to science and virtue.”75 Through three volumes of eulogies Vicq-d’Azyr played on all the keys of prudent panegyric that his corporate spirit allowed. If the departed member was truly illustrious, a tone of tragedy might be struck: “Now the chain of all these truths is broken; all is mute within this vast building, or rather everything here announces the loss of a great man....” 6 A career only lightly touched by genius might contain other elements reserved for praise: “great diligence joined to a desire to witness many things and the necessary patience for sound observation.”77 Corporate consolation and ceremony did not, of course, mean that the colleague was earmarked for Parnassus, particularly if his life had been cut short: “In condemning oneself to a certain and premature death by working beyond capacity (un exces de fatigue), one is in danger of losing all rights to immortality.”78 On the other hand, a mediocre contribution to knowledge could still merit attention: His last wish was that of a sensitive and modest man, whose ambition was limited to wanting to be remembered by his colleagues, without any claim to that of posterity.”79 Vicq-d’Azyr sometimes wrote his eulogies with exaltation, never with meanness. By common acknowledgment the Royal Academy of Sciences was the ne plus ultra of learned institutions in the eighteenth century. Founded under the auspices of Colbert, it included most major figures of the time who had anything to contribute to scientific and philosophical discourse; its conditions of admission were more rigid and less subject to venal tampering than those of the other acad72. Ibid., p. 1. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., p. 2. 75. Vicq-d’Azyr, “Vie de Luin6,” ibid., p. 208. 76. “Vie de Hunter,” ibid., 2:388. 77. “Vie de Duhamel,” ibid., 1:168. 78. “Vie de Busquet,” ibid., p. 276. 79. Vicq-d’Azyr, “Vie de Montigny,” ibid., 3:360.

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emies. It sponsored both important research and investigations affecting public policy and often served as a kind of court of exper¬ tise for the government. As a source of scientific inquiry rather than a hotbed of protest in the fields of religion and politics, it could defend itself vigourously from assaults of superstition and castigation by the orthodox. It maintained influential contacts and correspon¬ dence from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia. Nevertheless, in the mode of a French academie, it had a complex sense of order and hierarchy in its internal organization, at least from the reforms of the Abbe Bignon on (1699). Hahn argues that these reforms were intended to overcome a certain informality and chaos and to bring the conduct of the Academy more in line with the formal manners and status patterns of surrounding society.80 Effectively directing the Academy’s procedures was a “permanent secretary.” There were only four of these in the eighteenth century, of whom two, each serving for a long period, were extremely famous: Fontenelle and Condorcet. Among their tasks was that of composing appropriate eulogies to be submitted to the corporation upon the death of any of its members. They constitute a significant part of the literary corpus of both men; they were considered impor¬ tant, and their authors laboured over them with care. All the eloges of Fontenelle appear to follow a common pattern.81 The intellectual and active life of the deceased colleague is recounted episodically from birth to death. The circumstances of death are always described, emphasizing the attitude of the dying man and of course praising the courage of the living man in going forth to meet his future, mostly without any mention of acts of piety. The closing paragraphs of these eulogies usually refer to the personal life, the conduct and beliefs, and, above all, the intellectual virtues of the deceased. Sometimes the failings are also cited, but as human peccadillos, not as object lessons for others. Fontenelle’s tone is invariably professional, secular, and often dry (when one thinks of his capacities for wit). The length of each e'loge is proportional to the intellectual achievement of the subject: for example, the eloges for Malebranche and Leibniz run to four and nine pages respectively; others cover less than a page.82 80. Hahn, Anatomy of a Scientific Institution, p. 76. 81. Fontenelle, Eloges des acade'miciens de VAcademie royale des sciences, marts depuis 1699, vols. 6 and 7 of 8 vols., in Oeuvres de Fontenelle (Paris, 1790-1792). All subse¬ quent citations are to this edition. 82. His brevity elicited some appreciation. As d’Argenson writes: “Fontenelle, in artfully passing over the dryness of matters to which those who were the subject of his encomium applied themselves, says generally what is necessary.” Rene-Louis d’Ar-

Celebrating the New Hero

69

Fontenelle places great value on the “good death”—which means to him essentially (and he practiced what he preached, expiring at ninety-nine) a natural death from old age, reflecting balance, temperance, and order during life. To die for one’s profession or ideals is also a noble death. Can we speak here of secular piety? No doubt we should. For example, the eulogy of Jean-Baptiste du Hamel, secretary of the Academy, who died at eighty-two, contains the following: “Up to now we have portrayed him as a scientist and academician; but this would be the panegyric of a saint, and we are not worthy to undertake this part of his eulogy, which should be done in front of an altar and not in an academy.”83 Thus Fontenelle (himself a deist) touches upon the personal virtue of his subjects but opts for a division of labour between academy and parish. While Fontenelle admires a calm and late death, he often brings forward the idea that total commitment to work, although admi¬ rable, can hasten death.84 Early deaths are grievous not only to friends and colleagues of the departed but also to science, which might have profited from the researcher’s further discoveries: “The public, through his death, has lost several useful inventions which he was contemplating-regarding the printing press, ships, the plow.”85 There are continual references throughout these eulogies to the intrusion of unfortunate sicknesses, bad constitutions, and perturba¬ tions of life, and a constant catalogue of the natural causes of the subject’s death. Stoic courage in the face of pain and illness and the will to carry on are frequent topics of praise: for example, the Marquis de Dangeau’s heroism in the face of surgery (“a courage very different from that demanded in war and less suspect of being feigned”),86 or Sir Isaac Newton’s patience amid his gallstone attacks.87 Stoicism was also the response to the misfortunes of Jean-Baptiste-Henri du Trousset de Valincourt: having amassed a choice library of 7,000 volumes, he was fated to watch his books burn up in a Fire. But he said, “I would hardly have profited from my books if I didn’t know how to lose them.”88 It is only in the case of Valincourt and a few others that Fontenelle mentions the relig¬ ious underpinnings of their moral constancy. However, this occagenson, Essays...Written after the Manner of M. de Montagne [sic], essay 38, p. 186. 83. Fontenelle, Eloges des academiciens in Oeuvres de Fontenelle 6:172-173. 84. See ibid., Fontenelle, “Eloge de Daniel Tauvry,” p. 100; “Eloge du marquis de l’Hopital,” p. 132; “Eloge de Jacques Bernouilli,” p. 149. 85. Fontenelle, “Eloge de Guillaume Amontons,” ibid., p. 159. 86. Ibid., 7.108. 87. Ibid., p. 289. 88. Ibid., p. 356.

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sional homage to God does not appear forced: in the case of Boerhaave, for instance, Fontenelle writes of the great anatomist s “love of everything that came to him from the hand of God.”89 Condorcet’s eulogies of the scientific academicians were collected in five volumes and published in 1799.90 They are much longer than Fontenelle’s. This work includes introductions by Condorcet himself (dead since 1794) and by his editors. Condorcet explains the art of the eulogy as “a rare talent of making oneself clear in the most difficult things.”91 He goes on to submit that his extended work in this area has been useful to the progress of knowledge: “The details of the history of science are always useful: besides having the advantage of clarifying the advance of the human mind, they inspire the love of glory, but cure it of presumptuousness [not quite Diderot, but how far from Bossuet!]....Finally, they encourage a merit that is useful, even if it lacks brilliance.”92 The editors of the work, even more than the revolutionary savant, were concerned to point out how the influence of the best minds corrects common errors of opinion: “Man is essentially an imitator. He needs objects to imitate before his eyes. He is naturally inert and lazy; he needs to be dragged from his inertia and aroused from his idleness.”93 Condorcet spent much energy on his eulogies. In aspiring-or conspiring-to replace Grandjean de Fouchy as permanent secretary, he researched and wrote brief eulogies for members of the Academy of Sciences who had died between 1666 and 1699 and still awaited their due.94 But he was intent to write “not simply their eulogy, but their history, because the dead are owed nothing but that which can be useful to the living-truth and justice.”95 Condorcet’s eulogies carry on and accentuate the work of Fontenelle, with a heavy emphasis on usefulness, and conceivably bring the admiration of intellectual endeavour to a yet higher pitch. For example, as he writes of M. Fontaine, a geometer who died in 1771: “He always looked on suffering and death as a necessary result of nature’s general laws, about which it would be foolish to complain.”96 Condorcet’s idea of heroism in the face of death was 89. Ibid., p. 497. 90. Condorcet, Eloges des academiciens de VAcademie royale des sciences, morts depuis Van 1666 jusqu’en 1790, 5 vols. (Paris, 1799). 91. Ibid., 1:13. 92. Ibid., p. 14. 93. Ibid., p. 24. 94. See Leon Cahen, Condorcet et la Revolution frangaise (Paris, 1904), p. 8. 95. Condorcet, Eloges de VAcademie royale 1:14. 96. Ibid., p. 224.

Celebrating the New Hero

71

totally secular. M. de La Condamine, who died in 1774, was praised for lending himself to an operation susceptible, despite its conse¬ quences (it killed him), to helping humanity. He was, according to Condorcet, “a new kind of hero.”97 This is indeed what the philosophe historians were trying to create. In fact, donating bodies to medicine would be heroic: priests should receive the corpse for burial only after it had passed through the hands of the anatomist.98 “New heroism” stressed civic obligation and it did not annul personal piety. M. Jean-Charles-Philibert Trudaine, who died young at forty-four, was praised for being “an enlightened and honest magistrate...a citizen friendly to the peuple...a philosophe concerned with the happiness of all men.”99 In the case of M. de Haller, the famous medical scientist of Bern and member of many academies, whom death took in 1777 at the age of sixty-nine, Condorcet, after reviewing his intellectual exploits, described him as “approaching death without terror...confident that God, whom he had faithfully served, would take account of a life wholly given over to the study of nature and the good of man.”100 In his eulogy of Linnaeus, Condorcet applauds the botanist’s “great respect for Providence...because every day new observations of nature gave him new proofs.”101 Condorcet was particularly alert to the advances of the medical arts in his own valuation of life: this is evident in the eulogy of M. Lieutaud (d. 1780), professor at Aix and Paris, and principal physi¬ cian to the king.102 The same is more cogently stated in the eulogy of M. Tronchin (d. 1781), of the famous Genevan family, and doctor to the Due d’Orleans: “He knew that pain is more of an evil than death itself, and he never used those cruel practices that prolong life even for a few moments, causing anguish and pain, and which often make a long ordeal out of that last, peaceful sleep by which nature would have brought life to an end.”103 M. Pringle (d. 1781), physi¬ cian to the king of England, “had a lively feeling for the anguishes of the wounded and dying” and was among those who had contributed “to the reform of the moral conduct of the century.”104

97. Ibid., p. 270. 98. See Arids, L’homme devant la mort, p. 360. 99. Condorcet, Eloges de VAcademie royale 1:359-360. 100. Ibid., 2:84. 101. Ibid., p. 146. 102. Ibid., pp. 240-241. 103. Ibid., p. 424. 104. Ibid., p. 427.

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Condorcet’s eloges are replete with judgements that exalt the life of mental inquiry or praise those who have contributed to the miti¬ gation of human suffering; there are scarcely any theological implica¬ tions. Rarely does the notion of a God or a hereafter appear in these productions: the eulogy for Benjamin Franklin (d. 1791) is, however, an exception. Condorcet was not above sticking a few academic pins in the corpse when there was scholarly jealousy or personal dislike. This can be seen in the eulogy of Buffon, who died in 1788. Condorcet and Buffon were political enemies in the Academy, for Buffon had unsuccessfully advanced the candidacy of Bailly as permanent secretary against Condorcet, who was d’Alembert’s man.105 In this eulogy Condorcet accuses the deceased of cultivating “enthusiasm,” “corruption of taste,” and an “ambitious and pompous style.” However, he cannot withhold the honour of posterity.106

Defining Posterity

The academic eulogies cited here are by no means isolated examples. In the midst of the Age of Reason, the eulogy had become a highly acceptable art form, a pathway to literary recognition. There were specialists in eloges: A.-L. Thomas, for example, who had gained prizes in 1759 (Marshal de Saxe), in 1760 (d’Aguesseau), in 1763 (Sully), and in 1765 (Descartes).107 Later on, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre expressed the wish to see literature engulfed in these exercises. “Are you men of letters?” he challenged. “It is you who hand out glory to others. Renowned writers!...without you there would be nothing pleasing in the sphere of the intelligence and nothing lasting in the field of the memory.”108 Behind it all there is the scarcely dissimulated desire for posterity and the privilege of moral and historical arbitership, especially pronounced among the academicians. This elitism gushes forth in the words of J.-S. Bailly, an astronomer of note who had tried his own hand at eloges and later had an important career in the 105. See Jean-B.-Claude Izoard Delisle de Sales, Vie litteraire et politique de Bailly (Paris, 1809), pp. 38-39. 106. Condorcet, Eloges de I’Acade'mie royale 4:414. 107. See Favre, La mort au siecle, p. 520. 108. J.-H. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, “Voeux d’un solitaire,” in Oeuvres completes, 12 vols. (Paris, 1826), 11:91-92.

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Revolution: While great men propel the sciences, increasing the number of true propositions by new discoveries, history broadcasts these truths; history makes knowledge descend from above, like waters gathered on mountain peaks that rush down to the plains and are distributed by canals.”109 After Bailly himself died, beneath the blade of the guillotine, he too was rewarded by posterity’s chain of connections: “The man dies, but his virtues and his talents do not die. Time destroys our existence, but not our renown.”110 Although we cannot say that these eloges arrogantly challenged the mortuary content of the Christian faith or attempted to displace the funeral oration, it is clear that the academician’s idea of the ars moriendi, as well as his propositions on the meaning of life, were in basic discord with Catholic tradition. In fact, they amounted to an insidious attempt to create a posterity of secular sainthood that rivalled the Church Triumphant, joining this companionship of persons to a macrohistory that rivalled the sacred history of Providence. The church, but to little avail, was well aware of the peril of the prideful elitism of the intellectuals. It specifically denounced the “fantome eblouissant” of posterity: “The fame which is attached to the ostentation of History is prohibited to most men; they make no claim to it; and yet all of them have important obliga¬ tions to fulfil: this is proof positive that the hope for that fame, which is a subsidiary and secondary motive for a small number of men, cannot be a true motive for the multitude, nor can it be a prin¬ cipal motive of virtue for anyone.”111 But, having been traditionally indulgent to “old heroes” and to many of the great who were lacking in all heroic specifications, the church was in no better position to repel the “new hero” than it was to combat the “new history.” This is one of the instances in which, in the words of Pierre Chaunu, “death changed its face” in the eighteenth century.112 As for the savants, although old beliefs were cast down, old habits were not modified out of recognition: “On 17 February [1755] the [Academie frangaise] gave [Montesquieu], according to custom, a solemn ceremony, which, despite the severe weather, almost all the intellectuals then present in Paris attended as a matter of duty. During that sad ritual it would have been proper to place the Esprit 109. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, “Discours preliminaire,” to Histoire de I’astronomie moderne, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Paris, 1785), 3:v. 110. Merard de Saint-Just, Eloge historique de Jean Sylvain de Bailly, au nom de la republique des lettres, par une societe des gens de lettres (London, 1794), p. 1. 111. “Sixi£me avantage: l’esperance de l’immortalite,” in Avertissement...sur les avantages de la religion chretienne et les effets pernicieux de Uincredulite (Paris, 1775), p. 69. 112. Chaunu, La civilisation de VEurope, p. 167.

74

Mortal Politics

des lois in his coffin, just as once beside the coffin of Raphael his last painting of the Transfiguration was presented. This simple and touching gesture would have been a fine funeral oration.”113 The Enlightenment’s parallel excursus in macrohistory and personal history illuminates an area in which philosophy directly confronted the forms and meanings of the Christian tradition. With allowance for other mediations that cannot be specified here, it also gives us some notion of how the Revolution was able to combine its strains of national eschatology and hero-worship. Finally, we get a multiple impression of the mortuary rites of the literati, new pieties acknowledging the ancient notion that all men are like grass, but now a grass seeding fresh meadows. 113. D’Alembert, “Eloge de Montesquieu,” in Eloges historiques, in Oeuvres completes 3:457.

Tales Told by the Dead Chapter 4

The Tradition

While the academicians of France sought for a “new history” of life and death in their secularized eulogies, a parallel literary form of life-and-death manipulation had a renaissance, beginning in the late seventeenth century. Interestingly enough, it was also inaugurated by Fontenelle. This genre, called “dialogues of the dead,” had been invented in the second century A.D. by the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata. In Fontenelle’s hands, it became a kind of rococo answer to moralism—witty, didactic, and sceptical.1 Like its predecessor, it also arose in a mannered milieu where previously solid values were being corroded by experimental doubt. It was, to be sure, not histor¬ ical in form (it was Fictional); but in purport it was a kind of “philosophy teaching by examples.” This chapter will trace its impact, its politicization, and its fate. The device of the “dialogues of the dead” is prefigured by Socrates’s musings on his own death: If...death is a sort of migration to another place, and the common tales are true that all the dead are there, what finer thing could there be than this? Would it not be a good journey that takes one to Hades, away from these self-styled judges here, to find the true judges who are said to dispense justice there-Minos, Rhadamanthys, Aecus, Triptolemus, and other demigods who were just in their own lives? Or what would one of you not give to meet Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? I myself would have a wonderful time there, with Palamedes and Ajax son 1. In Le “Dialogue des morts” dans les litteratures franQaise, allemande et anglaise, 1664-1789 (Paris, 1934), Johan S. Egilsrud suggests that Fontenelle also took aim at his literary precursor Boileau, presumably in an effort to gain attention.

76

Mortal Politics

of Telemon and any other of the ancients who had met his death as a result of an unjust verdict, comparing my experience with theirs. There would be some pleasure in that. Best of all,. I could examine and interrogate the inhabitants of Hades as I do the people here, to find out which one of them is wise, and which thinks he is though he is not....2 That passage establishes much of the future program for the genre, which was then further inflected through the irreverent dialogue of Aristophanic comedy and Menippean satire, becoming a kind of human spoof against ancient pieties. Lucian, the Hellenized Syrian who created the canonical dialogue of the dead, recaptured the style and cadences of classical Attic Greek as it had been written six centuries before to produce thirty memorable examples, as well as other sets of dialogues.3 His economy, grace, and skill set him above later imitators, while yet determining the conventions in which they would work. Lucian’s pieces were the soul of brevity. Formally they were more theatrical than their Enlightenment imitations, tiny play¬ lets that sometimes used as background the personnel of Hades-Mercury, Rhadamanthys, Charon, Minos, Cerberus-in supporting roles. As many as seven or eight characters can appear in Lucian’s quick sketches; he also does not hesitate, where it suits him, to make the dialogue trilateral (as in the twelfth dialogue, where Alexander, Hannibal, and Scipio debate over their military talent).4 Moreover, Lucian conveys a “strong sense of the folly and brevity of man’s lives...with an appreciation of the humor in the situation of their all being forced to die.”5 Lucian’s underworld is also graced with amusing byplay: Mercury’s complaints about difficulties in rounding up new passengers to Hades, Charon’s grumbles about payment for passage across the Styx and the dangers of an overloaded boat, various chores of administra¬ tion and discipline in the underworld itself. These touches enliven the matter at hand considerably.

2. Plato, Apology 40c. The translation is from William Keith Chambers Guthrie, Socrates (London, 1971), p. 159. 3. For biographical material on Lucian, see Maurice Croiset, Essai sur la vie et les oeuvres de Lucien (Paris, 1882); and Francis G. Allinson, Lucian: Satirist and Artist (Boston, 1926). 4. The modern form is almost always bilateral; Fenelon abridges it only once, Fontenelle not at all. 5. Benjamin Boyce, “News from Hell,” Publications of the Modern Language Associa¬ tion 58 (1943):403.

Tales Told by the Dead

77

We might here notice how different this pagan (and presumably artificial) Hades is from the afterlife of Catholic sermons and picto¬ graphy. The grimness of confinement still allows for humour. Appearances are in no way macabre. The dead are presumed as existing all together and can freely converse;6 they can take some pleasure in communication in spite of their being disembodied shades; and they are free to reflect their earthly personalities and interests. They are, however, constrained by their perpetual common detention. This will give them unlimited opportunity not only to reflect on their own fortunes, but to conduct debates that might instruct the living. Some of these classic effects (especially the byplay) are felt super¬ fluous or psychologically nettlesome by the French, who have experi¬ enced Christian civilization and entered a different sort of sceptical reaction. As Fontenelle puts it in his dedicatory epistle, “A Lucien aux Champs-Elysees”: “I have eliminated Pluto, Charon, Cerberus, and everything out of date in hell (tout ce qui est use dans les enfers). ” He goes on to say (accusing Lucian of a certain flippancy): “All your dialogues suppress their moral potential, but I have moralized my dead spokesmen; otherwise, why take the trouble to make them speak? Living persons could have been found to...say useless things.”7 There is also the claim that the dead of Fontenelle, with more experience and longer leisure to have reflected on the human condition, will have wiser things to say. Yet, plausibly, Lucian was culturally better placed to use the resources of the genre, to “take a step backward and treat his setting and its inhabitants sympatheti¬ cally...or to trifle with them.”8 On reading Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues, La Bruyere accused him of being “a composite of pedant and precieux...in whom...one notices nothing great except the opinion he holds of himself.”9 Much later, Voltaire (who had much of Lucian’s spirit) concurred: 6. Although, as we are informed in the thirteenth dialogue of Lucian, there is a restricted area where the worst malefactors receive earnest punishment. Early Chris¬ tianity conveyed the doctrine that the dead slept until their resurrection in the flesh; only gradually in the Middle Ages were the notions of eternal punishment, purgatory, and judgement at the moment of dying developed. See Ari£s, L'homme devant la mort pp. 30-32, 154-156; Chaunu, La mort a Paris, pp. 116-125. 7. Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts, ed. Donald Schier, University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, no. 55 (Chapel Hill, 1966), p. 27. 8. Frederick

M.

Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead: A

Critical History,

an

Anthology, and a Check List (New York, 1973), p. 13. 9. La Bruyere, “De la soci£te et de la conversation,” in Les caracteres, ou les moeurs, p. 177.

78

Mortal Politics

“Lucian doesn’t want to be witty. Fontenelle’s defect is that he always wants to be: you always see him and never his characters....All he wants is to show off his own brilliance.”10 This was a vindictive charge against a book whose mettle had been proved by the many times it had been reprinted and the many imitations it had spawned.11 Yet it pointed to a certain subjective fuzziness in the Enlightenment itself. Dialogues of the dead are never speculative inquiries into the meaning of death, like the moral sentences of Montaigne or La Rochefoucauld: they are never a divine comedy or human elegy. Neither are they deadly serious. Fenelon will try to teach the Due de Bourgogne life by example; and the other writers often cultivate a polite scepticism about any reform of character in this world or the next. In Fontenelle especially, vicious historical persons are made neither utterly despicable nor beyond reprieve, for they are found to be worth listening to. They are at least granted the saving grace of dialogue, where they have the chance not only of defending them¬ selves but of bloodying their opponents with the equal weapon of discourse and sharp turns of wit. A superior dialogue of the dead also requires “worthy opponents” who can reasonably match each other in virtue or vice, wit or power, prudence or self-congratulation, contentment or regret. As Egilsrud puts it: “It is only when those who have gone to their death engage in equal and detached conversation that we gather in that subjective revelation of a reality elucidated by death which so particularizes the moral and philosophical quality of this genre.”12 For the usual rule of the dialogues is that the characters appear transparently to each other and discuss their motives in a vein of self-understanding and franchise that would not have been possible on earth. A Plato may confess to his gallantry. A Bossuet may confess to his jealousy at not being as well-born as Fenelon. A Fenelon may confess to his sin of arrogance. A Mazarin may cede laurels to a Richelieu; or a Richelieu to a Pascal. Nothing of the sort ever happened in history. Nevertheless, the authors were, through their fictions, helping to shape a future historical imagination.

10. Voltaire to Frederick II, 5 June 1751, in Correspondance, ed. Besterman, 9:166. 11. See John W. Consentini, Fontenelle’s Art of Dialogue (New York, 1952), p. 147. 12. Egilsrud, Le ‘Dialogue des morts’, p. 18.

Tales Told by the Dead

19

Dialogues of the Dead as High Enlightenment

The prior invention of a classical and mythological form allowing the dead to reason, compete, or rebuke each other for their worldly acts was priceless. Pagan Hades was, in fact, a location well suited to Fontenelle’s culture for a number of reasons. In the first place, it could be a locale for liberating wit from the more hidebound rules and declensions of grand siecle moralism, from Boileau and from the shade of Pascal and his successors. Fontenelle, as the Abbe Trublet put it, “married bel esprit and esprit philosophique in the highest degree,”13 but he did this in both a mocking and a troubling manner, without pretense to fundamental originality. Secondly, it was a singularly painless way of exploring the comparative psychology of the great without inserting a good deal of historical tedium. Delicious to any audience that shared classical culture, it was attractive to a readership that also shunned erudition. The dialogues were also spiced—or democratized, if one prefers-by the inclusion of heroines and villainnesses in a way that could pique the interest of both the sexes.14 In the third place, Fontenelle’s new form permitted him to manipulate the equivalence of “ancient” and “modern”; inasmuch as death bestows an equality and a detachment that go beyond normal assumptions about living persons or persons portrayed alive. Finally, Fontenelle was able to express behind his masks of the dead comments that might have been vulnerable in another style of address. This point should not be overstressed; for if his work is in any way seditious, it is not so chiefly in a political sense. Yet when Fontenelle has Pietro Aretino address the following remarks to Augustus Caesar, one wonders how much the incidental flattery is watered with sarcasm: Be consoled; you will no longer complain [that your royal govern¬ ment hasn’t been properly appreciated]. From all I hear from the dead arriving here recently who speak of Louis XIV, the present king of France, it is he who from now on will be considered the model of princes, and I predict that in the future people will not imagine that they can praise them more than by allowing them some connection with this great king.15 13. Abbe Nicolas-Charles-Joseph Trublet, Memoires pour servir a I’histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de M. de Fontenelle (Amsterdam, 1759), p. 12. 14. Twenty-one out of seventy-two of Fontenelle’s characters are women. More¬ over, men and women frequently share a dialogue. 15. Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues, bk. 2, dialogue 1, p. 57.

80

Mortal Politics

At least this is flimsy flattery. After all, Louis XIV will himself one day be freighted to Hades, where he will have to debate his acts with Augustus, Alexander, Charles V, and others of his breed. Eventually there will be dialogues where Louis XIV is called sharply to account; neither will his great-grandson Louis XV be spared.16 One of Fontenelle’s critics writes of an “incipient and restrained radicalism” that informs his work, an instance of what Paul Hazard called “la crise de la conscience europeenne,” “prophetic,” according to the critic, “of the decline of one world outlook, but at the same time the birth of another from the ashes of the old.”17 This is surely overstressed. The guiding mood that runs through many of Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues is a kind of cheerless gaiety in the face of the inadequacies of human reason and the fickleness of human progress. “How much men are to be lamented!” declares Smyndirides the Sybarite. “Their natural condition gives them little to take pleasure in, and their reason teaches them to enjoy it even less.”18 For Icasia, “all is unsure. It seems that fortune has laboured to reward the same things with different degrees of success so as to keep on making sport of human reason, which can have no steady rule.”19 Eristratus and Harvey debate: although the latter has a far greater knowledge of physiology than the ancients possessed, this has not ravaged nature of her ultimate riddle of death (“on ne prendra pas la nature pour dupe, on mourra comme a l’ordinaire”).20 Charles V and Erasmus argue about glory and merit, in one of Fontenelle’s most powerful dialogues. Are these great gifts to be achieved through lofty birth or through personal genius? Refuted by Erasmus, the great monarch flings back a diatribe on how merit itself is fortune, working through the materialistic anatomy of the brain.21 Even Descartes avows that “what is at the core of philos¬ ophy scarcely makes progress”: even if truths are actually discovered, one has no way of knowing this.22 Fontenelle’s dead are, to this degree, disabused, de'trompe's, while the living remain infected with illusion. This is not a totally promising starting point for even a tempered radicalism that could be filled by political content. And yet the form of expression allows for the possibility. Political thoughts are safer if they are not imputable to the lips of the living, or, as we 16. See below, pp. 89-92. 17. Consentini, Fontenelle’s Art, pp. 17-18. 18. Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues, bk. 1, dialogue 1, p. 37. 19. Ibid., dialogue 6, p. 52. 20. Ibid., bk. 2, dialogue 5, p. 76. 21. Ibid., bk. 3, dialogue 2, p. 89. 22. Ibid., bk. 4, dialogue 4, p. 176.

Tales Told by the Dead

81

shall see later, do not come from inside France itself. Very possibly it was the warm reception given to Fontenelle’s dialogues that inspired Fenelon to adopt the form for his pupil, the Due de Bourgogne.23 Although for Fenelon the instructional task was supreme, his knowledge of youthful dispositions and the culture of his time led him to honeycoat the austere lessons of virtue with the artifice of fable and fiction. If it is permissible to speak of the difference between a “Socratic” and a “Lucianic” strategy for dialogues of the dead, we could say that Fenelon had moved toward the Socratic camp. The pedagogical plan was to advance the moral and political education of the young prince through a series of literary experiences that suited his age: Bourgogne would be a kind of Emile, but an Emile with his nose buried in books. Fenelon used his tales in exactly the same way that Rousseau would later recom¬ mend the uses of history: “to make us passionately fond of all good men, while despising the wicked.”24 Thus Fenelon exposes the dialogues of the dead to didactic politics. Fenelon and Fontenelle had little enough in common, besides their appreciation of the classics. In Fontenelle, judgement flickers: if he may be taken to teach, in a vague way, that man should follow nature, nature itself often seems vagrant. In Fenelon, judgement is so decisive that each dialogue is prefaced by the moral maxim that it is intended to illustrate, so that the Due de Bourgogne receives his lesson, as it were, before he has learned it. This not only follows from the missions of the two writers or from the kind of audience they were addressing (some of Fenelon’s Dialogues became publicly available in 1699, although a comprehensive edition of the seventynine dialogues was not published until 1823). It is also directly related to the fact that Fontenelle distrusted the power of reason, while Fenelon (despite his brush with “quietism”) profoundly believed that reason was available to guide men to an upright life. By culti¬ vating his own reason, the pupil could stand back from the agonic scenes in Hades and decide the merits of the case after Fenelon’s artifice had absorbed him passionately in the dialogue: “Sometimes he feels the joy of anticipating a reply and finding it in the depths of himself. Sometimes he tastes the pleasure of a decisive answer that he was not expecting....This spectacle is a kind of combat where he becomes the spectator and the judge.”25 23. Francois Salignac de la Mothe Fenelon, Dialogues des marts, suivis de quelques dialogues de Boileau, Fontenelle et d’Alembert (Paris, 1862). On the circumstances, see Egilsrud, Le “Dialogue des morts,” p. 56. 24. Rousseau, fragment “Histoire de Lacedemone,” Oeuvres completes 3:545. 25. F6nelon, “Instruction pastorale en forme de dialogue,” cited in Egilsrud, Le

82

Mortal Politics

Both as a devout Christian prelate and as a servant of the state, Fenelon used the suave formulas of Lucian to promote ideals of just government in the mind of the young prince. Thus, contrary to Fontenelle’s practice, he repeoples his scenes with the stock charac¬ ters of Hades, sensing them as a harmless contrivance. They also help him to reinforce a motto that he very much shared with Lucian: death as the great leveller. Fenelon’s political pedagogy proceeds in a quite deliberate sequence. The prince is immediately drawn into the first dialogue. Mercury is conversing with Charon: he has just been up to earth and has seen a prince “who loves honnetes gens and is grateful to their preceptors. If he can get over his swiftness [to anger] and his laziness [in doing his lessons], he will be marvellous; I predict it.”26 The rest of the dialogue, then, will teach self-control and the exercise of the mind. Instantly the bad model of the bellicose and amorous prince is exposed, when Hercules charges Theseus: “How could you have governed [Athens], when you were constantly engaged in new mili¬ tary expeditions and in setting all Greece ablaze with your love affairs?”27 Chiron (Fenelon) now reminds Achilles (Bourgogne) that “the remedy for youth is to be in fear of yourself, to believe the wise and call them to your aid, and often to invoke Minerva, whose wisdom prevails above the rashness of Mars.”28 The author returns to the mentor-pupil theme in conversations between Socrates and Alcibiades (“You were made to be good, and you wanted to be evil; I cannot console myself5)29 and Alexander and Aristotle (where the latter observes: “When young, one is instructed, stimulated, and corrected by good men. Afterwards, one surrenders to three kinds of enemies: one’s presumption, one’s passions, and flatterers”).30 Alcibiades is painted in such evil shades that Charon is very reluctant to ferry him across the Styx.31 Most of the other dialogues are political in thrust. They run through antiquity up to some very pointed commentary on the young prince’s royal ancestors and their agents. Cardinal Bessarion lectures Louis XI: “I’d rather be a pedant than a cheat, a tyrant, and an enemy of mankind.”32 Philippe de Commines tells the same Dialogue des marts, works.

p. 62. I have been unable to locate the citation in Fenelon’s

26. Fenelon, Dialogues, dialogue 1, p. 3. 27. Ibid., dialogue 2, p. 6. 28. Ibid., dialogue 3, p. 8. 29. Ibid., dialogue 16, p. 58. 30. Ibid., dialogue 25, p. 97. 31. Ibid., dialogue 20, p. 79. 32. Ibid., dialogue 55, p. 185.

Tales Told by the Dead

83

monarch that kings must respect history since they cannot escape its censure.33 Louis XII castigates Franyois I: “I would rather that you had been the father of your people than the father of letters.”34 Henri IV, after giving an account of his own wise statesmanship, flings a final insult at Henri III: “[And I did] all that without deceiving, assassinating, or committing injustice.”35 Chancellor Oxenstierna of Sweden addresses Richelieu: “you made yourself odious to your nation....I died in peace, and all Europe is as full of my name as yours.”36 Finally, Richelieu gains some consolation in telling Mazarin: “You tried to defeat your enemies by ruse and cowardly disguises; as for me, I laid them low with transparent force.”37 Fenelon developed an unsparing form and style of political criti¬ cism which, if mingled with the satiric grace of a Fontenelle, might provide a clever vehicle for opposition propaganda.38 Although the dialogue of the dead did not find its way into the hands of such a master, there are a few interesting instances that followed. Of the oracles of High Enlightenment, Vauvenargues wrote eighteen speci¬ mens of the genre, but they were not published until 1820-1821; Voltaire dabbled at one or two;39 and d’Alembert wrote one which is important to our account. Certain literary and political figures of the recent French past seemed to interest Vauvenargues the most. These were mainly men whose “greatness” could excuse their failings, and whom he made to excuse one another in a dignified spirit of understanding (e.g., Richelieu, Mazarin, Bossuet, Fenelon). This was more an aesthetic and psychological than a political appreciation. As one of his interlo¬ cutors, Boileau, puts it: “If we were capable of serious reflection on ourselves and on the weakness of the human mind, we would excuse more faults and, happy to find a few virtues in the best men, we would be able to esteem and admire them despite their vices....”40

33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

dialogue dialogue dialogue dialogue

57, 62, 68, 74,

p. p. p. p.

193. 204. 225. 242.

37. Ibid., dialogue 75, p. 245. 38. Later dialogists seem to have avoided confronting Fontenelle and Fenelon: they had not discovered metacriticism. 39. Voltaire, “Conversation de Lucien, Erasme, Rabelais dans les Champs-Elysees,” Oeuvres completes 25:339-344. 40. Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, Oeuvres completes de Vauvenargues, ed. Henry Bonnier, 2 vols. in 1 (Paris, 1968), p. 361. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

84

Mortal Politics

In Vauvenargues’s dialogues the substance has shed its shell. Hades has disappeared from sight. The dead seem to be sitting in some limbo-like library setting, cancelled and preserved in humanity, possibly because Vauvenargues really despised death so much himself, possibly because his own style conversed best with styles already sealed in amber.41 D’Alembert’s single dialogue of the dead was prompted by the visit of Gustav III of Sweden to the Academie frangaise in 1774. The permanent secretary used his work for propaganda, meaning to flatter the monarch and the intellectual class at the same time by presenting a conversation between Descartes and his patroness Christina of Sweden. Descartes commences: “You know that on this very earth princes and philosophers don’t live much in one another’s company: if they sometimes seek each other out, it’s because of a transient feeling of mutual need, the princes to gain learning, the philosophers to be protected, both to be famous....”42 D’Alembert was transparently eager to see how far he could push the replace¬ ment of Throne and Altar by Throne and Intellect. He has Descartes comment bitterly on the slow pace of the education of nations, to which Christina brightly replies: “It is true that peoples make their way slowly; but they do make their way, and they get there sooner or later.”43 Descartes complains that France honoured him only after he was dead.44 A well-rehearsed Christina counters: “If posterity remembers me favourably, I owe it to the little I did for literature.”45 Descartes now propounds the full program of the Enlightenment: “Sooner or later the men who think and write govern opinion, and opinion governs the world.”46 Lest this seem too rash, he adds the corrective that “truth is released [from the hands of the wise] little by little, without causing any risk to those who hold it and let it slip away.”47 D’Alembert of course has no reason to think that the learned should fear the dissemination of their discoveries (how could he have anticipated the Jacobin assault against the academies in 1793?); this was a rather polite way of 41. Cf. in ibid., Pensees, no. 142: “To do great things one must live as if one never had to die; and no. 143: “The thought of death deceives us; for it makes us forget how to live,” p. 413. 42. D’Alembert, “Descartes et Christine de Suede,” in Fteelon, Dialogues des marts de Fenelon, suivis de quelques dialogues de Boileau, Fontenelle et d’Alembert (Paris, 1862), p. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p. p.

331. 333. 335. 336. 337.

Tales Told by the Dead

85

advising monarchy to make a coalition with the philosophes (Turgot came to power in the same year). It was clever of him to use a dialogue of the dead for the purpose. Certain writers of the High Enlightenment resuscitated the dialogue of the dead, with many of its ancient conventions intact, to raise moral issues in a new age of scepticism and intellectual pugnacity. Pagan trappings slipped away while the form took shape as a vehicle of social and political comment. However, it remained a medium of no conspicuous immediacy. Lesser pens would pursue it as a provocation to the ruling powers. We turn to their less polished efforts.

Dialogues, Scribblers, and Politics

The least known of the minor productions, and the earliest in date, is the Dialogues des marts d’un tour nouveau, published anonymously in The Hague in 1709, and recently attributed to Nicolas Gueudeville.48 The work is interesting for several reasons: its demo¬ lition of Lucianic style (its “tour nouveau”), its extension of the Fenelonian range of politics, and its uses of the dialogues of the dead for the radical ends of the French diaspora in Holland. Gueudeville was a fugitive Benedictine monk who had escaped from his monastery in 1688. A year later, he made his way to Rotterdam, where he quickly converted to Calvinism, married, and soon became embroiled in the quarrels of Jurieu and Bayle, siding with the latter. Bayle has left a notice describing him as an agreeable conversationalist and pleasure-lover.49 Probably Gueudeville’s Protestantism was pro forma or at least latitudinarian in the extreme. French emigre circles of the major Dutch cities were well penetrated by freethinking doctrines in the years immediately preceding the Treaty of Utrecht. Protestantism and the injustice of the Revocation could serve as a cloak for far more sweeping secularist and repub¬ lican propaganda, infused with scepticism, libertinism, and natural morality, and directed relentlessly against the political and religious

48. See Aubrey Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville and His Work,

1652-172? (The

Hague, 1982), p. 63. 49. Joseph-Frangois Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne..., 45 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 18:69.

86

Mortal Politics

institutions of France.50 In style, Gueudeville’s six dialogues were an extreme deformation, abandoning the brevity and wit of Lucian and even the rather more extended treatment of the form by Fontenelle and Fenelon. Of varying length, they occupy 469 pages of text. Not only did the author lack a compact style suited to the genre; he also wished for latitude in order to expatiate morally and politically on present conditions. By the nature of his seditious impulses an ironist and a dissembler, Gueudeville excused himself from classical practice on grounds of its inimitability,51 but what he really wanted was a wider broadcasting system. Thus he changed the character of Hades: his spokesmen, being dead, merely speak truth and justice and have shed their original traits and passions; their dialogues are long because they have lost all notion of time in the underworld. These are excuses for turning the dialogues into cumbersome cannonades against the manners and institutions of Bourbon France and its despot. When Gueudeville protests (a I’italienne) that his situations are imaginary and “have nothing to do with the happy or wretched souls in the eternity revealed to us by Holy Scripture,” his tongue is in his cheek. He goes on to say, significantly, that the Elysian Fields and Tartarus “are only imaginings, but in truth very useful to poli¬ tics.”52 Two of the dialogues transpire between Greek mythological figures, covering an ample range of moral, theological, and political questions; another is between Apuleius and the Renaissance philoso¬ pher Agrippa, covering magic and superstition; the fourth is between Heliogabalus, the tyrannical and hedonistic Roman emperor, and Diogenes, the cynic; the fifth, most central to our inquiry, confronts Caesar and Brutus; the sixth is between Caligula and Nero: who is worse? Gueudeville was a declared enemy of Fenelon, and had attacked his Aventures de Telemaque in a reply of some 1300 pages.53 Since Fenelon’s critical project was presumably for the benefit of a freer politics, it might seem at first glance odd that Gueudeville should treat the book roughly. But there were three good reasons for that. In the first place, by using the porous advantages of the Dutch press, the Huguenots could keep the controversy between the archbishop and his party and the divine-right absolutists simmering. Thereby 50. Well covered in Jacob, Radical Enlightenment. 51. [Nicolas Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, preface, pp. xi-xii. Cited in Rosen¬ berg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 63. 52. [Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, p. xviii; Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 64. 53. See Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 37.

Tales Told by the Dead

87

they could hope to show the despotism, evil, and futility of French institutions. Pages and chapters, many of them petty, repetitive, and boring, were their weapons in the fight. Secondly, and more impor¬ tantly, by using and disingenuously enlarging the official criticisms of Fenelon by orthodox censors, they could hope to expose the fatal cracks within French Catholicism. In the third place, their polemic was designed to transform the aristocratic attack on Bourbonism into a republican and secularist one. Undoubtedly it was for similar reasons that Gueudeville pursued Fenelon into his other genre, the dialogue des morts. There he spared little: the sexual mores of the monarch;54 constraints on liberty;55 and, most importantly, in the long dialogue between Caesar and Brutus, the forfeits of absolutism.56 As Rosenberg writes: “All the attacks on arbitrary power are intended to apply to the regime of Louis XIV.”57 Although the argument is pressed tenaciously on both sides, Brutus is the author’s spokesman and hero: “All the different kinds of states are subject to great disabilities...but the [republican government] is more just and more equitable than [the monarchical]; that is the main point that demands our attention.”58 Brutus does not opt for a democracy, but for a mixed and hierarchical republic. A republic sponsors liberty, and liberty is “the foundation of all that is good in civil society,” while absolutism is “the source of all evils.”59 In another dialogue, Caligula declares: “Our Romans aren’t the only ones who quickly got used to slavery; I have heard that there are on earth peoples who for a long time were proud of being governed as men, but whom one today would take for beasts of burden.”60 Nero comments sagaciously: “They would avoid their [troubles] without difficulty if they opened their eyes to their inter¬ ests....”61 In political boldness Gueudeville had no real competitors in the genre until the reign of Louis XV, by which time philosophical criti¬ cism had won an advanced position in letters and society. But he had one immediate successor in the diaspora of Holland: Antoine Bruzen de La Martiniere, a former secretary to the Duke of Mecklenburg, who, after the death of his patron, had emigrated to The Hague, 54. Ibid., pp. 67-70. 55. Ibid., p. 105. 56. Ibid., p. 194. 57. Ibid., p. 72. 58. [Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, p. 233; Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 76. 59. [Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, p. 301; Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 76. 60. [Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, p. 339; Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 77. 61. [Gueudeville], Dialogues des morts, p. 339; Rosenberg, Nicolas Gueudeville, p. 77.

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where Gueudeville had passed his last years, about the time that the latter was sick or dying (ca. 1720). The political situation had changed substantially in one generation. Although the Dutch printing establishments remained the major source of French contra¬ band literature, the apocalyptic feelings of the War of the Spanish Succession had been tempered. Like Gueudeville, La Martiniere is described in biographical notices as a “compilateur laborieux” (and his spacious, ephemeral literary production confirms this); but he was evidently less flagrant than the self-defrocked and radical monk. He had gone abroad voluntarily, lived in a certain style, and had come to Holland under the French Regency. He was privileged to enter¬ tain visitors of high rank.62 No doubt he arrived in Holland with habits and opinions that were freer, being Protestant, than those current in France. But he did not have to combat Versailles or embody the “crise de la conscience europeenne” in quite the same way as Gueudeville. In one sustained experiment he adopted the form of the dialogues of the dead and carried them to even more inordinate length. His Entretiens des ombres aux Champs-Elysees are massive by any standards: they three times exceed the bulk of Gueudeville’s productions. They are also a kind of game of mirrors. La Martiniere chose the pseu¬ donym of Valentin Jungermann and perpetrated the notion that he “had drawn these Entretiens from an enormous German compilation and delicately adapted them to the genius of our [French] language.”63 The dialogues feature pairings like the (elder) Marquis d’Argenson and the famous criminal Cartouche (executed in 1721), Pope Sixtus V and Moliere, Elizabeth and Cromwell, Confucius and Machiavelli. Their immense length does not entirely smother them: they are becomingly witty and helter-skelter, leaping from topic to topic with little structural development. They faintly suggest the coming brilliance of Diderot. In fact, in the first dialogue Cartouche defends his “metier de filou” in much the same tone as Rameau’s nephew defends his parasitic way of life, and he mocks heroism by claiming to be less of a criminal than Alexander the Great.64 The whole institution of royalty gets pretty well raked over. But Regency readers could not have tolerated too much political moralizing in 62. Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle 27:160-161. 63. In the words of Francois Bruys, another “compilateur” and author of the Critique desinteressee des journaux litteraires et des ouvrages des savants, 3 vols. (The Hague, 1730). 64. [Bruzen de La Martiniere], Entretiens des ombres aux Champs-Elysees, (Amsterdam, 1722), 1:14.

3 vols.

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such a huge extension of the dialogue form. La Martiniere recog¬ nizes this in the “avertissement” to his final dialogue; he will be deco¬ rative a contre-coeur: “I am well aware that many readers need trivial tales and that they wouldn’t open a book if they thought they were going to be seriously instructed by a moral. I have favoured these same readers by having more regard for their taste than for my own on numerous occasions.”65 Still, a number of seditious themes peep through.66 In the half-century following, numerous and usually anonymous specimens of dialogues of the dead were published from abroad in French, using political interlocutors. In 1775 a compiler made an anthology under the inevitable title Nouveaux dialogues des morts, citing, among precursors, the oeuvre of Bruzen de La Martiniere, “devenue rare.”67 It was just at this time (in the wake of the “Maupeou coup” and at the sudden death of Louis XV) that uses of the dialogue became pointedly and politically savage. Mathieu-Frangois Pidansat de Mairobert, a colourful literary fringe figure who had previously occupied a position in the censor¬ ship office and enjoyed the confidence of Malesherbes,68 left at least two of these. The first presents Louis XV at the gates of Hades to meet Pluto and be judged by Minos. A proclamation is issued calling together a whole host of French notables, past (Louis XII and Henri IV) and present (the Queen, Stanislas of Poland, the Dauphin, the Due de Bourgogne, the Due d’Orleans, the Comte de Clermont, etc.) to give testimony for the judgement. The whole machinery and personnel of Hades are present, as in the plot-frames of Lucian, to add comic flavour. Louis XV is certainly no longer the “roi bienaime.”69 The tenor of the dialogue may be grasped by the following exchanges: Minos. What did you do to make your people happy? Louis XV. That was not my business. It was up to my ministers. Jupiter did not set up kings for them to be tormented and made 65. Ibid., avertissement to the last dialogue. 66. E.g., ibid., 1:276; 2:62, 192; 3:75. 67. [Anon.], Nouveaux dialogues des morts, recueillis de divers journaux (Paris, 1775). 68. Pidansat de Mairobert committed suicide with both a razor and a pistol in 1779. His piquant sketches of current affairs and gossip were later collected and published in ten volumes under the title of L’espion anglois ou correspondance secrete entre Milord All’Eye et Milord All’Ear..., (London, 1784). 69. Pidansat de Mairobert, L’espion anglois, vol. 2, letter 18, “Sur un livre intitule 1’ombre de Louis XV devant Minos,” p. 256.

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more wretched than the lowest handyman.... Minos (now using the tutoiement). And you outrage Jupiter by claiming that he created twenty million people for your petty pleasures! Louis XV. Anyway, I didn’t have a bad heart. I wouldn’t have minded bringing happiness to my people, if it had really depended on me. But how could I? I was absolutely incapable of paying the slightest attention to public affairs.... 0 In the midst of testimony on the administration of the “triumvirate,” Minos thunders: “Pusillanimous monarch!...you had no sensitivity, no notion of government, none even of humanity....71 To the monarch’s complacent sentence “...many people were obliged to sacrifice themselves for me,” Minos rejoins: “Your people were weary, fatigued, worn down by your reign and only drew breath once they had been delivered from a prince who was their cruellest curse.”72 Louis XV is treated to twelve such trial sessions. At the end he is sentenced to the pit of Tartarus, where he will join Sardanapalus, Nero, Caligula, Louis XI, and others of his kind. The verdict is to be posted in France so that Louis XVI will be warned against the practices of his grandfather.73 Even in the atmosphere of Maupeouana and the scandal literature surrounding Madame du Barry, Mairobert was writing fairly strong stuff. Moreover, his Hades imagery could well suggest to Christian subjects the likely fate of their unrepentant Catholic monarch. The author did not relax in his pursuit of the Bourbons. In a second dialogue, which features the arrival in Hades of the Prince de Conti,74 a cousin and bitter antagonist of Louis XV, the deceased king inquires: “You mean everything isn’t going as well as it might?” “Not exactly,” Conti replies.75 The inexperience of the young king, the frivolity of Marie-Antoinette, and the disgrace of Turgot and Malesherbes are commented on at length. “It would be funny,” the king muses,” if they even regretted Maupeou.” “You would laugh even more,” Conti says, “if I told you that they wanted the Abbe Terray back.”76 The parlements, so popular during their exile, are 70. Ibid., pp. 258-259. 71. Ibid., pp. 261-262. 72. Ibid., p. 269. 73. Ibid., p. 274. 74. Pidansat de Mairobert, L’espion anglois, vol. 4, letter 46, “Dialogue entre Louis XV 8c le prince de Conti,” pp. 81-105. 75. Ibid., p. 83. 76. Ibid., p. 90.

Tales Told by the Dead

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then accused by Conti of vanity and dereliction of the law. “Why then,” asks Louis XV, “was I so despised by my subjects at my death, when they don’t complain about my successor?” Conti explains that there is no public pardon for fifty-nine years of misrule, whereas much can be forgiven an inexperienced young king whose ministers, though inept, are not sunk in evil.77 Louis XV appears consoled by the thought that, whatever happens, the strong always triumph over the weak and monarchs always make mistakes. But not all monarchs: the dialogue ends with a burst of Henriolatry. Louis XV regrets that, for never having thought of this king or tried to imitate him, he has been forbidden to approach him in the world of the departed. Conti, not subject to this prohibition, promises to consult with Henri IV and report back.78 Henriolatry is also the theme of the interestingly constructed dialogue of the dead by Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, a distin¬ guished noble of the Austrian Netherlands, court favourite at Versailles, and a writer of taste and skill as well as an accomplished warrior. His dialogue was probably written around 1779, although not published till four years later. The Prince de Ligne sets up the scenario as follows: “The other day Minos took it into his head to rank the dead in several classes. Here we rank them in heaps, but down there it’s different....”79 The Jesuit historian Pere Griffet, recently deceased (1771), has been appointed to this task by Minos, who understands nothing of the moderns, including their languages. There then follows a long, but artful, passing parade through which eighteen different characters trot, revealing their pretensions and degree of merit. Henri IV, first on the scene, quips to the Jesuit: “You can’t kill me any longer here, but, for God’s sake, don’t bore me.”80 Griffet assures him that “up there” his fame is without rival: “They speak of no one else, they draw you, they engrave you, they wear you on their fingers, they play you on the stage, they sing about you, they praise you, they tell tales about you, they swear by you....” Now Louis XIV enters and tries to promote his virtues: Louis. ...what a difference I had in education! Masters of all sorts, of the highest merit! Henri. Masters! I never had but one. 77. Ibid., p. 97. 78. Ibid., p. 99. 79. Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, “Dialogue des morts,” in Me'moires et melanges historiques et litte'raires, 5 vols. (Paris, 1827-1829), 2:85. 80. Ibid., p. 89.

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Louis. Who was it? Henri. Adversity. You had it, too, but it was too late. It didn’t correct you, and it made you ridiculous rather than interesting. Louis. The Graces presided at my birth. Whenever I approached a place, it was adorned; every step I took was a festival. In all my exercises I shone....81 This kind of defense will avail Louis XIV nothing. A sequence of other characters, each in some way entitled to the epithet “grand,” then ensues. At the end, Griffet finds that the Grand Turk and the Grand Mogul far surpass Peter the Great and Louis the Great. Conde and Corneille are worth far more than Alexander. Francis, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, is greatly superior to Constantine, Charlemagne, or Leopold of Austria. Finally, as for Henri IV, “one has but to name him to sing his praise.”82 The Prince de Ligne does not attempt to have Minos punish the unworthy. Nonetheless, this is revealing political commentary to have from an Austrian convive of Versailles, not least for its being one of the many evidences of Henriolatry in the waning years of the Old Regime.83

The Dead of Thermidor

The ascending Revolution (1789-1794) silenced all conversations in Hades. This is not a time when a Fontenelle would have prospered. The French, busy with deeds, had had enough of mannered moral scenes; they had reflected enough on the politics of the past, on history teaching by examples; and they had absorbed all this pour et contre into their images of the new order. Whatever that new order was to become, it would not, they thought, repeat the errors and crimes documented in the dialogues of the dead. They had left school to regenerate the world. It was not just that the crescendo of deeds robbed men of time for literary pursuits. The new freedom of the press sapped their creative power to think beyond today’s polemic and tomorrow’s constitution. The spirit of Minos lived on: but it was flesh-and-blood 81. Ibid., p. 93. 82. Ibid., p. 125. 83. See below, esp. pp. 136, 137-140, 176, 232-234, 244.

Tales Told by the Dead

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actors who were being judged on the public stage, not Louis XI and Charles XII; and it was Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Danton who declaimed the reborn nation, not Demosthenes and Cicero. Finally, with the advent of the Terror, the river Styx became the river Seine. For the masters of the moment, the dead were not, quite obviously, gathered in one place: many filled common ditches, others were apotheosized in the Pantheon. With the Thermidorian reaction, a new freedom seemed to return to the literary community, some of whose members had been confined in prisons awaiting the blade of the law. Transformed, and sometimes corrupted, by their close encounters with real politics, yet nostalgic for the belle-lettristic solidarity of the Old Regime, these men began to re-gather in their conventicles and institutes to accuse the inquisitors of virtue, whose vengeance they had barely survived, and to create a new mythology of the wisdom and shame of the recent dead. Some were, by now, inclined to royalism; but, living in a declared republic still fiercely at war with the dynasts, they could not carry this banner before the public. Small wonder that one dialogist could put these words into the mouth of his master Fontenelle: “The true and only freedom is dependence on a legitimate authority, which will neither leave the governed to their own devices nor place them too much in bondage to their rulers. ”84 Yet Fontenelle had never been a political theorist of any sort. The mood once more favoured a moralistic interrogation of the departed, and dialogues were again forthcoming. An examination of three series of dialogues of the dead from the Directory will establish the tone and purpose of the enterprise. The first of these, whose author is known to have been Jean-Pierre Gallais, an ex-monk and prolific political writer, impris¬ oned under the Terror and released shortly after 9 Thermidor, is closest to the events it covers, and it is the most ostensibly republican in tone. In a notice prefacing the first dialogue, Gallais announces that he is replying to the appeal of Freron [of I’Orateur du Peuple]...who, in his tenth number, invites the sections of Paris [to express themselves freely].”85 He will defend the Revolution as necessary, but attack the Jacobins for perverting its intentions. The 84. Francois-Xavier Pages, Nouveaux dialogues des marts entre les plus fameux personnages de la Revolution franqaise... (Paris, an VIII [1800]), fourteenth dialogue, p. 120. Italics in the original. 85. This comes out in the fourth dialogue, where there is a reference to the Alma¬ nack des prisons, followed by a six-page list of victims, among whom the author, describing himself as a “froid observateur,” is found. [Jean-Pierre Gallais], Dialogue des morts de la Revolution... (Paris, 1795 [an III]), p. 40f.

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work consists of seven dialogues in all and runs to a total of 130 pages. Some of these dialogues are unsigned and others bear the pseudonymous name of “Pilpay” (Pilpay or Pilpai was a legendary Hindu storyteller, already used as a persona in Morelly’s Basiliade). In his first dialogue, Gallais defends the freedom of the press through the mouthpiece of Loustalot, first editor of the Revolutions de Paris, according to whom, writers, “brandishing the torch of truth before everyone’s eyes, thundered, fought, and overturned thrones and tyrants.”86 Philippeaux and Desmoulins are hailed as “martyrs of the Revolution,”8' while Robespierre’s “patriotism” is equated to the “religion” of Louis XIV as a “saddle for all horses.”88 What free expression permits is “a party of opposition,” without which there is no balance or liberty.89 In the third dialogue, the murdered Gustav III of Sweden, who had carried through reforms in a peaceful fashion, lectures Mirabeau: “Liberty cannot grow when it is watered with blood.”90 In a footnote Gallais himself wonders why “liberty is always placed beside death...on the walls, on the frontispiece of books...,”91 perhaps stifling his memory of the pervasive “vivre libre ou mourir” motto common to all the sects of the Revolution. A fourth dialogue, where the author inserts his own biographical note, depicts the horror of hundreds of thousands of prisoners waiting for the scaffold.92 He expostulates: “...and they called this regenerating the Nation-turning out carmagnoles, watering trees of liberty, bleeding the body of the citizens (corps politique).... ”93 It is inevitably this recoil from bloodshed in the name of a propor¬ tionate liberty where literature can be revived that strikes us about these Thermidorian writers. Their dialogues evoke gory proximity, and all of the witty detachment of their models has been withered. If Gallais’s work has no claim as literature, it carries a certain power of political witness. Not that much can be said for the contribution of Frangois-Xavier Pages (best known as a mediocre novelist), who published dialogues five years later, when events had somewhat receded. They are insufferably wordy and wooden. Pages claims universality for his form (summoning his previous sources), and says

86. Ibid., p. 9. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p.

10. 11. 15. 34.

p. 35. p. 39.

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that he will try ...to call back to sound morality, true politics, and common sense men of all parties, who perhaps never in any other century have strayed further from the rules of the vrai beau and the honnete, and from the invariant principles of wisdom and prudence, some from ambition and greed, others from the delirium of revenge— too many from the thirst for gold or blood, and not a few from the desire to shine and to say or do extraordinary things....94 Pages adds modestly that “it is especially amid imminent danger that every citizen owes his country the tribute of his thoughts.”95 Eighteen dialogues of the dead, to be followed by eight dialogues of the living that differ in no important stylistic respect from the others, are then presented. Some of Pages’s dialogues are ancientmodern and some modern. Charles I of England tells Louis XVI: “Your greatest political fault, and my own, came from oscillations of strength and weakness in our character.”96 Danton is forced to confess, on behalf of himself and Couthon: “We were both intoxi¬ cated by our sudden eminence; it made us wicked, raging, and mad....”97 A latent monarchism peers through in a speech by Pierre Corneille.98 Militarism also occurs here, as well as in a dialogue between Generals Marceau and Joubert, for it is not to be supposed that the conservative Pages can easily resist the glory of French republican armies.99 In other scenes, Barnave and Brissot, Marat and Mirabeau hurl wild charges against each other.100 Sulla accuses Robespierre of perpetrating a Terror so wanton that he was destroyed by it himself, only to receive the astonishing reply: “But didn’t I experience sweet pleasures? I slaked the thirst for blood that was devouring me. I needed blood, always more blood...and I quaffed it unhindered. Was I not happy?”101 Pages’s political heroes are constitutional royalists like Malesherbes and Bailly. His well-turned dialogue between Rousseau and Voltaire is an interesting piece of recuperative propaganda for Jean-Jacques, so idolized by the Jacobins. These two philosophes, who crossed swords in the real world, begin by commending each other.102 Voltaire 94. Pages, Nouveaux dialogues, p. vii. 95. Ibid., p. viii. 96. Ibid., p. 15. 97. Ibid., p. 30. 98. Ibid., twelfth dialogue, p. 105. 99. Ibid., ninth dialogue, pp. 79, 82. 100. Ibid., fifteenth dialogue, p. 130; sixteenth dialogue, p. 141. 101. Ibid., seventeenth dialogue, p. 146. 102. Ibid., eighth dialogue, p. 63.

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laments that they had been made to share the Pantheon with Marat.103 Rousseau has even stronger reproaches: “Did they [the Jacobins] think that they could make liberty triumph through anarchy, virtue through crime, laws through assassination, fraternity through death? But that wasn’t the goal of those wretches. They wanted, by piling up thousands of victims and covering all France with new Bastilles, to be raised to a dictatorship of crime in which they would share.”104 Yet the Revolution had its glory: “We saw beauty, youth, and almost infancy rival in firmness those who had been best trained to face death....”105 “There are my French,” Voltaire chimes in, “frivolous and fickle Athenians, but sublime.”106 Rousseau hints that Voltaire might have done better to spare religion a little, to which the sage of Ferney answers: “We were always a little dry and chilly in everything,” hardly a compliment to the author of La Nouvelle Heloise.107 We have finally a sequence of fourteen dialogues of the dead by Jean Chas, another “compilateur infatigable,” appended to his verse tragedy in three acts, La mort de Robespierre.108 These are also stri¬ dently anti-Jacobin, more savage even than the works of Pages. However, Fauchet, Petion, and Herault de Sechelles receive some extenuation, probably because all were victims of the official Terror. The “triumvirate” of 9 Thermidor, together with sanguinary figures like Marat, Henriot, and Hebert, are treated to Chas’s worst abomi¬ nations. Robespierre is pitted against Cromwell, and the point is made that both these “usurpers” waged combat against learning.109 Machiavelli addresses Saint-Just as “mon cher eleve.” He informs his pupil that his failure was brought about by depending too much on words and not enough on actions. Why, for example, had he both¬ ered to set up any kind of judicial forms? Because of “fraternity,” Saint-Just replies.110 “Bon dieul” Machiavelli exclaims, “why did you waste three whole months killing the king?”111 Saint-Just is rapt with admiration: “Great man! Robespierre would have given you half of France....” Hereupon the Florentine closes the debate: “If I had 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid.,

p. 65. p. 67. p. 71. pp. 73-74.

108. [Jean Chas], La mort de Robespierre, tragedie en trois actes...ouvrage...suivi de quatorze dialogues entre les personnages les plus celebres dans la Revolution... (Paris, an IX-1801). 109. Ibid., p. 157. 110. Ibid., pp. 171-172. 111. Ibid., pp. 173-174.

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been the lawmaker, Robespierre would not have lived twentv-four hours.”112 7 Chas surpasses Pages in skill by such turns. After the emperors Caligula and Nero find Marat inadequate to their sanguinary expec¬ tations, the journalist turns on them with: “If in Rome there had been a man like me, neither of you would have lived two minutes. Cola da Rienzi and Henriot become entangled in a comic malentendu over the meanings and tactics of their respective insurrections.114 St. Dominic and Chabot (a former Dominican) joust over inquisitorial procedures.115 Hebert, on being reminded that under a king you would still be alive,” confesses that the regime of the Capetians was “a hundred times more just than that of Robespierre. 16 Anaxagoras, the philosopher friend of Pericles who avoided public affairs, taunts Chaumette for so maladroitly adopting his name.117 Charlotte Corday receives her laurels from Mucius Scaevola, the brutally murdered mentor of Cicero.118 At least six of the dialogues of Chas are very readable for their mixture of politics, style, and wit. He was not, however, imitated or followed by any successors of merit. The Empire, a dark night for both politics and literature, drew the curtain. Without ancestry himself, the emperor thought it best to still all kinds of ancestral voices. Chas, among others, went over to his camp.

The Significance of the Form

At first glance, dialogues of the dead seem to bear none of the meta¬ physical burden of mortality. They are not Christian texts (even Fenelon’s is not), although they appear in what is still for the most part a Christian culture.119 They appear chiefly before an audience of “modern unbelievers who reject [eternal punishment], either 112. Ibid., pp. 174-175. 113. Ibid., p. 185. 114. Ibid., pp. 189-190. 115. Ibid., pp. 205-209. 116. Ibid., p. 258. 117. Ibid., p. 265. 118. Ibid., pp. 269-270. 119. See especially Georges Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, I'homme au siecle des Lumieres (Paris, 1972), pp. 19-38.

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because they imagine the soul to be mortal like the body, or because an eternity of punishment seems to them incompatible with the idea of a God who is in essence and by his supreme power good and forgiving” (i.e., materialists and deists).120 Moreover, the dialogues proceed out of a tradition that is sceptical, comic, or serio-comic. They are sentences of the dead but not death sentences, not really about the experience of dying, except occasionally in Fontenelle. Are they then simply jeux d’esprit transplanting cognition, memory, social relations, and sometimes even moral maturation to the underworld for the entertainment, and secondarily the instruction, of the living? Or is there some deeper meaning beyond that obvious instrumental purpose? We might reflect here on Pascal’s famous observation that men seek to be happy by pushing all thought of death aside. If evasion of death is the best cheer that men can muster, then a dialogue of the dead is surely a reminder of death, whatever else it might be. The fact that characters of these dialogues are summoned not just from the “past” (as in ordinary history) but from the “dead” indicates a more than lively appreciation of their existence as separated voices: death can evidently teach something that the past cannot. Death is, among other things, detachment; the past is a kind of living conti¬ nuity where we treat with the dead as founders, ancestors, and even contemporaries. There is, to be sure, also continuity in Hades, where the recent dead join their seniors; but the breach between dead legend and living legend is more ultimate than that between ancients and moderns understood in a purely historical perspective. Hades might even be described as a kind of “state of second nature.” Although these dead are made to speak with a show of literary wit and never in an aura of horror, they still focus attention on the fact that they are disembodied voices. While the tone may be sceptical, the notion that the dead could speak to each other and indirectly speak to us through an authorial channel is not simply atheistic mockery, nor is it a totally contrived art form. The reason why this is so is found in a substantial number of these dialogues. The dead either judge each other, or even them¬ selves; sometimes they are judged by the mythical figure of Minos (or, in the case of the Prince de Ligne’s work, by his stand-in, the Pere Griffet); we are always, because of the exigencies and biases of the form, invited to judge them; and it is by no means rare that their judgements judge us. These various sorts of judgement might be thought to be mere titillations for the appetite of the modern 120. Article “Enter,” Encyclopedie, 5:668b.

Tales Told by the Dead

99

mind. But the implicit judgement of those presently alive by the dead or the judgement of the dead by the living, or even an imagi¬ native judgement of the dead by one another or by a supreme judge, respects a necrological instinct that connects the pagan and Christian worlds, and, using the symmetry and symbolism of those worlds, extends them into the outskirts of a still superstitious secularism. The notion of judgement was critical to the piety of human life long before it was expanded into law or logic. The two realms of life and death can make their intramural judgements; but, especially, each is qualified to judge the other in some peculiar sense; and, if the notion of a superior and, so to speak, transcendent judge is intro¬ duced, his judgement of the dead is final but his judgement of the living is conditional until the moment that they die. To attempt to co-opt the dialogues of the dead for Christian liter¬ ature would obviously be absurd. This form of writing, as noted, was produced for a tolerably incredulous milieu, not so different from that of Lucian of Samosata. However, the notion of making the thoughts of the dead contemporaneous with, as well as critical of, the life of the living (as in Fontenelle) is not an ostensibly anti-Christian idea. What is un-Christian is the invitation to a living public, with considerable prompting from the literary class, to judge souls in a manner normally reserved to God. It is also un-Socratic. Such a move leads not only to secular humanism (the “divinity of society”), but to subjectivism, pluralism, and ideology-to the extent that we take the form of the judgement and the oscillations of judging seriously and not as mere jeux d’esprit. Moral pluralism is not, however, moral Pyrrhonism. The eight¬ eenth century still had a lively notion of virtue and vice (who could doubt this after the Revolution?), although it often disagreed on their origin, nature, and content. Increasingly also, as we know, that century cultivated discrepant views of duties, especially political ones; and this is amply reflected in its assessments of great men who were monarchs, statesmen, or commanders. Thus it disagreed on how a life should be judged and on what the judgement meant to the living. It did not flinch from saying that lives should be judged. The question was-by whom and under what circumstances? In the Encyclopedic, under the rubric “immortalite,” we read the following: Immortality is still taken to mean that form (espece) of life that we achieve in living memory; that feeling which sometimes vaults us toward the finest actions is the strongest indication that we desire the approval of our fellow men. We hear the praise (eloge) that

100

Mortal Politics

they will eventually give us, and we commit our lives to this (nous nous immolons). We sacrifice ourselves, we give up our real exis¬ tence, to live in their memories.121 The criterion of approbation lies at the core of Hume’s theory of moral sentiment, expressly rejecting any transcendent or categorical a priori.122 It is accompanied here by a rather un-Humean, unsceptical interpretation of the coherence of the memory and its recep¬ tivity to the resonance of fame (the theme of Diderot’s Lettres a Falconet). However, it was by such anomalous means that the gens de lettres crossbred the philosophy of the century with the notions of glory and glorification culled from the ancients. This is one reason why Minos sometimes appears, sometimes not. When he does, he adds a certain majesty to the proceedings and even acts in loco parentis for the Christian judge of all men, who is inappropriate to the landscape of this genre. When he does not, the nexus of judge¬ ments is made entirely human, most explicitly concentrated in the reader guided by the author, the petty sovereign advised by his minister of culture. That literate human beings (as a public) may now judge the dead as a matter of course comes out rather interest¬ ingly in the same article: I am quite surprised that those who have been teaching men [the doctrine of] the immortality of the soul did not at the same time persuade them that they, beyond the grave, will hear the different judgements made of them when they are no longer.123 This is more complicated than it looks. The irony is evident: despite beliefs entertained since time out of mind by pagans and Christians alike, the church was extremely wary of the notion of communica¬ tion between the living and the dead without intercessory processes: candles and prayers were the authorized currency, not conversation. However, the author is also speculating that Christianity might have forsworn its cheerless doctrines of hell, purgatory, and eternal punishment (and thereby devised a place for the departed much like Hades) if it had employed the persuasive and far more humane argu¬ ment that the chastising voice of the living resounds in the ears of the dead. 121. Article “Immortalite,” ibid., 8:576b. 122. See David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1902): Morals, sect. 5, pt. 1, p. 216; sect. 9, pt. 1, p. 276. 123. Article “Immortality,” Encyclopedic 8:577a.

Tales Told by the Dead

101

It will already be clear why the powerful presence of an alterna¬ tive

allegorical

morality

and

literary

tradition

was

vital

to

the

“natural

preached by the eighteenth-century writers, and why it was

so attractive, even to Fenelon, as a didactic device. Pagan Hades could both stand for and stand against the internalized cosmos of Christian belief, of which all but the most intransigent freethinkers shared certain residues. It would have been wretchedly hard to gain the

same

indeed

advantage

such

were

from

possible

any

new

(and

it

mythology is

of modernism,

scarcely

so,

even

if

today).

Although Christianity assuredly had literary means of presenting its dead (e.g., the Divine Comedy), the payoff of the pagan scenario is that it could mix the play of wit with rationalistic or sceptical criti¬ cism of theological design. Moreover, as we have seen, the dialogues were an unmediated vehicle by which the living could both judge the dead and be edified by the best of them. According to the uses of the form, one could either conclude that the virtuous dead are our models

and

can

speak to us (at

least to

Rousseau and

Madame

Roland), or that the sad riddle of life is that the living are never prepared to learn from the dead. This balance—or contradiction-well suits the paradoxes of a century that was both sceptical and militant. We might assert, on the one hand, that the dialogue of the dead was an especially appropriate literary vehicle for sceptical moderates Fontenelle), pour et contre

(like

specialists

whose

impatience

with

dogmatism and moral fiat did so much indirectly to undermine tradi¬ tional institutions and habitual loyalties. However, if the project had stopped here, it could have been concluded (as with Montaigne and Descartes) that, in the absence of any very certain knowledge of morals and politics, inertia was probably the safest route. And so, on the

other

strain

hand,

through

this a

genre also expressed its didactic,

dramatic

manipulation

of

vice

and

Plutarchian and eventually activist and political strain.

hortatory virtue,

a

Scepticism

sapped the old morale among certain of the elites; activism steadily occupied the ground surrendered. Both

the

sceptical

and

benefited

from

dialogues.

If personages

could

be

shown

natural as

the

admonitory

qualities

of

of history,

fatuous

as

well

wit

strands

and

satire

occupying as base,

or

of in

familiar

the the

form best

positions,

witty as well as

virtuous, their audience would obviously respond more readily. But there was first a certain need to sort out the heroes and villains in not only a comparative, but a kind of lexical, order: this was not

commedia dell’arte. Amid the scores of characters presented, there was a

noticeable convergence on a fundamental

heroic model in the

102

Mortal Politics

political realm: Henri IV. Hero-roles were further strengthened by the

form’s

resistance

to

any

utopianizing

of the

past:

the

dead

continually remind us of continuities in human nature, whether they are base or noble. After making a brilliant entry at the troubled close of the reign of Louis XIV, the “dead” appear to have lent themselves with increased frequency to political purposes in the years when the authority crisis defined itself. More and more of the recent dead were exposed in the dialogues. After the Revolution had abated, its many villains and a few heroes (e.g., Bailly and Charlotte Corday)124 were made to profess their motives by Thermidorian moderates who found the dialogue form congenial. Death was not now distant, but a perilously close historical presence for these survivors, whose message was not merely political but vengeful. They reviewed a parade of scelerats whose corpses were scarcely cold. Fontenelle and politics did mix: caught between extremes of the ultras and the Jacobins, these medi¬ ocre “compilateurs laborieux” were rather plaintively yearning for the good old days of the “crise de la conscience europeenne.” 124. Bailly was sometimes thought to have inherited Fontenelle’s mantel, as the “member of the Three Academies” (i.e., Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Sciences, and the Academie franchise).

The Point of Honour Chapter 5

The Problematic of Duelling

Duelling appears to have been a refinement of private war, but it was also a public scourge, and may even have been the significant symbol of wider French society. For centuries the French had the reputation of being a hot-blooded race, quick to take offense, eager for the fracas.1 The substitution of republican vertu for aristocratic honneur did not alter this image, partly because it was mediated by vengeance, which the Revolution collectivized but did not still. At the same time, commoners amply distributed along the social spectrum accepted the aristocratic habit of the duel: we will find it much later, even among the gratin of Proustian society. Flowever, our concern here will be to observe conditions of duelling in the eighteenth century, partly with the hope of shedding some light on 1789. Just as the Old Regime Frenchman was not reluctant to draw the sword, so also the new-model Frenchman of 1789 and after would prove delicate on matters of the Revolutionary point d’honneur. This investigation of duelling is part of a wider problematic that can be expressed as follows: (1) Does the persistence of the duel provide further evidence for the widely alleged disposition of the French bourgeoisie to wish to “live nobly” (vivre noblement), rather than to create and impose its own culture, up to the very eve of the Revolution? (2) On the other hand, does the generally perceived waning of the duel in the reign of Louis XVI indicate a contrary disposition, or at least a surrender of feudalistic manners to “the philosophy of the century”? (3) Whatever is concluded on these points, how would the verdict affect the thesis that the value system 1. This is generally asserted in Micheline Cuenin, Le duel sous I’Ancien Regime (Paris, 1982). Regarding the army, see the remarks of Albert-Arsine Babeau, La vie militaire sous I’Ancien Regime, 2 vols. (Paris, 1889-1890), 1:166, 367.

104 of

Mortal Politics the

nobility

had

changed

radically

by

1760,

with

“honour”

replaced by “merit” as a guiding principle?2 Finally, can we perceive any linkage between an earlier context of personal score-settling and the practice of Revolutionary violence itself? My exploration will not settle these questions, but it will provide an additional way of stud¬ ying them. It will also trace a theme that has the immense advantage of treating the Revolution as an integral element and not merely as an aberrant interruption in the evolution of “mentalities.” We may take “drawing the sword” to be a symbol or reflex of what might be called aristocratic or private justice. As Hobbes wrote: “...amongst the passions, courage (by which I mean the contempt of wounds, and violent death) inclineth men to private revenges, and sometimes to endeavour the unsettling of the public peace.”3 Public justice, the justice of the state, as represented both by the central¬ izing

Bourbon

monarchy

and

by

successor

institutions

of

the

republic, strove to curtail this tendency with regular, reliable, and common

ordinances.

Popular justice can be identified as a third

category: born out of centuries of social grievance, it was the senti¬ ment

not

of a

“public,”

but

of a

group,

mass,

or

faction

that

regarded its demands, procedures, and goals as superseding public justice on the grounds of a higher expediency or morality. It was often a form of vengeful behaviour, in which respect it shared some common elements of extra-legal recourse with aristocratic justice, while at the same time exhibiting express hatred for the institutions and manners of aristocracy. It goes without saying that there are vast differences among a “duel between gentlemen,” a common bagarre or

fixe, class warfare, and the dispositions of a Revolutionary journee. Yet all of these expressions of behaviour are directed against public law with the intent of defying it or superseding it.

The Domestication of Private War The aristocratic notion of justice was inseparable from the inherited practice of personal score-settling and private war, as well as the

2. This thesis, less familiar than the preceding two, is forcefully argued by Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, “Aux origines de la Revolution: Annates E.S.C., 20 (1975):265-278, especially pp. 267-268. 3. Hobbes, Leviathan, conclusion, p. 460.

noblesse

et

bourgeoisie,”

The Point of Honour

105

right to dispense seigneurial and manorial justice, which the central state had gradually,

especially under Richelieu, taken out of the

hands of the nobles.4 It was an idea based on estate, blood, honour, and privilege, in origin a warrior’s code; as Montesquieu writes, “il fait gloire de mepriser la vie” (“it is glorious to have a contempt for life”).5 The practice revolves around the rich and ambiguous notion of honneur,

whose connotations ranged in the eighteenth century

from the sublime to the ridiculous. Whatever Montesquieu may find admirable or blameworthy in the “tempered monarchy,” it must be conceded that his treatment of the “honour” of his age, “that is, the prejudice of each person and each condition,” is often sardonic.6 The aristocracy’s honour “is to obey a king while regarding it as a sovereign

infamy

to

share

power

with

the

people.”7

In

the

Encyclopedic, Jaucourt, following a tradition endemic in certain strains of Renaissance humanism,8 identifies “honour” with a virtue that shuns orgueil and bravado: “Let [the prince] be persuaded that these virtues [e.g., courage, loyalty, respect for truth] and all others will accompany talent; when celebrity and the glory of genius cannot erase the shame of bad morality, then honour is active, but the day when

intrigue

and

personal

connections

obtain

honours

is

the

moment when it vanishes.”9 This was not, however, what the ancient aristocracy had intended by honour; rather it was understood as connected with pride and physical bravery. Various attempts were made in the eighteenth century to explain the genealogy of aristo¬ cratic

honour

from

post-Carolingian

past

this was

perspective. not a

mere

The

barbarism

mythology

in

of France’s the

Age of

Reason, despite well-known exaggerations. Predatory tribalism and freebooting virtually demolished law and order in some places. As Bloch writes:

Violence became the distinguishing part of an epoch and a social system....[It] played a part in the economy: at a time when trade

4. On remnants of seigneurial justice, see Favre, La mort au siecle, pp. 51-52. 5. Montesquieu, De I'esprit des lois, bk. 3, chap. 8. 6. Ibid., chap. 6. 7. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 9. 8. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), especially pp. 125-128, 229-231. 9. Article “Honneur,” Encyclopedie 8:290b.

106

Mortal Politics

was scarce and difficult, what surer means of becoming rich than plunder and opposition?...Violence entered into the spirit of the law as well; partly on account of the principle of customary law which in the long run resulted in the legalization of almost every usurpation; and also in the consequences of the firmly rooted tradition which recognized the right, or even made it the duty, of the individual or the small group to execute justice on its own account.10

Such violence was not specifically aristocratic, of course; but it stimu¬ lated the founding of an ethos from which the feudal type of justice flowed axiomatically as the waves of anarchy receded. Historically bent eighteenth-century writers put forth various explanations and opinions regarding aristocratic practices. In Montesquieu’s words: In a military nation, where strength, courage, and prowess are esteemed, the really odious crimes are those that arise from fraud, artifice, and cunning, that is, from cowardice....I conclude, there¬ fore, that under the circumstances of a time when trial by combat...obtained, there was such an agreement between these laws and manners of the people that the laws were rather unjust in themselves than productive of injustice; that the effects were more innocent than the cause, that they were more contrary to equity than prejudicial to rights, more unreasonable than tyran¬ nical.11 Montesquieu pointed out that duels were a regulated refinement of private war, a result of “a certain reason based on experience.” His source seems to have been Louis Legendre’s Moeurs et coutumes des Franqais (1713).12 D’Alembert copied his observations almost verbatim in his Encyclopedic article “Champion,” as did Diderot in “Treve de Dieu,” where it was argued that private wars had raged among the Franks even into the early period of the troisieme race.

10. Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1964), 2:411. 11. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, bk. 28, chap. 17. Also, cf. bk. 30, chap. 20: “Practicing justice was nothing more than granting an offender protection against the vengeance of the offended and obliging the latter to receive a certain satisfaction, so that, among the Teutons, as opposed to all other peoples, justice was handed down to protect the criminal against the plaintiff.” 12. See Montesquieu, Pensees, no. 1953, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Caillois, 1:1474.

The Point of Honour

107

Duclos presents an even more complex and interesting “natural history” of personal combat. Noting the providential beliefs of the “Gothic” centuries, he maintains that custom and belief translated trial by combat into law, rather than vice-versa: According to all appearances, the origin of the duel was not a legal usage. A man, accustomed to draw the sword, having been accused of some crime in a private quarrel, would have recourse to weapons, probably to revenge his insult rather than prove his innocence. If he was victorious in the fight, people were more circumspect in making any reproaches: subconsciously (insensiblement), and through a secret feeling of fear or admiration, they judged him innocent; they believed it natural that heaven would favour the just cause; in following times this presentiment was transformed into an infallible judgement; the courage of the outraged innocent party was thereby sharpened, and it was a great step toward victory: several favourable outcomes led to the adop¬ tion of this feeling into law, which was compatible besides with the genius of the nation.13 Duclos did not hesitate to point out in succeeding remarks that if the origin of the modern duel was the medieval duel judiciaire or judge¬ ment of God, then this placed duels in the same category with other strange ordeals to determine guilt or innocence: they were therefore not compatible with civilization and enlightenment. That, indeed, was the common view of the parti des lumieres (though Voltaire once demanded reparation par les armes in 1725 from the haughty Chevalier de Rohan, who had the young author beaten by his servants).14 Nevertheless, as we shall see, the presence of private justice and the persistence of the point d’honneur were not strangers to the Age of Reason or the Revolution, even among the bour¬ geoisie. But almost as an isolated intellectual voice, Vauvenargues defended the duel on the grounds that nature favoured the plus fort and that personal combat was bracing, because “a man who fears death is not worthy to live.”15

13. “Memoire sur les epreuves par le duel et par les elements: Discours prononce devant l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres en

1739,”

in Charles Pinot

Duclos, Oeuvres completes, 9 vols. (Paris, 1820-1821), 3:507. 14. Rohan used the alternative device available to influential nobles-the lettre de cachet-to have Voltaire pursued, causing him to seek temporary refuge in England. 15. Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvenargues, “Reflexions sur le caractere des differents si£cles,” in Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1827), 1:275-276.

108

Mortal Politics

Despite its lethal insignificance when compared with wars, epidemics, starvation, and even public criminal justice, the duel was a symbol of the French sensibility of honneur and manliness.16 To fight-even to the death -privately was essentially an aristocratic prerogative asserted against the res publica and a scandal to its conformity. Only the nobility were specially privileged to carry the sword, although gardes bourgeoises and other elements of municipal police had been armed for centuries, as had many other commoners before the intensified “police” of Louis XIV. Nevertheless, as Louis-Sebastien Mercier observed (and other texts verify), the pre-Revolutionary bourgeoisie-royal officials, petits robins, and miscel¬ laneous townsmen-wishing to ape the noble order did not fail to absorb the esprit bretailleur.17 When the petit bourgeois Rossignol, later a general of the Revolutionary armies, visited his family in Paris in 1781, he confided that “during my stopover I had several altercations with soldiers. I drew my sword seven times.”18 Nicolas Guenot, a future terrorist who arrested Andre Chenier, “was in and out of prison throughout his [military] service [1775-1783]; and in one of the brawls in which he was involved and in which sabres were drawn, he was severely wounded in the left arm, the use of which he never fully recovered.”19 No doubt this is a potentially endless cata¬ logue. Though the bourgeoisie aspired to peace, commerce, and lumieres, it also wanted to validate the equal privilege of going armed.20 We need only think of the militarism of competing plumes, cockades, and uniforms of the Gardes Nationales of 1789, those “airs” that so much tried the patience of the plebs. Aristocratic justice had waned greatly-despite numerous docu¬ mented exceptions—since the reign of Louis XIV. Still one must not underestimate the power of this attitude on French manners. The Revolution would not have been so explosive if the envy of rank and custom of revenge had not been strongly planted. We should not 16. For a modern context, see Jesse Pitts, “Continuity and Change in Bourgeois France,” in Stanley Hoffmann, et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass., 1963) pp 244-245. ™' 17. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau cte Paris, new edition, 12 vols. (Amsterdam 1782-1788), vol. 2, chap. 197. 18. Victor Barrucand, ed., La vie veritable du citoyen Jean Rossignol (Paris, 1896), pp. 19. Richard Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (London, 1972), p. 80. 20. See, for example, the cahier of Tinteniac (Senechaussee de Rennes), in Pierre Goubert and Michel Denis, eds., 1789: Les Franqais ont la parole (Paris, 1964). Chaussinand-Nogaret, in “Aux origines,” finds remarkable identity of interest between the general cahiers of the Noblesse and the Tiers. He does not comment on this particular issue.

The Point of Honour

109

forget that in the Old Regime aristocratic justice was not only private justice but flagrantly unequal justice. This is what some of the local cahiers of the Tiers complained so bitterly about in 1789, “distinguishing men in the very action of the law and determining the nature of the penalties according to the persons and not the crimes”: “That, for example, a noble guilty of a certain crime should have his head cut off, while a non-noble guilty of the same crime should die hanging from a gibbet...indicates that there are base executions and others that are not, that the noble belongs to a privi¬ leged class, and that the commoner belongs to the despised class of citizens, the class disfavoured by the laws, and whose honour is totally degraded by the laws.”21 From the aristocratic point of view men were not, as Hobbes had asserted, to be made unequal by private contracts enforced by public power; they were to be main¬ tained in their historical position by a hierarchy of jurisdictions, functions, and privileges. Yet the monarchy had fortified its control over the justice of the kingdom-though, paradoxically, for these purposes, ecclesiastical, military, civil, territorial, the kingdom itself was hardly whole, hardly, in this respect, a state: for there was a panorama of parallel and competing jurisdictions, including espe¬ cially those of the fourteen regions of the realm whose legal adminis¬ tration was serviced by the parlements and conseils souverains.22 And even the legal nobles, responsible for the registration and enforce¬ ment of the common law, occasionally drew the sword on each other: Bluche lists several incidents that interrupted the monotony of the parlementary exile of 1753.23 Increasingly, aristocratic justice (especially, as I shall relate, the point d’honneur) was regarded by enlightened spirits as one of the worst running sores of feodalite (the common word by which the Old Regime was damned). Yet it still continued to be argued, and not by the least enlightened, that aspects of feodalite, though part and parcel of the French monarchy, set boundaries to royal caprice and were, in effect, a breeding ground of freedom-the so-called “aristocratic liber¬ alism” sometimes imputed to Montesquieu. Moreover, many of these anomalies had, as we have seen, deep wellsprings in French manners; and as Montesquieu himself had observed, “most of the peoples of 21. Cahier of Castelferrus (Tarn-et-Garonne), in Goubert and Denis, eds., 1789: Les Franqais, pp. 76-77. 22. For a thorough account, see Jean Egret, Louis XV et I’opposition parlementaire (Paris, 1970), pp. 10-17. 23. Francois Bluche, La vie quotidienne de la noblesse franqaise au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1973), p. 27; and cf. his study Les magistrals du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1960).

110

Mortal Politics

Europe [presumably excluding the English] are still governed by les This is the attitude that would later make the liberal Madame de Stael declare: “Chivalry is for the moderns what the heroic ages were for the ancients: all noble memories of the European nations are attached to it.”25 moeurs. ”2

Law, “Philosophy,” and the Point d’Honneur

The nervous society of esprit bretailleur is of course inspired by the nobility, but as Mercier reminds us, on the eve of the Revolution, “it has descended among the bourgeois.”26 Its immediate origins are in a seventeenth century where the “point of honour” and personal combat are rampant; society is only now gradually acquiring a softening of manners. The vocabulary of aristocratic justice is still very much a part of the eighteenth-century lexicon, as a few citations will show. We can begin with the pivotal phrase point d’honneur. This Montesquieu describes as follows: “Upon a man’s declaring that he would fight, he would not afterward depart from his words....Hence the rule ensued that whenever a person engaged his word, honour forbade him to recall it.”27 The cause of such an intent is readily to be found in the word injure, as the Encyclopedie indicates: in its narrowest signification means everything done to offend someone by contempt, whether in his person, or that of his wife, his children or servants, or of anyone belonging to him, whether a relative or not. Injure

24. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, bk. 8, chap. 8. 25. Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, baronne de Stael-Holstein, De I’Allemagne, 3 vols. (Pans, 1964), 1:72-73. There were, to be sure, exceptions to this temper in the aristocracy, especially in the milieu of devout Catholics. In 1651 the Abbe Olier founded a society of nobles who, known for their military courage, nevertheless renounced the practice of duelling. The head of the society was the Marquis de Fenelon (uncle of the archbishop of Cambrai). St. Vincent de Paul supported the soci¬ ety s aims, but apparently its membership ws small and its influence slight. See Charles Bataillard, Du duel, considere sous le rapport de la morale, de I’histoire, de la legislation et de l’opportunity d’une loi repressive (Paris, 1829), pp. 57-58. 26. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 197. 27. De l esprit des lois, bk. 28, chap. 20. For extended discussion, see Montesquieu’s Pensees, no. 1953, Oeuvres completes, ed. Caillois, 1:1473-1475.

The Point of Honour

111

Injures may be described in three ways, namely, verbal, written,

or physical....One commits physical (par effet) injures in two ways, namely, by gestures and other actions, without hitting or touching the person; or else by striking him, with slaps, blows of fists or feet, with a stick, or otherwise. Injure imputes failings, crimes, vices, faults: it denies good quali¬ ties; it attacks the person....The great soul permits no injure; it pardons wrongdoing (tort), and devotes its life to the pursuit of •

•

injure.

28

We can easily see in this terminology how injure triggers the point d’honneur and that there are multiple ways in which this might happen. Indeed, one might well go looking for excuses. Injure there¬ fore leads without much difficulty to vengeance, which is discussed in a double-faced article by Jaucourt, commencing, “it is permissible to repulse a real injure, to be guaranteed against insults, to uphold one’s rights, and to avenge offenses where the law brings no remedy; thus vengeance is a sort of justice.”29 However, here we recover the good sense of the Age of Reason, for the author adds immediately, “but I hear the voice of the wise telling me that it is fine to forgive, that one owes indulgence to those who have failed us in little things (choses legeres) and wrath to those who have really offended us; the man who has benefited from the lumieres of all the centuries condemns all that is pure vengeance.” It is both an enlightened and a bourgeois touch by the Chevalier de Jaucourt: enlightened because it stands against capricious lawlessness; bourgeois because the bringing of injure under the sway of law helped to prevent aristocratic morgue from reaching down into the industrious classes. This interpretation is further affirmed in Jaucourt’s own discussion of point d’honneur, where he describes it as the “character of each profession,” though acknowledging that it is particularly a feature of the military.30 Already class distinctions are beginning to show in the ancient vocab¬ ulary of aristocratic usage, with each profession seeking its “honour.” Honour is also being detached from its ancient “point,” as the title of a work by Champdeveaux makes clear: L’Honneur considere en luimeme et relativement au duel, ou Von demontre que Vhonneur n’a rien de commun avec le duel, et que le duel ne prouve rien pour Vhonneur.

A

28. Article “Injure,” Encyclopedic 8:752a. Injure was of course a category of juris¬ prudence; an edict of 1704 established penalties for various forms of injure. 29. Article “Vengeance,” Encyclope'die 17:4a. 30. Article “Point d’honneur,” ibid., 12:873b. 31. M. de Champdeveaux (Paris, 1752). On the Sieur de Champdeveaux, see Cuenin, Duel sous I’Ancien Regime, pp. 262-264.

112

Mortal Politics

decade later, a comedy by Sedaine holds the point d’honneur up to a kind of bourgeois ridicule, as in the passage where the father laments the folly of his son, a young military officer, for becoming implicated in a duel: “Cruel abuse of the point of honour! You could only have been born in the most barbarous of times; you could only persist in the midst of a vain and conceited nation, in the midst of a people where each one thinks everything of himself, and nothing of his country and family.”32 The monarch had every interest in curbing the lethal vivacity of his privileged subjects. A full codification of antiduelling legislation can be found in the edicts of Louis XIV in 1679, by which “the marshals of France, the governors of the provinces, or in their absence the commanders and lieutenant-marshals of France, are charged with determining all differences that might arise between subjects of the king, according to the power already provided to them by former ordinances.”33 The death penalty was generally to be decreed. In his Siecle de Louis XIV, Voltaire comments: “The aboli¬ tion of duels was one of the greatest services rendered the country. Formerly these combats had been authorized by kings, even by parlements and by the church. Even though forbidden since Henri IV, this evil custom had become more and more enrooted....There are now in Europe a hundred times fewer duels than in the time of Louis XIII.”34 But was this not somewhat of an exaggeration? If duelling was not the frenzied occupation it once had been, it had scarcely been driven from the land. The severe punishments were only dissuasive to the extent that they were actually applied, which was negligible.35 As Henri Carre writes, “Unfortunately the French nobility of the eight¬ eenth century was just as disorderly as it was brave....Always ready to take the sword in hand, how would these gentlemen have forborne combat? The pretexts for duels were innumerable.”36 Here is one example of such a case. In 1750, the marquis de Montalembert, a powerful maitre de forge, stole most of an order of 1400 cannons requested by Louis XV from noble competitors. One of these, Rene-Annibal, son of the comte de Roffignac, could not entice the 32. Michel-Jean Sedaine, Le philosophe sans le savoir, act III, sc. 5. 33. Article “Duel,” Encyclopedic 5:163ab. 34. Voltaire, Oeuvres historiques (Paris, 1962), p. 972. 35. Sometimes the death penalty was accomplished by the execution of an effigy after the culprit had vanished. See Diderot, Oeuvres completes 6:391; and Duclos Oeuvres completes 3:105. 36. Henri Carre, La noblesse de France et I’opinion publique au XVIIIe siecle (Paris 1920), pp. 167-179, especially pp. 167-168.

The Point of Honour

113

aging marquis to the field of honour; however, the brother-in-law, Colonel Jean-Charles de Montalembert, consented to be his cham¬ pion. The duel took place at Tournai, in Flanders, with pistols. Young Montalembert grazed his opponent’s head with a bullet, causing a mild wound. As the guilty party for issuing the challenge, the unfortunate Rene-Annibal was sent to serve six years in ' prison. 37 At his coronation Louis XV swore to grant no pardon to any person convicted of duelling, and he confirmed this in an edict of 12 April 1723. He reinvested the marshals of France as arbiters of the point d’honneur (we shall refer later to the Tribunal des Marechaux) and reaffirmed the death penalty. However, we know that by 1735 death sentences for duels were no longer handed down.38 Nor had many been earlier. Of forty-four duellists brought before the Parlement of Paris between 1700 and 1725, twelve were acquitted, twenty-six were released under a formula entitled “plus amplement informe,” and six were sentenced-one to pay expenses, one to be hanged in effigy, one to be banished for nine years, and one to suffer the galleys for nine years. None was executed.39 As Brillat-Savarin comments: “This law, which is the last one decreed by our kings on the subject, had no more effect than the earlier ones, and duels continued to take place publicly, more frequently and generally than ever: this lasted until the end of the reign [of Louis Xvi] ”4° q^ey i00k place not only between nobles, or nobles and commoners, but between commoners themselves, between military men of all descriptions, and even between students.41 Diderot stressed the symbolic substance of duelling, whether with swords or with words. It was the quintessence of the French striving for superiority, a metaphor of all society: Duels go on constantly in society in all kinds of forms, between priests, between magistrates, between men of letters, between phil¬ osophies: each estate has its lance and its knights; and our most

37. Gaston Tesseron, La Charente au XVIlIe siecle (Angouleme, 1967), p. 258. 38. Dominique Muller, “Les magistrats frangaise et la peine de mort au

18e

siecle,” Dix-huiti'eme siecle 4 (1972):95. 39. Frangois Billacois, “Le Parlement de Paris et les duels au XVIIe siecle,” in Andre Abbiatecci, Francois Billacois, et al., Crimes et criminalite en France sous I’Ancien Regime: 17e - 18e siecles (Paris, 1971), pp. 42-43. 40. Anselme Brillat-Savarin, Essai historique et critique sur le duel (Paris, 1819), p. 34. 41. Needless to say, many of these vicious bagarres were inspired by something other than aristocratic mores; cf. ibid., p. 115.

114

Mortal Politics

respectable and ingratiating assemblies are only puny tournaments where sometimes one bears the thrusts of love in the depths of the heart, if not on the shoulder.42 Yet most commentators appear to agree that the reign of Louis marked a downturn in the incidence of duelling, if scarcely its disappearance. Brillat-Savarin attributes this to the fact that the monarch made no more foolish laws on the subject.43 While it is not certain that this verdict is exact (Bataillard takes exception),44 there is some indication that “philosophy” had begun to achieve what severe legal penalties had not been able to. In 1761 the Academie des Jeux Floraux of Lyons had proposed a competition on the ques¬ tion: “La lumiere des lettres n’a-t-elle pas plus fait contre la fureur des duels que 1 autorite des lois?” Brissot, in an academic discourse of 1780, affirms that “the number of duels has diminished prodigiously for the past twenty years, and one owes this decrease to the revolu¬ tion wrought in the spirit of the century. The writers have achieved more than the law.”45 And Mercier notes that the duel has retreated to the garrisons. He agrees with Brissot: “Today duels are no longer common....That frenzy collapsed without need of legisla¬ tion....Philosophy has obtained what the laws of Louis XIV could not.”46 For, as he claims elsewhere, we now dwell in an “etat police, where force and violence are forbidden to each private subject, where he has no right to impose his own justice.”47 Helvetius was not inclined to compliment “philosophy,” but he felt that luxury had stifled the spirit of personal combat. The law, too, had added its weight: “Duellists are given the death penalty; at least they are almost all forced to go abroad: the duel is no more.”48 XVI

Had philosophy rescued public justice from private assault? Even Mercier admitted that there are troublesome circumstances where personal honour compels the mildest and most honest of men” to flght placed.

his dignity-in the position where he finds himself Yet one is today in a position to refuse a duel; one can

42. Diderot, Jacques le fataliste, in Oeuvres completes 6:73. 43. Brillat-Savarin, Essai historique, p. 38. 44. Bataillard, Du duel, p. 60. 45. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Les moyens d’adoucir la rigueur des lois pennies en France sans nuire d la surete publique, ou, discours couronne par VAcademie de Chdlonssur-Marne en 1780 (Chalons, 1781). 46. Mercier, Tableau de Paris vol. 8, chap. 641. 47. Ibid., vol. 2, chap. 197. 48. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, De I’homme (London, 1777), sect. 7, chap 3 p 366 49. Mercier, Tableau de Paris vol. 8, chap. 641.

The Point of Honour

115

say: “I will not fight for that.”50 No doubt Rousseau’s persuasive demonstration in favour of magnanimity and against the point d’honneur (Nouvelle Heloise, part 1, letters 57-61) was not without influence on its large reading public, as part of the entire “philosophical” aversion. Commenting on the supposed decrease in duelling, Diderot wrote in 1769, perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek: “There will be fewer injures than before, because men fear the loss of their fortune more than that of their life, or even their honour.” He also suggested using the powerful precepts of the religion he despised against the practice.51 Yet Valmont’s fatal duel with Danceny in Les liaisons dangereuses is perhaps the only incident in Laclos’s brilliant and cynical novel where a ray of honour is allowed to penetrate. One foreign, but close, observer, the Prince de Ligne, was still impressed by the frequency of duels as the reign of Louis XVI opened. He attributed this to individualism, mercurial temperament, and social jealousy: People in France fight the most. It is not because they are braver than others; it is because this is the country where everything is most homogenized (le plus confondu). Elsewhere, everything is ranked: there ensues a kind of subordination and harmony designed to banish disputes and combats, especially private ones. Except in France, the whole nation would rise against the puny individual that delivered a challenge to the great man who might have saved his life in war. In France I would be the first to advise him to give satisfaction to whoever asked it. It is worth more to be policed than polished. But there cannot be order (police) among people who all think themselves equally gentilshommes and gens d’es¬ prit .

Indeed, some famous duels were fought during the reign of the meilleur des rois, not least the one between his youngest brother the

comte d’Artois and the prince de Bourbon: affaire de femme. Blood might easily have flowed in the Bois de Boulogne had the guard not interposed themselves. And public opinion cheered the warriors. “When the princes appeared for the first time after the incident, in the box of the Duchesse de Bourbon at the Opera, they were

50. Ibid., vol. 2, chap. 197. 51. Diderot, “Requete presentee au Parlement de Grenoble,” in Oeuvres completes 6:390. 52. Prince de Ligne, “Mes ecarts,” in Memoires et melanges 2:197.

116

Mortal Politics

greeted by repeated and unanimous salvoes of applause.”53 “Philosophical” or not, one can still find a serious preoccupation with the legal control of duelling in the reign of Louis XVI. An anonymous and comprehensive Tableau proportionnel des delits et des peines of the period treats the subject thoroughly in all its ramifications-e.g., if no guilty party dies, if one guilty party dies, if both are guilty and die. There is inadequate space to canvass this wordy recommendation for penal reform. However, a long observa¬ tion attached to it will convey the flavour of its progressive views and serve as evidence that duelling was not so scarce as to be taken lightly: The means we have indicated...to prevent combats, encounters, and [particular acts] of vengeance, by giving to the offended party the public satisfaction he might wish, and especially by gravely punishing the aggressor, these means make simple armed encoun¬ ters, though claimed to be fortuitous, just as criminal as formal duels. We hope, moreover, that the punishments recommended here against the infraction in question, will manage to destroy this barbarous prejudice, which, after causing the honour of a citizen to depend on the false opinion of fools, creates the even more foolish belief that it can be restored only through personal venge¬ ance, by the blood of the offended or his adversary; and absurd prejudice that presumes that right and reason are on the side of him who fights. Besides, it is especially by the example of submission to the laws of the state, of reason, of nature, and of God by the high nobility, the grandees, and the princes that one should await and hope for the cure of this national epidemic, a Gothic residue of the ludi¬ crous trials conceived in the centuries of ignorance, which are nothing but a contemptible abuse and a false and ridiculous image of true bravery.54

Military Duelling The stormiest instance of aristocratic justice in the eighteentl century, by far, had been the military point d’honneur, as one wouli

53. Brillat-Savarin, Essai historique, p. 39. The baron de Besenval delectates over the incident at length in his Memoires du baron de Besenval (Paris, 1846), pp. 237-258. 54. Tableau proportionnel des delits et des peines (1781), subsection 7,’“Crimes contre la vie des particuliers, ou homicide et ses differentes especes.”

The Point of Honour

117

expect from a caste whose profession it was to live by the sword and whose practices and codes were most intimately linked with souvenirs of a feudal past. The nobles were wont to defend their privilege and honour on the basis of their military origin and calling. Billacois claims that by the turn of the eighteenth century the duel remained a la mode only in military circles; but we have already seen evidence to refute this.55 Forbidden in the officer training schools, the duel could nevertheless not fail to tempt the youth as well as their more experienced elders. Toward the end of the reign of Louis XV there were said to be more swords drawn in single combat in the French army than by all the other officers of Europe combined. It was “the running sore of military life.”56 “Often,” according to Carre, “the prejudice of duelling was unavoidable among the nobility as the result of the insistence of worldly women involved in love affairs.”57 The mitigation of that practice was not aided if “the military leaders who had the duty of maintaining discipline and of stopping a subor¬ dinate from demanding satisfaction for an offense by a superior were sometimes the first to encourage these shows of insubordination.”58 The captains and the colonels gleefully goaded each other into indi¬ vidual warfare. As a controlling and preventive device, the state had established a “tribunal of the marshals of France” to hear and decide grievances over military points d’honneur before they came to bloodshed; their domain was reinforced by Louis XV’s edict of 1723. As the Encyclopedie informs us, “The marshals have a tribunal where they judge quarrels over the point d’honneur and various other matters relating to war and the nobility. They have subdelegates and lieuten¬ ants in the provinces to conduct preliminary hearings, with their site of jurisdiction in the Palais de Paris, under the title of Connetablie et Marechaussee de France. They have officers who administer justice in their name.”59 Pierquin reminds us of the political func¬ tion of this organ, as originally created in the seventeenth century: “To repress or prevent the duel...a feudal survival, rebellious to the

55. Billacois, “Parlement de Paris,” p. 45. 56. Bluche, Vie quotidienne de la noblesse, p. 27. 57. H. Carre, Noblesse de France, p. 176. 58. Ibid., p. 177. 59. Article “Marechaux de France,” Encyclopedie 10:94a.

118

Mortal Politics

king’s justice,” preferably by precautionary measures rather than ulti¬ mate penalties.60 Although it is likely, as Bluche suggests, that the mode of the duel diminished among the military aristocracy, as well as the nobility in general, during the reign of Louis XVI and that the task of the Tribunal of Marshals was thereby deflected toward other categories of military conduct and discipline,61 there is little evidence to suggest that the marshals and their provincial emissaries ever had the situation well under control. “Philosophy” may have penetrated manners, but this was not true of public justice with its “Draconian and arrogant” legislation.62 As Pierquin summarizes: “Never was a tribunal...less respected....A jurisdiction of privilege, pronouncing penalties judged honourable and not defamatory, it was more apt to stimulate the zeal of the duellists than it increased in them the desire for reconciliation.”63 One reason for this is no doubt that the senior marshal of France in the reign of Louis XVI was none other than the hot-blooded Due de Richelieu, who had fought numerous duels of gallantry during his long lifetime and even offered a challenge of honour at the age of seventy-eight.64 As regards the evolution of the point d’honneur and its surrounding complications, two adjacent considerations merit brief mention here. In the first place, there is the instance of the so-called revolte nobiliaire, the “aristocratic reaction” that began to gather steam a few years after the accession of Louis XVI, creating much of the back¬ ground of what Jean Egret has called the “pre-Revolution”-an attempt by the aristocrats to use the unpopularity of the queen, the bankruptcy of the state, and rising public effervescence to restore “traditional” political balance to the realm, in part through cabal and pressure on the royal administration, in part through the extension of privilege against the estate beneath. So far as the army is concerned, this reaction took shape in the famous reglement Segur of 1781, which closed most of the officer corps to all aspirants who were unable to show four quarterings of nobility. However, it has been effectively argued in an important article by D.D. Bien that the Segur reforms were directed not so much against the bourgeoisie as the anoblis (recent creations), who, it was felt, were degrading and weakening the military organization: thus this may have been a reac¬ tion by the most professional and alert part of the military nobility 60. Hubert Pierquin, La jurisdiction du point d’honneur sous I’Ancien Regime et le tribunal des mare'chaux de France (Paris, 1904), p. 67. 61. Bluche, Vie quotidienne de la noblesse, p. 28. 62. Bataillard, Du duel, p. 59. 63. Pierquin, Jurisdiction du point d’honneur, p. 85. 64. Ibid., p. 81.

The Point of Honour

119

against other factions.65 Bien’s thesis would help us to explain why we do not note a significant recrudescence of military violence in the aristocracy paralleling the revolte nobiliaire. In fact it may be of signif¬ icance that a “reglement fait au Tribunal [des Marechaux]” of 28 May 1781 in all respects repeats (for purposes of officers of the Tribunal) the firm restrictions of the Segur reforms, reinforcing the notion that the army was also putting its justice in order.66 There follows, on 6 July 1782, a starchy letter from Marshal de Richelieu to his local subordinates ordering strict compliance with the royal decree governing the point d’honneur,67 No doubt this shows that, even if on the wane, the old game was still going on. The passing of a prejudice, or a reorientation of the military ethos? One factor meriting far deeper investigation than I can give it here might be the spread of the values and practices of Freemasonry in the army of Louis XVI. Gaston Martin, who estimates that there were approximately 30,000 Freemasons in France in 1785, describes the movement as “a vast network of fraternity and idealism whose influences were far from negligible.”68 Of the 505 lodges, 69 were military ones: here bourgeois officers or noncoms were not ostra¬ cized by the nobility. And some of the most illustrious nobles belonged.69 The ideology of most of the lodges encompassed a kind of deism, humanitarianism, and critique of feodalite that, in military circles, would certainly have reduced the thirst for aristocratic justice. We know the lodges were a la mode: their popularity in the army increased rapidly in the 1780s. They probably encouraged an adoucissement des moeurs among the pacesetting members of the aris¬ tocracy. Moreover, the professional military nobility of the mid- and later-eighteenth century is found to have been a relatively “enlightened” part of its estate by other criteria.70

65. David D. Bien, “La reaction aristocratique avant 1789: l’exemple de l’armee,” Annates

E.S.C.

19

(January-Febrary

1974):43;

and

ibid.,

19

(March-April

1974):533-534. 66. M. de Beaufort, Recueil concernant le tribunal de nosseigneurs les marechaux de France..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1784), 2:125. 67. Ibid., 2:127-128. 68. Gaston Martin, La franc-magonnerie franQaise et la preparation de la Revolution...de 1789 en France et specialement en Bretagne (Paris, 1926), pp. 32, 101. 69. See Alain Le Bihan, Loges et chapitres de la Grande Loge et du Grand-Orient de France (Paris, 1967); and the same author’s Francs-maQons parisiens du Grand-Orient de France, fin du XVIlle siecle (Paris, 1966). 70. Robert Darnton shows that fully 8 percent of persons catalogued in the Paris police files in 1750 as “authors” were from the military aristocracy. The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), p. 151.

120

Mortal Politics

Duelling and the Revolution

How did the Revolution, or more specifically the Constituent Assembly, deal with duelling? The most succinct answer would be: gingerly. As might be expected, the great majority of “patriots” abominated the practice, a “feudal survival,” but they found it less than simple to legislate manners. Tinkering with the point d’honneur proved no easier than altering the mentality of an officer corps largely inherited from the Old Regime. On 3 February 1791, Chevalier, a deputy of Paris, introduced a new law against the duel, which carried despite opposition from the Right.71 But little more was heard of the matter; the law kept its silence. This provoked Barere (of later Committee of Public Safety fame) to insert the following remarks in the July Moniteur: The legislators are witnessing how a feudal practice is surviving the destruction of feudalism.... The duellist assassinates his fellow citizens instead of obtaining their punishment; he is a wild animal that should be handed over to the discretion of the constituted authorities of protection. Let the duellist therefore be without protection of the law; let him enjoy none of the privileges of the social condition...[and] be declared an outlaw.72 Barere’s demand is unquestionable evidence that the French were continuing to draw their swords against one another. The reorganized criminal code promulgated on 6 October 1791, and abrogating all previous ordinances, makes no mention of duelling. At first this was interpreted to mean that duels were afforded legal sanction. The ambiguity was not dissipated until 17 September 1792, when the Legislative Assembly passed an act of indulgence against all cases of duelling that had transpired since July 1789, giving as its reason that political and patriotic considerations might legitimately have provoked such combats. But as late as 29 Messidor, an II, the Convention determined that no existing legisla¬ tion had dealt with duelling and decreed that its appropriate committee “examine and propose means of preventing duels and the penalties to assign to those guilty of duelling or provoking it.” We may be assured that this was not directed against duels between 71. Brillat-Savarin, Essai historique, p. 124. 72. Ibid., pp. 125-126.

The Point of Honour

121

nobles. Simultaneously, under the Jacobin regime, renewed attempts were made to eradicate duelling in the armies.73 The old habit died hard, even in the republique une et indivisible. Moreover, despite refusals by many of the “patriots,” conspicu¬ ously the impetuous elder Mirabeau, to be provoked to individual combat, there are two famous instances of duels within the bosom of the National Assembly. In the first case, it was Cazales, the spokesman for the ultramonarchists, who delivered the injure to Barnave, then the spellbinding young rhetor of the Left, having called him a tramp and a “brigand.” The duel was fought, a I’anglaise, with pistols in the Bois de Boulogne on the morning of 11 August 1790. Despite the courteous disposition of the two men toward each other personally, they fought lethally. Eventually Barnave managed to wound Cazales on the forehead. Surprisingly, the duel cemented a friendship across political barriers, and the two antagonists were mutually hailed with applause when they greeted each other next in the Assembly. Barnave’s victory won him much popularity, especially in his native Grenoble.74 In the second case, the well-known friend of Barnave, the future Feuillant Charles de Lameth, although avoiding the consequences of one injure by a young officer named Chauvigny de Blot, could not ignore the ensuing insults of a deputy of the Right, the Due de Castries, son of the marshal. Their combat took place with swords on the Champ de Mars on the afternoon of 12 November 1790; Lameth was painfully wounded on the left hand. Though a literary descendant of the Due describes the encounter as “a simple explana¬ tion between gentlemen,” more serious political implications were attached to the act, for Lameth, though a noble, was at the time a leading spokesman for the Left.75 Word was passed that Castries’s sword had been poisoned, and on the following afternoon a large, angry mob sacked the Hotel de Castries on the rue de Varenne. The following evening Castries left Paris for exile. Important political repercussions attended this episode, gravely damaging Mirabeau’s rapprochement with the court.

73. See Bataillard, Du duel, pp. 61-62. 74. See

Jean-Jacques

Chevallier,

Barnave,

ou

les

deux faces

de

la

Revolution,

1761-1793 (Paris, 1936), pp. 155-160. 75. For details, see Rene de La Croix, due de Castries, Mirabeau, ou I’echec du destin (Paris, 1960), pp. 479-484. Jacques Hebert, protesting against duelling, while sympathizing with

his (then) ally Lameth,

wrote:

“It is

really barbarian

to come

together politely to kill each other....The goddamned duel is really an abominable thing.” Le Pere Duchesne, no. 19 (1790), pp. 1-2.

122

Mortal Politics

This account of the ancient custom of the point d’honneur-even involving an “advanced” bourgeois deputy, Barnave-is of course but a single example. We know that the inspiration for the reform and standardization of public justice was high on the agenda of “philosophy” and a serious current of the Revolution. Yet this makes the survival of private justice no less interesting. Although, as pointed out, duelling was not covered in the 1791 criminal code, antiduelling legislation was not absent from the thoughts of the “patriots” as a component of their general reform. Invited by the mother club of Paris to render an opinion on this, the Jacobins of Orleans debated the subject and listened to two speeches on 23 January 1791. One of these, delivered by an Elie Vinson, culminates in a rhapsodic recommendation that each village mayor require all citizens to swear a public oath “not to use their weapons except for the defense of the fatherland, the support of the Constitution, against the enemies of both and never against each other.”76 Two important ideas are to be noticed in this address. The first is that honour, instead of being individualized, must be national¬ ized: one must “destroy the prejudices of the point d’honneur by patri¬ otism.” The second is that, as a penalty, the duellist is to be deprived of his rights of “active citizenship”: the privilege of belonging to the nation has replaced that of birth.77An important ideological trans¬ mutation is at work in Vinson’s rhetoric. And yet, despite his exco¬ riation of aristocracy and its habits, Vinson is no pacifist, lavishing unambiguous praise upon those of his patriotic kind who, in the Revolution, took up arms individually “so as not to be condemned to shame and perhaps plunged back again into slavery.” Thus he defends a new violence in terms strangely reminiscent of the old, enveloping his ideas in the swaddling of patriotism and instigating the tendency toward popular justice, concluding: “Let us treat one another with caution, let us respect the warlike virtue and the extreme sensitivity of our brothers.”78 In a work that appeared in the same year, Frangois Gorguereau reached somewhat the same conclusions. He was severe with both the church and the monarchy for fostering an atmosphere of arbi¬ trary cruelty where the duel could flourish. Attributing the decrease of personal combats after 1750 to “philosophy,” as did Brissot and Mercier, he also added a touch of Vauvenargues: “honour” as well as

76. Elie Vinson, Opinion sur Le (Orleans, 1791), p. 7. 77. Ibid., p. 8. 78. Ibid., pp. 4-5.

d’Orleans...

duel: discours prononce' le dimanche 23 janvier au Club

The Point of Honour

123

“virtue” had receded, and with them the incidence of duelling.79 Gorguereau preached the destruction of “[this] last title of feudal aristocracy, like Vinson he felt that only love of country, the posses¬ sion not of individuals but of an entire nation, could exalt or justify the sacrifice of life.80 Public justice and public safety were, then, to become both “national” and “popular.” But the “tribunal of the nation” can be a two-edged sword. Either it can refer to the supremacy of the laws of an established community or it can mean the appeal from a faltering jurisdiction of law to a power returned to the social aggregates calling themselves sovereign. And no sooner was the French constitu¬ tion of 1791 set in place than the “real” France fell prey to these confusions and their explosive potential. Popular justice in the Revolution most certainly had its roots in events enacted since time out of mind that had little connection with the habits of the aristocracy. Suddenly released in great power, it attempted a factional manipulation, even a conquest of public justice. As regards the earlier state of affairs, Carre gives a particularly lively account of the situation in Poitou: “In a time when quarrelsome habits and the insufficiency of police made violence frequent, the nobles were feared for their right to bear arms. Furnished with swords, shotguns, pistols, one might feel the temptation to impose his will.”81 Carre’s monograph is scarcely a catalogue of points d’honneur. Rather it is a compendious narrative of vignettes exposing the arrogance of poor and semiliterate country hobereaux and the spite existing between them and the bourgeoisie, cures, and peasants of recessive parishes-how the former attacked and the latter banded together to fight back, not according to any code of chivalry, but with sticks, pistols, ambushes, and fistfights. We find in such cases the beginnings of class war, perhaps even revolution, between “rustic” and “brutal” nobles and the many occupations and profes¬ sions arrayed against them. Not only is this a revealing glimpse of collective private violence in the age of Louis XV, but it is also a harbinger of how popular justice would supersede the inadequate resources of public justice in an atmosphere of vendetta. To insinuate that the “tribunes of the people” were in some sense angry men with a disguised aristocratic mentality would be to make a mockery of the forces in play. Yet it may have been a mentality that 79. Francois Gorguereau, Le duel considere dans tons les rapports historiques, moraux et constitutionnels, et moyens de I’ane'antir radicalement (Paris, 1791), pp. 18, 73.

80. Ibid., p. 200. 81. H. Carre, “Querelles entre gentilshommes campagnards, petits bourgeois et paysans du Poitou au XVIIle siecle,” Revue du dix-huitie'me siecle, annee 1 (1914): 1.

124

Mortal Politics

had descended. One cannot avoid being struck by some of the Jacobin rhetoric, especially that of Saint-Just, with its use of some of the formulas of belligerent honneur. The force coactive of the Terror was meant to stabilize a government through purges, not to frag¬ ment the nation into individual warring parts (the substance of the accusation against the “Girondins”). Yet the imagery is not all Roman; it is also the imagery of a transformed French heroism that comes not to assert the law but to replace it with a more implacable trial by combat. In his famous “happiness in Europe” speech, Saint-Just declaimed: “Give the people revenge on twelve hundred years of transgressions against their ancestors (forfaits contre ses peres). ”82 And he also told the Convention: You have been severe; you have had to be. But you have done this judiciously: it was necessary to take revenge for our fathers, and hide beneath these ruins that monarchy, huge coffin of so many enslaved and wretched generations; it was necessary to meet crime with inflexible justice, destroying the conspiracies and punishing the sanguinary hypocrisy of those who, without courage, claiming to restore the throne and deceiving the Republic, brought about the state’s agony with dark misdeeds and hidden traps. ...We opposed the sword to the sword, and liberty is founded; it came out of the bosom of storms. Such an origin is common to the world sprung from chaos and to man, wailing at his birth.83 “Revenge for our fathers” and opposition of “the sword to the sword,” despite the imagery, is not exactly the magnification of the duel. Yet beneath the political complexities and shifting hatreds of the Revolution one discerns a certain demand for honour and repa¬ ration, as well as many unsung instances of personal vengeance and private war throughout the towns and villages of France. Indeed, as Sieyes had already written in Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etatl, one should send the “Frankish” nobles back to their German forests and the people would then become conquerors (i.e., noble) in their turn.84 One must tentatively conclude, however, that aristocratic repara¬ tion and collective vengeance make only negative contact, while conceding at the same time that the “republic of virtue” failed badly 82. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, “Rapport du 13 Ventose, an II (3 March 1794),” in Oeuvres choisies, p. 206.

83. “Rapport sur la police generale, la justice, le commerce, la legislation et les crimes de faction,” 26 Germinal, an II (15 April 1794), in ibid., pp. 257-258. 84. E.-J. Sieyes, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etatl, 2d ed. (Paris, 1789), pp. 12-13.

The Point of Honour

125

in its attempt to extirpate old habits. Concerning the evolution of the duel in the period prior to the Revolution, our evidence suggests that while it remained well rooted (far more than in other nations) and susceptible to influencing the manners of the commoners, it was becoming more eccentric, less a hereditary reflex than a situational recourse, whether as a mode of gallantry, a symbolic practice appro¬ priate for underscoring specific sorts of professional rivalry, or a vehicle of class sensitivity. It became, to that degree, more bourgeois” than before, more available to “civil society” despite the preachments of “philosophy.” It is thus an ambiguous indicator with regard to the thesis that the bourgeois value of merite had sapped the traditional honneur among the nobility toward 1760. For it suggests a persistence, or even an expansion, of at least one vehicle of honneur in French society, while at the same time conveying the sense that honneur had become pluralized and handed over to the propagators of merited Eventually, as we have seen, the Jacobins would attempt to make it “patriotic.” We might conclude that a specifically French penchant for private combat contributed to some of the effects of the Revolutionary mentality. We might also at least respect if not blindly endorse Clausewitz’s suggestion that the duel is the primitive model for all warfare.86 The reasons for this hesitation will become clear in the two chapters to follow. 85. I cannot go quite so far as Cuenin, Duel sous VAncien Regime, p. 318, who concludes that the philosophical attempt to segregate “honneur” from the “point d’honneur” had failed utterly. 86. Karl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1984), bk. 1, chap. 1 and 2, p. 75.

War: The Paths of Glory Chapter 6

The Vocation of War

Psychologies of self-interest and epistemologies of sympathy, so fertile in the eighteenth century and, up to a point, adaptable to cases of political mortality, are inadequate interpreters of the institu¬ tion of war. In vain their proponents fulminate against it: for a whole strain of philosophes stretching from Saint-Pierre to Condorcet by way of Voltaire, Hobbes is wrong, aggression is a perverse abuse of kingship; peace and sociability are the natural condition, while war is the “art d’egorger son prochain.” Melon goes so far as to claim that war is wrong, not because it kills people, but because it disrupts the economic life of many more: “Losing soldiers is not the worst thing about wars. A hundred thousand casualties are a small portion of twenty million...but the increase in taxes and the difficulties in making up losses which are the necessary consequence of taxation and the loss of commerce distress twenty million people, and that distress is common to all.”1 Yet the Age of Reason cannot sweep war away with its ridicule or its sound sense. The disutility and fanaticism of arms are not to be measured against those of revealed religion. Few philosophes are utopian or craven enough to deny military heroism its canonized place in the pyramid of moral passions. Voltaire expresses this quite candidly when he writes to Madame du Deffand in the wake of a 1758 victory by his friend Richelieu: “I must tell you that I have just cried ‘Long live the King,’ on learning that the French have killed four thousand English at point of bayonet; it’s not humane, but it was very necessary.”2

1. Jean-Francois Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce, in Eugdne Daire, ed., Economistes et financiers du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1843), p. 753.

2. Voltaire, Correspondance, ed. Besterman, D8592, in 44:93.

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Why did philosophy privilege the passion of deadly combat above the seemingly equivalent passion of religious enthusiasm? For one thing, because that was its strategy and preference. But more impor¬ tantly because passion had some reliability when it acted in the visible world, within the boundaries, one could say, of natural law. Also, if we are to judge by the art and poetry of the time-much of it infected by philosophy and the souvenirs of antiquity-war was felt to be aesthetic in a way that religious ceremonies or outbursts (e.g., the convulsions of the Jansenists) were not.3 Warlike prowess was not exactly natural or automatic. It was a conquest of base impulses and an overcoming of fear by honour, which was essentially a noble trait or at least a mark of election for true nobility. Duguay-Trouin, ennobled to chevalier, and commander of a naval squadron, conf¬ essed to his taste for warfare, the surroundings of whistling fifes, pounding drums, and the bark of cannons and rifles. But, he conceded, “many times the sight of an impending danger caused strange palpitations....However, scorn [for them] and honour over¬ bore those unworthy feelings, and soon won me a new strength....With boldness I could brave the greatest dangers. After that combat between honour and nature, my most effective actions were pushed beyond anything I could have hoped for.”4 In the medical and psychological jargon of the age, military bravery became an illustration of the more-than-human in man, a suspension of his “sensibilite.” As such, it could be awesome. “Sensibilite” is described by the doctor and would-be philosophe Jean-Paul Marat as “the source or, rather, the measure of our virtues and vices.”5 He goes on to say: “The impassioned man braves the perils and death that he fears because he is more sensitive to other things; but he also braves them because he does not see them.”6 The ambivalence is clear: men in peril of death have the uncanny ability to direct their sensibilite (we might say their thoughts) elsewhere, but they are also guilty of a certain lack of peripheral vision while absorbed in their bloody work. This ambivalence creates a climate for the Enlightenment’s approach to war: an admiration for the real

3. For a thorough account of Jansenist convulsionaries, see B. Robert Kreisler, Miracles,

Convulsions,

and

Ecclesiastical

Politics

in

Early

Eighteenth-Century

Paris

(Princeton, 1978). 4. Rene de Duguay-Trouin, Memoires de Rene de Duguay-Trouin, in Joseph-Franyois Michaud and P. Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection des memoires relatifs a Vhistoire de France, 34 vols. (Paris, 1881), 34:662. 5. Jean-Paul Marat, De I’homme, ou des principes et des loix de Uinfluence de I’ame sur le corps, et du corps sur I’ame, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1775), bk. 4, vol. 2, p. 187.

6. Ibid., p. 205.

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Mortal Politics

war hero shared by almost all the rest of society, and a vision of war humanized by science and the pursuit of rationality (the creation of peripheral vision). We need now to look at the matter from the other side. War, and war-making, though consolidated under the single jurisdiction of the monarch in seventeenth-century France, was held to be the specific contribution and function of the “real” nobility. By the eighteenth century it is no longer totally appropriate to distinguish between a noblesse d’epee and an ennobled noblesse de robe, for the latter have long used their military commissions as well as other offices to mount the ladder to elite integration.7 Yet, in the Age of Reason, the impoverished members of the epee fight back, especially after 1750, against the plundering of their predestined career by venal anoblis. A whole ideology forms around this effort, incorporating itself to the legendary purity of the past and the specific capacity of the nobleman to know how to die for the nation and his king. What complicates our effort to describe this phenomenon is that, while seemingly conflicting or mutually offsetting views upon the world, neo-feudalism makes contact with philosophy through its reformist spirit (its sense of the metier), while out of both philosophy and neo¬ feudalist reformism come some of the preludes to the notion of a “citizen army” that will figure so prominently in the Revolution. At the same time there are unbridgeable mental and social gaps between these positions. Since philosophical pacifism was never a very strong influence in the eighteenth-century French mentality (here Saint-Pierre seemed an absolute utopian to most other French intellectuals), the crafting of war itself became an uppermost concern. Wars, according to their strategy and conduct, were more or less carniverous (although the literary and painterly tableaux of war may mislead the modern observer to think that men were more endangered by combat per se than by hospitals, disease, hunger, and ruin). The success of a campaign, a siege, or a battle en rase campagne depended often on the gifts of the commander and the morale and confidence of the troops, above and beyond numerical or logistical advantage. Measures which could promote the transmission of assurance through the ranks, as well as specific institutions designed to fortify an army’s collective resolve and courage, were pursued with vigour by French military theorists. As befits an age of military art where old feudal practices kept uneasy company with new methods of drill, logistics, strategy, and morale; where old and new techniques of 7. See Corvisier, L'armee franqaise, p. 131.

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organization and motivation merged and often collided; the wars of the Age of Reason are instructive vis-a-vis the society they mirror and yet fail to reflect. The last and most difficult question to be asked is: How and under what circumstances could men be exalted and made willing to die? Was it for their birthright, their reputation, their religion, their king, their comrades in arms, a certain bravura that marked them as adventurers, or a simple fate that they had mutely learned to accept? The answer is complicated. If we now hypothetically adopt the common eighteenth-century view by the nobility of themselves as the impresarios and defenders of French glory, the natural leaders of the nation in arms, what does our research disclose? We find a cult of war based on aristocratic prejudices, which the domestication of the court nobles by Louis XIV may have muted but not stifled. It is, first of all, a cult of gloire, although by no means all the “great captains” measure up to it. Yet a premium is certainly granted to the highest breeding. In the darkest hours of the War of the Spanish Succession, Villars wrote to the war minister, Voisin: “When a general sees ardour decreasing, he does not think it a merely petty advantage if persons of distinguished birth arrive, who can speak of glorious and valorous actions, and whose proud and imperious countenance dominates the fearful officer and the enemy, too.”8 At its utmost, this cult calls for the superhuman and caloric man, so well expressed in Saxe: “Impassioned with glory, avid to teach himself, wherever he could conquer, there was his fatherland.”9 Saxe was of course a Protestant mercenary, the bastard of a foreign king.10 Yet at mid-century he set the heroic style for the whole French nation. We should not fail to notice that for a hero like Saxe, according to his panegyrist, the notion of patrie was mobile; it was not necessarily the France of his master Louis XV; it was not the philosophical ubicumque bene of Voltaire; it was wherever he had done his great deeds. Except for the fortunes of politics, he might have pursued his career elsewhere, as Duke of Courland. Similarly, the Comte de Saint-Germain, a great military reformer as minister of war in 1775, had himself become a mercenary and had reorganized the army of Denmark.11 The Prince 8. Claude-Louis-Hector, due de Villars, Memoires du due de Villars, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 33:179. 9. Antoine-Leonard Thomas, Eloge de Maurice, comte de Saxe... (Paris, 1759), p. 8. 10. See introduction to Maurice de Saxe, Mes reveries, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1762), vol. 1, chap. 1 and ff. 11. The principal biographical source is Leon Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain et ses reformes, 1775-1777 (Paris, 1884), pp. i-xlix.

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Mortal Politics

de Ligne (from the Austrian Netherlands), never a French commander but a court favourite at Versailles, had circulated as far as Russia. And the Chevalier de Folard, an important military theo¬ retician of the First half of the century, had followed the campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden.12 This view of the military vocation was not unlike Voltaire’s conception of philosophy, except that it was regarded as an exclusively noble pursuit.13 In his bitterest moods Voltaire thought all soldiers mercenaries. He accorded to the gens de lettres what he denied to the military: brahmins, in his view, were cosmopolitans; kshatriyas should not be. Motives of cosmopolitan glory could not be imputed to most French officers. They did not go racing around the continent after reputations. Rather, they hoarded the privileges of ancestry and estate. As a poem of 1750 puts it: Mais, la noblesse seule, a chaque instant nouvelle, Renait de ses cendres, plus auguste et plus belle, Et d’un eclat plus pur ornee en vieillissant, Toujours son dernier age est le plus florissant. C’est un souffle divin qui, passant dans une ame, De l’amour de la gloire y fait naitre la flamme, Soutient, eleve un coeur par le sort abattu, Et fait avec le sang circuler la vertu; Pareille a ces rayons dont la chaleur feconde Epure la matiere et ranime le monde....14 As a more recent author writes of the battle of Fontenoy: “The losses were felt as the inevitable risk of the profession, assuring the

12. On Folard, see Emile-G. Leonard, L’arme'e et ses problemes au XVIIIe siecle 1958), pp. 109-120. Folard’s major works were the Nouvelles decouvertes sur la and the Commentaire sur Polybe in seven volumes, written between 1719 and Folard influenced both Saxe and Frederick the Great, who made a resume work: L’esprit du chevalier de Follard (1761).

(Paris, guerre 1730. of his

13. Of course, commoner mercenaries were far more a feature of eighteenthcentury warfare than aristocratic ones. See Voltaire on this, pp. 150-151, 160 below. 14. [Anon.], “La noblesse militaire,” in Emile Raurie, ed. Le chansonnier historique du 18e siecle, 10 vols. (Paris, 1879-1884), which is based on the contemporary “Recueil Clairambault-Maurepas,” 6:172: “Only the nobility, renewed at every moment, / Is reborn finer and more imposing from its ashes; / Through aging it bursts forth again in purer form: / Its latest age is always the most flourishing. / There is a divine breath which, passing through its soul, / Rekindles the flame of its love of glory, / Sustains and uplifts a heart cast down by fate, / And makes virtue circulate in the blood: / Just like those rays whose fertile heat / Purifies matter and brings the world back to life.”

War: The Paths of Glory

131

survivors of advancement and glory.”15 Another example is provided in Lebrun s study of death in Anjou. The prim and coura¬ geous eighty-year-old Marquise d’Autichamp (whose family were Angevin nobles of the court) lectures her bereaved daughter-in-law in 1782. Madame, that is what you ought to have expected in marrying a d’Autichamp. That’s what the king pays them for. I had the same sad experience in losing my husband [at the battle of Lawfeldt] that you have had in losing your son.”16 A contemporary author speaks of “the consolation of dying with sword in hand.”17 Finally, an anonymous pamphlet of the pre-Revolution exalts the sword nobles as those “protectors of the people, who give the example of patriotism, virtue, and honour; who, inspired by the memory and distinction of their ancestors and by the delicate pride embodied in their name, guide our legions on the field of glory and instil in the French soldier the lessons of conquering and dying for the fatherland. 8 The historical notion of a fit between ancestry, training, privilege, and capacity was deeply rooted in the French military aristocracy of the eighteenth century. There was an inbred contempt for the military skills of the commoner, except in paper work, technical branches like artillery and engineering, and those rare and distinguished cases where the commoner might literally “ennoble” himself in the blaze of battle. Otherwise the sword nobles believed that the conduct of war was their sovereign province, espe¬ cially because they understood what it was to die honourably.

Dying Well

To die honourably in the eighteenth century meant necessarily to die in the bosom of one’s religion. However, it is well known that there were notorious deposits of unbelief in the French aristocracy of the period. Moreover, religious practice in the royal army was 15. Maurice de La Fuye, Fontenoy, 1745 (Paris, 1945), p. 254. 16. F. Lebrun, Les hommes et la mart, p. 426. 17. [G. d’Heulland], 1758-1761), 1:82.

Theatre de la guerre presente en Allemagne,

5 vols. (Paris,

18. [Anon.], “La legislation reduite a sa plus simple application,” cited in Andre Decoufle, “L’aristocratic devant l’opinion publique a la veille de la Revolution (1787-1789),” in Andre Decoufle, Francois Boulanger, Bernard-Andre Pierrelle, eds., Etudes d’histoire economique et sociale du XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1966), p. 45.

132

Mortal Politics

quite pro forma, indifferent, and apparently getting worse as the century progressed.19 Less than a century after the pious Turenne and Catinat, staunch religious faith had to be played down. This is evident from the long and very interesting letter that the devout Marshal de Noailles sent to his grandson, the Comte d’Ayen, in 1755, when that young man went off to command his regiment as titular colonel. After several paragraphs commending the faith, Noailles adds: “But, in the century in which we live, even religion should avoid excessive devotion: this only furnishes material for satires and impious profanation. Religion ought to be more implanted in the heart than displayed on the surface; God is less honoured by petty and capricious practices than by a behaviour that is wise, constant, gentle, and bienfaisante....” While advised never to make close friendships with persons lacking in faith, the young officer was, however, not to make any great show of piety and to be ruled in all his actions by “honneur, sagesse et discretion.”20 No aspiring successor to Bossuet (who guided Turenne from Calvinism) ever attempted to convert Maurice de Saxe to the true faith from his once-born Lutheranism: Piety would have been quite ludicrous in life, although Saxe received a grandiose Protestant funeral in Strasbourg a month after his death against the explicit instructions of his own will.21 No doubt there were individual offi¬ cers who were deeply religious: Voltaire cites Fenelon, the nephew of the Archbishop of Cambrai: “He sought death and found it....His extreme devotion increased his fearlessness: he thought that the action most pleasing to God was to die for his king. We must grant that an army of likeminded men would be invincible.”22 But the evidence does not suggest that the army was full of such persons. A more typical reaction is probably that of Lieutenant Prunelle de Lamure, an anobli. Stationed in 1761 in Brittany, where the British were attacking, he suddenly took his own destiny to heart: “Like everyone else, I began to take things seriously. I had straightened out the matters of my conscience. I made a military will, which I placed in good hands, in which I shared my possessions between Saint-Didier and Lamure [his brothers]. I had it signed by the Chevalier de La Raignerais, commander of my post.”23 19. See Corvisier, L’armee franQaise, p. 865. 20. Adrien-Maurice, due de Noailles, Memoires Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 34:383-385.

de Noailles,

in

Michaud

and

21. Introduction to Saxe, Mes reveries, vol. 1, chap. 123-125. 22. Voltaire, Histoire de la guerre de 1741, in Oeuvres completes 15:259. 23. Rene Lacour, ed., Les fr'eres Prunelle, de Vienne, temoins oculaires de la guerre de Sept Ans, 2 vols. (Lyons, 1953), letter no. 15 (late 1761), 2:88.

War: The Paths of Glory

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It was of course normal to mention religion in the eulogies of defunct commanders. The best that could be said for Saxe was that he was an agent of God, “destined by Heaven for the salvation of peoples. He could scarcely have been portrayed as devoted to God. However, of Noailles it was remarked: “His death was that of a sage. The end of a just man can only be consoling. Religion crowned all his virtues.”25 And Belle-Isle’s biographer reports: “He died on 26 ^eUary 1761].at eleven in the evening, as a Christian and a sage. After receiving his fatal wound, Montcalm is said to have declared: “As for me, I am going to pass the night with God and prepare myself for death; let no one speak to me of anything else. But many of the religious touches seen decorous and formu¬ laic. For the most part, French officers did not gallop toward the jaws of death inspired by the life to come. To find a truly dramatic example of how religion moved men in battle in the eighteenth century it is necessary to go back to the Protestant Camisards of 1702-1704 and their inspired guerrilla leader Cavalier. “Through our fervent Prayers,” that commander writes in his memoirs, “we were induced from above with that Courage, whereby we were inabled to look Resolutely on all Dangers, and even on Death itself, and to get unexpected Victories. 28 Cavalier’s troops won admiration from all Protestant Europe, and pinned down 20,000 of Louis XIV’s army during the War of the Spanish Succession, until Marshal de Villars negotiated the end of hostilities. Villars, arriving on the scene in the Cevennes, wrote that he had found “a people resembling nothing I had ever seen, agitated, tumultuous, carried away, open equally to frivolous and profound influences, stubborn in opinions.”29 He had encoun¬ tered a stormy combination of local and religious war. As he commented: “The soldier was not fond of this war, and even feared it....The officer detested it and feared it even more, because there was neither honour nor security....”30 France would scarcely again 24. Loventz, Oraison funebre de Seigneur Maurice de Saxe, p. 9. 25. Eloge d Adrien-Maurice, due de Noailles,” in L’homme a la vertu guerriere, ou eloge de quelques-uns des plus celebres officiers qui ont ve'cu et qui sont morts sous le regne de Louis XV (Hambourg-ez-Monts, 1779), p. 36. 26. Frangois-Antoine Chevrier, La vie politique et militaire de M. le Marechal Due de Bell’Isle (The Hague, 1762), p. 266. 27.

Eloge de Montcalm,

in L hommage a la vertu guerriere, p. 112.

28. Jean Cavalier, Memoirs of the War of the Cevennes under Col. Cavallier [sic], in Defence of the Protestants Persecuted in that Country (Dublin, 1726), p. 116. 29. Claude-Louis-Hector, due de Villars, Memoires de Villars, letter of 1 May 1704, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 33:138. 30. Ibid.

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Mortal Politics

see the likes of such spiritual ferocity until Valmy. Since deep piety did not stir the souls of most eighteenth-century officers, irreligion was everywhere recognized to be a problem for the zeal of the armies and the discipline of the troops. If commanders were wanting in faith, the common soldiers lacked it in abundance. As Corvisier writes: “...one can affirm that the soldiers were out ahead of the rest of the population in their lapse of respect for religion....The army of the first half of the eighteenth century seems to have been rather deeply marked by anticlericalism.”31 Military reforms following on the defeats of the Seven Years’ War would stress the functionality of the religious dimension of military demeanour. As the Prince de Ligne wrote, late in the century, reviving an old controversy that had begun with Bayle: “Let it not be said...that the Catholic religion harms courage, for it almost no longer exists in the armies....In war I would count more on the truly devout than on those who, half-believers, half-libertins, are in great fear of the devil, and consequently of the enemy.”32 On the eve of the Revolution came this judgement: “Religion, even a false one, is the best guarantee that men can have from other men. It is the most powerful instrument (ressort) that the general can use to inspire, sustain, or revive the courage of his soldiers.”33 Religion was, of course, a twoedged blade, not always at the unchallenged behest of the “art d’egorger son prochain.” In his funeral oration for Louis XIV had Bishop Massillon not thundered: “Sad souvenirs of our victories, what do you recall for us? Proud monuments, raised in the middle of our public squares to immortalize the memory, what will you recall for our descendants?...You will recall a whole century of horror and bloodshed....You will recall our crimes rather than our victories.”34 Leaders like Belle-Isle and Saint-Germain saw the need to make religion work for them. But religion was not one of the most conspicuous motives for which the intrepid fought, nor did it gener¬ ally summon the faint-hearted to new courage. If not for faith, did the noble officers then fight for the monarch, the sovereign who was God’s lieutenant? Here the answer will require a certain amount of nuance. The king, to mix a metaphor, was traditionally the central figure of the military hive and was ideal¬ ized as such. Souvenirs of the warrior-king Henri IV made contact 31. Corvisier, L’armee franQaise, p. 869. 32. Prince de Ligne, “Oeuvres militaires,” in Me'moires et melanges 3:171. 33. [M. de P..., TAuteur d’Azemor”], Considerations sur I'influence des moeurs dans I’etat militaire des nations (London, 1788), p. 227. Italics in original. 34. Bp. Jean-Baptiste Massillon, quoted by Leonard, L’armee et ses problemes, p. 141.

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with a still semi-feudal ancestral mentality. According to an oath sworn by Colonels, Capitaines, Lieutenants, Porte-Enseignes, Centeniers, Caps d’Escadre, Fouriers, Sergens de Batailles, Prevots, et Gens de pied, they were pledged to “serve the king well and loyally envers et contre tons, without exception, in all positions where it pleases the Sovereign; and to carry out entirely what is commanded of them...and to alert this same Sovereign to everything coming to their attention that concerns his goods, honour, profit, or damage....”35 I have no ready explanation why an oath does not appear to have been obtained from higher officers: perhaps their fidelity was taken for granted. From 1763 on, an oath, mentioning the king as well as all officers and non-commissioned officers in command, was also required of all army recruits.36 It is useful at this point to recall the ancient substance of an oath. In Roman times (and long before the term came to be assimilated to the Christian mysteries) an oath (serment) was related to the notion of sacramentum, from which the French word descends. “The cluster sacramentumserment successively includes the ideas of military oath (all the consec¬ rating ceremonies that accompany the oath sworn by Roman soldiers when their unit is formed), of rite of initiation to mysteries, and of religion in the objective sense....”37 With this archaeology in mind and from abundant evidence of the importance of oaths in the Revolution, we can have little doubt about the seriousness of the serment.

Yet the oath was by its nature a single performative action. It could obligate in the most severe sense; but it could not continually arouse the passions. What evidently was required for that was the signifier of a warrior-king, the ancient symbol of a supreme lord with military prowess. Though no field marshal, Louis XIV had scru¬ pulously joined his proximate campaigns; when the immobility of advanced age kept him close to Madame de Maintenon during the War of the Spanish Succession, it seems that military morale suffered. Louis XV was implored to go to war by Marshal de Noailles: “Your resolution to go to war, Sire, has become indispen¬ sable in all respects: it is the only way to save the State, which is in danger....You engage the personal honour of Your Majesty. No king is so great as when he leads his armies: that is the way his subjects

35. Pierre de Briquet, Code militaire, ou compilation des ordonnances des rois de France concernant les gens de guerre (Paris, 1728), 1:264. 36. Leon Mention, L’armee de I’Ancien Regime de Louis XIV a la Revolution (Paris, n.d.), p. 21. 37. Plongeron, Theologie et politique, p. 183.

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Mortal Politics

love best to see him.”38 Louis XV was present at the victories of Fontenoy and Lawfeldt; and it is reported that his safety was a major concern for Saxe on both occasions.39 There can be little doubt that the presence of the monarch, with his heraldic insignia, in the midst of his troops gave inspiration to their efforts. This is one of the numerous reasons why all France thirsted for a reborn Henri IV, “the king that had reconquered his people.” Neither Louis XV nor Louis XVI came close to fitting the Henrician fantasy, although for a time, especially during the War of the Austrian Succession, poets tended to grant Louis XV these capac¬ ities: Que tu sais bien, grand Terrible a tes rivaux et Tu ramenes la paix sur Que manquait-il encore

Roi, couronner tes projets! cher a tes sujets, ton char de victoire. a tes voeux, a ta gloire?...40

That this author was Henriolatrized is shown by the way he unites the courage of the nobles and, especially, the resourcefulness of the people under the heroic image of their common sovereign, concluding: “Un tel maitre a son peuple, un tel peuple a son Roi.” Despite the gloomy prognostication of the Marquis d’Argenson, made only two years later, that France was rushing toward republic¬ anism (“In my time I have seen the respect and love of the people for royalty decrease”),41 it might seem that what France wanted most was a politic warrior-king it could cherish. The army obviously wanted one even more. But the mood would darken, especially with the bungling of the Seven Years’ War. Duclos gives us an informed picture of the intrigues which, buzzing around Madame de Pompadour, were capable of making or unmaking the reputations of second-rate commanders like Soubise, d’Estrees, Clermont, and Richelieu.42 A verse of the time ran: “Rome jadis consultait les oiseaux / Sur la 38. Noailles, Me'moires de Noailles, Noailles to the King, 6 August 1745, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 33:324. 39. See La Fuye, Fontenoy, p. 182. 40. “La noblesse militaire,” in Le chansonnier historique 6:171: “Great King, how wisely you crown your deedsl / Terrible to your rivals and dear to your subjects, / You fetch back peace in your chariot of victory. / What more can your desires and your glory need?...” 41. Rene-Louis d’Argenson, Journal et me'moires du marquis d’Argenson, ed. EdmeJacques-Benoit Rathery, 9 vols. (Paris, 1859-1867), 7:242. 42. See Charles-Pinot Duclos, Me'moires secrets sur le regne de Louis le regne de Louis XV, 2 vols. (Paris, 1864), 2:287f.

XIV,

la re'gence et

War: The Paths of Glory

137

guerre, la paix, le choix des generaux....”43 It is clear that court politics was by now not only demoralizing but corrupting France’s generals and that the king no longer furnished the symbol that a generous-spirited officer or soldier would frame a resolve to die for. Even slightly earlier, the numerous maxims and sketches that the moralist and ex-officer Vauvenargues had devoted to military bravery, the omnipresence of violence, and the conditions of war had pointedly neglected loyalty to the throne as a motive of service. It was specifically a contempt for fidelity to the nation that anguished him. Several years before the Abbe Coyer broached this question in Sur le vieux mot de patrie (Coyer had been a military chap¬ lain), Vauvenargues wrote: “Service of the patrie now passes for an old-fashioned style, for a prejudice. In the armies you see only disgust, boredom, neglect, and bold and insolent insinuations. Luxury and softness are brazenly produced there, just as in peace¬ time.”44 Aggrieved loyalty is shifting from the monarch to the nation in a mood pregnant with the future. It is not, however, a bourgeois temper that Vauvenargues displays: “Those who pretend to despise glory so as to give all their esteem to virtue rob virtue of its compensation and firmest support.”45 “To accomplish great things, one ought to live as if one would never have to die.”46 “Among kings, among peoples, among private persons, the stronger avails himself by right over the weaker, and the same rule is followed by animals, by matter, by the elements, etc.; so that every¬ thing in the universe comes about by violence.”47 There is no religion in Vauvenargues, there is no dynastic awe, there is no popu¬ lism, and there is certainly no hint of the rights of man. He is not the prelude to 1789; he points toward Napoleon. Yet Napoleon might not have been possible without the frustrated anticipation of Henri IV. The Henrician lineage is made explicit in a lengthy poem of 1762, by Baculard d’Arnaud. Its “argument” contains the following: “Invocation to love of the fatherland. Injurious remarks of England (Albion), overweaning in her success. Reply by a courageous old man who appears with the features of Henri IV. He cannot persuade our enemy to make peace. The old man discloses his identity. He rouses 43. “Epigrammes diverses: sur Madame de Pompadour,” Le chansonnier historique 6:298: “In olden times Rome consulted birds [i.e., the sacred geese] / For making war and peace, and choosing generals....” 44. Vauvenargues, “Sur les armees d’a present,” in Oeuvres completes, p. 280. 45. Ibid., p. 74. 46. Ibid., Vauvenargues, “Pensees et maximes,” no. 142, p. 413. 47. Ibid., Vauvenargues, “Pensees et maximes,” no. 187, p. 417.

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the French to a just [feeling of] vengeance. Their willingness to grant the State the means to satisfy it....”48 It is made doubly explicit in the famous first work of the Comte de Guibert, the Essai general de tactique. This was indeed a radical work; Voltaire was engrossed in it until he thought of its conse¬ quences: “...je ne m’occupe / Que d’apprendre un livre si divin. / Mes amis! c’etait l’art d’egorger son prochain.”49 While Guibert was no doubt a contributor to the Rousseauist civic ideology of the Revolution, the thrust of his message has sometimes been mistakenly interpreted. For example, Roger Caillois writes: “For him the solu¬ tion is not in doubt; it figures on each page of his two volumes, in the clear and between the lines. It is the Republic. He doesn’t pronounce the word, but constantly he suggests or defines the thing.”50 Guibert certainly had no hesitation in calling the reigning European monarchs incompetent, and he presented an ardent case for a people’s militia (though seven years later he was to concede that “les vapeurs de la philosophic echauffaient sa tete et offusquaient son jugement”).51 He had also dedicated the Essai “a ma Patrie. But he had added decorously: “Dedicating my work to my country is to consecrate it collectively to the king who is the father; to the ministers who are the administrators; to all the orders of the state who are the members; to all the French who are the chil¬ dren....”52 The paternalistic imagery annuls the republicanism, or at least heavily disguises it. Moreover, toward the end of his “Discours preliminaire, Guibert writes: “O my patriel...Maybe some day, escaping from the vices of his century and placed in more favourable circumstances, a prince will rise to the throne who can carry out this great revolution. From the writings of my fellow citizens, from my own perhaps, he will extract the desire to do it and the way to go about it....”53 Guibert is indulging in Henriolatry: and every 48. Franeois-Thomas-Marie de Baculard d’Arnaud, “A la Nation” (Paris, 1762), p. 49. Voltaire, “La tactique” (1773), Oeuvres completes 10:188: “The book I read is so divine I cannot put it down. / But, my friends! It was the art of cutting your neighb¬ our’s throat.” 50. Roger Caillois, Hippolyte de Guibert et l’idee de la guerre republicaine,” in Hommage a Lucien Febvre, e'ventail de Vhistoire vivante, 2 vols. (Paris, 1953), 2:462. 51. Hippolyte de Guibert, in introducing his Defense du systeme de la guerre moderne (1779). 52. Hippolyte de Guibert, dedication to L’essai general de tactique, in Strate'giques (Paris, 1977), p. 132. V 53. Ibid., p. 150. And cf. ibid., p. 165: “Genius and virtue can come to birth on thrones.” Guibert’s formula recalls a passage from Hobbes’s Leviathan, chap. 31: “I recover some hope, that at one time or another, this writing of mine may fall into the

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adulation of the first Bourbon takes its toll in weakening his inferior descendants. If kings are no longer symbols for whom the supreme sacrifice can come easily, the nation in the integrity of its parts is being raised to that role by late Bourbon military romanticists; and this process is well under way before the death of Louis XV. To the degree that faith and royalty were not the stimulants to battle that they had once been, the emotional wellsprings of the mili¬ tary noble’s motivation were suffering drought. An admiring officer had written of the due de Vendome, dead in 1712: “He made war like a hero, like a grand homme and an honnete homme....Adored by the soldier, he served only for his glory, for that of the king, and for that of the nation.”54 By the end of the Seven Years’ War enco¬ miums could no longer be couched in this vein. Gloire, race, ordre remained powerful incentives, but they sought connection with a more encompassing ideal in the Age of Reason. The instance of the nation flourished in the writings of the Chevalier d’Arc, the Comte de Saint-Germain, the Comte de Guibert, and others; but, as I have suggested, not at first in its unveiled splendor, rather as filtered through the memory of Henri IV, the patriot king who had created harmony in the fatherland-a harmony since undermined. And by the accession of Louis XVI the commoners were beginning to fight for possession of this same image with an enlivened hatred of aristoc¬ racy. Ponce-Denis Ecouchard Lebrun, a poet of some distinction and later, with Marie-Joseph Chenier, noted for his Revolutionary verses, makes the following address to kings in 1783: Pourquoi cette guerriere elite? Pourquoi ce fer du satellite, Qui place la terreur entre le peuple et vous? Ah! vos craintes sont une offense: Entourez-vous des coeurs: monarques, aimez-nous, L’amour sera votre defense.55 At the end of his poem Lebrun summons Henri IV:

hands of a sovereign, who will consider it himself (for it is short, and I think clear) without the help of any interested or envious interpreter....” 54. Joseph Sevin, Chevalier de Quincy, Memoires, 3 vols. (Paris, 1898-1903), 3:120. 55. Ode, “Les Rois” (1783), in Poesies nationales de la Revolution (Paris, 1836), p. 4: “Why that warrior elite? / Why that girding bondage / That sows terror between the people and you? / Your fear of them offends us: / Gather our hearts around you: monarchs, love us, / Love will be your defense.”

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...de qui la gloire Fit monter sur un trone entoure de vertus La bienfaisance et la victoire.56 A curious yoking: that favourite word of the pacific Abbe de Saint-Pierre, “bienfaisance,” with “victoire,” a passion that no lumieres could efface from the French spirit.

War as Science

The military nobility was nagged by other demons as well. For one thing, in the opinion of some, war was becoming more routine and mechanical, drained of its last chivalry and great-heartedness. The rash of interest in Polybius (cf. the Chevalier de Folard’s sevenvolume Commentaire sur Poly be of 1730) was in part owing to unfavou¬ rable contrasts with the Romans in strength, skill, and stamina that French military reformers were making and continued to make throughout the century.57 Helvetius thought that by denying mili¬ tary commissions to those unable to bear the rigour of fatigues and discipline, one could wrench the idlers and comfort-seekers from their complacency. “Then,” he said, “they will want to be men.”58 However, Vauvenargues, who had experienced the problem earlier on, had written: “Soldiers march against the enemy like Capuchins going to matins. It is neither an interest in war, nor love of glory or of the nation (patrie), that inspires our armies today: It is the drum that leads them forward and back, just as the chimes cause the monks to get up and go to bed.”59 This clockwork of war that so offended Vauvenargues’s aesthetic could, in the opinion of Guibert, be traced back to the very institutionalization of a national army in France by Richelieu and the ministers of Louis XIV. Their corrup¬ tion of the nobility had caused the Second Estate to degenerate as an 56. Ibid., p. 7: “...whose glory, / Amid virtues, raised to a throne / Good deeds and victory.” 57. Cf. Guibert, Strategiques, p. 473: “Our manners (moeurs) are not military. Our soldiers, and our officers even less, have no frugality or patience or bodily strength which are the primordial and basic qualities of warriors. Those qualities are not honoured in our century.” 58. Helvetius, De I’homtne, sect. 5, chap. 2, p. 305. 59. Vauvenargues, “Pensees et maximes,” no. 696, in Oeuvres completes, p. 472.

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effective restraining force between the supremacy of the monarch and the servitude of the people: “Soon nothing more was left, neither national spirit, nor energy, nor virtues: and that was the work of Richelieu, whose mausoleum decorates our temples....”60 Guibert’s argument is of course more complicated than this. It is also far-fetched in some of its claims: If Richelieu, Le Tellier, and Louvois did much to kill the noble spirit of a golden age now appre¬ hended almost mythically, they also boldly undertook the creation of a modern army which the doctrines of Guibert and others would carry forward. For all the brave posturing of the Essai general de tactique, Guibert would shortly be adopting a more conventional and realistic view of the problem at hand under the rubric of “modern war”: Leave philosophy to nourish itself with impossible fantasies, and let us speak of our situation. We dwell on a large continent, we have immensely extended frontiers, and belligerent and power¬ fully armed neighbours. Monarchy is the government best suited for such a situation....61 In returning to a view that the war ministers of Louis XIV would not have challenged, Guibert presents a version of the “administrative” doctrine of monarchy, a justification based not on divine right or ancient election, but rather on function-a line of reasoning generally acceptable to the philosophes. Leaving the sacral dimension aside, functional and emotional justifications both seem necessary to the eighteenth-century military mind. Because of France’s geographical position and the evolving nature of modern warfare, the nation must necessarily be a highly coordinated monarchy; because of primordial elements in the psychology of the French warrior class-honour, glory, privilege, and the like-it is equally necessary to have a pater¬ nalistic, hierarchical, privilege-granting author of combat and service. The trick, for Saint-Germain and other reformers, is to conjugate reality and nostalgia (of which much abided still in French society) in the interest of efficiency. They cannot really envisage the patrie without a pater.

But-aside from the failure of Henri IV to be reborn-there is a dialectic at work to destroy that precious balancing of functionalism and fervor, of efficiency and devotion. This is contained in the nature of modern war itself, which with every military advance 60. Guibert, Strate'giques, p. 141. 61. Ibid., p. 547.

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encroaches on the personal qualities of heroism and the personal instincts of devotion unto death. The complaint that, as war was becoming more thoroughly modernized and the “guerrier” was displaced by the “militaire,” a part of war’s soul had been lost, was countered by the equally strong argument that modernization was “humanizing.” At this level of dialectic, philosophy and the military mind found some agreement. In the wars of Louis XIV, Vauban had hoped that his newly devel¬ oped methods of siege warfare would have the result of sparing both military and civilian lives.62 War was already being complimented for its moderation in the age of Louis XV, until the influence of theorists like Folard (who had written: “War has only one goal from the military point of view: that is the battle, the decisive battle”)63 caused belief in offensive shock to prevail and casualties to rise. Even Voltaire, admittedly in his role of royal historiographer, had been able to write: “Thus the barbarities of war have been curtailed (ordonne'es) in Europe, as much as human perversity can allow.”64 Vauvenargues commented, a little acidly: “Today war is waged so humanely among the peoples of Europe, with such facility and so little profit, that it can be compared, without paradox, to the law suits of private parties, where the costs exceed the benefits and where action depends less on strength than on cunning.”65 These observations were supported by a deeper current: the goal of transposing war from an art to a science. Though the word science was not yet used, the implication was clear. Practically prefigured in the artisanal crafts of military invention and brought to sophistication in Vauban’s earthworks and fortifications, science was now able to claim the entire vista of the battlefield as an annex of enlightenment itself. The principal, and pedantic, herald of the science of warfare was Marshal de Puysegur, whose Art de la guerre par pnncipes ou par regies was published posthumously in 1749 and dedicated to the king. A methodical officer who had served under Vendome and Villars, Puysegur became a member of the Conseil de Guerre at the time of the Regency, and used this protracted period of peace to gather his thoughts on war in a magnum opus intended for the instruction of the young monarch. As a modern historian writes: “C’est deja le Kriegspiel moderne.”66

62. See Rousset, Histoire de Louvois 1:461. 63. Quoted in Leonard, L’armee et ses probitones, p. 111. 64. Voltaire, Pane'gyrique de Louis XV, in Oeuvres completes 23:272. 65. Vauvenargues, “Pensees et maximes,” no. 575, in Oeuvres completes, p. 460. 66. Leonard, L’armee et ses pr obi ernes, p. 105.

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Puysegur’s first tome announces: “Of all the arts, that which has undoubtedly been the profession of most men in all times has indis¬ putably been the art of war; and yet today one has the least opportu¬ nity for learning it.”67 Practice itself is not enough; first a thorough study of “les regies & les principes” is needed.68 The military art is something that any man can learn without leaving his own house.69 This subject is founded chiefly on geometry and geography; but it does not seem that its principles have ever been effectively codified: no doubt this is because the exigencies of military life prevented the greatest commanders from setting down their insights systematically. Now, the Marshal proclaims: ...it is not only from the men of war that we must hope that [the science of war] will be handed down, since the life that is led in the armies, the dangers experienced there, and the demands of the profession discourage most of those who engage in it from writing about what they have learned. It is only from the gens de lettres helped by the insights of gifted officers or from a few mili¬ tary men who have become learned in other sciences that we can hope for the transmission of the art to posterity, after its precise principles have been identified.70 The author adds: “It is not to be believed that there is any condition (etat) of society where one can do without theory.”71 Puysegur thus encourages the collaboration of the captains and the philosophes. He also intimates, and attempts to prove by meticu¬ lous analyses of the campaigns of Turenne and others, and by an extensive Kriegspiel plotted defensively between the Seine and Loire rivers (no doubt warmed-over apprehensions of the waning days of the War of the Spanish Succession, when the collapse of the front had been feared), that war can be learned better through the exer¬ cise of the detached intellect than in the thick of the fight.72 Other writers took up the theme:

67. Jacques-Frangois de Chastenet, marquis de Puysegur, Art de la guerre par prin¬ cipes et par regies, 2 vols. (Paris, 1748), 1:1. 68. Ibid., p. 2. 69. Ibid., p. 3. 70. Ibid., 2:445. 71. Ibid. 72. Cf. ibid., 2:1-65, 129f, and passim.

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The progress of reason has influenced all the arts, and we no longer think that the single merit of an officer is to be able to muster a parade or show skill in the use of arms....It is by [theoretical application] that we make up for what we lack in experience, that we gain the qualities that make great officers, and that we launch ourselves on the path of glory.73 Truisms of French history, greatly abetted by narrowly social inter¬ pretations of the breakdown of the Old Regime, have led us to believe that the military mind and the philosophical mind were thoroughly hostile to each other. That they were hostile in significant respects is true. But there were also elements of rapprochement based on a shared interest in theory and science—and even in the humanization of war. War could indeed find its place in the Encyclopedic of Diderot and d’Alembert, not only because it was part of the human condition but also because it obeyed some of the same urges of innovation and technical intelligence that characterized the entire project of the Enlightenment. ^ The Encyclopedists felt that Saxe had coronated this effort. Grimm writes, regarding the Reveries: “People...first thought that the Reveries was a mediocre work unworthy of its author. But continu¬ ally, since then, this judgement has changed for the better. Soon this book will be esteemed by all the public as belonging to the classics handed down to posterity.”74 One scrutinizes the Reveries carefully, thinking to find there the decisive clues that could disclose the strange attraction of military theory for “the philosophy of the century.” But although Saxe does cursorily repeat the complaint of Puysegur (“All sciences have principles and rules; war has none. The great captains who wrote have never given us any”),75 we find much more about practice than system in his work. We discover his great instinct of practicality and his knowledge of battles. He boasted: “I composed the work in thirteen nights [cf. the twenty years’ labour of a Folard or a Puysegur], I was ailing....I wrote in a military fashion, and to dispel my boredom.”76 But Saxe appealed to the Encyclopedists for many reasons: his heroism, his success, his worldli¬ ness. Diderot may especially have appreciated his artisanship (numerous engraved plates in the work exhibit improved instruments of war, saddles, bayonets, etc., some of his own invention), as well as

73. 74. 75. 76.

Laurent Lecointre, quoted in Leonard, L’armee et ses problemes, p. 210. Grimm, et al., Correspondance litteraire 3:379. Saxe, Mes reveries, “Avant-propos” 1:1. Ibid., p. 151.

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his humanity toward the common soldier and his advocacy of a citizen army.77 Thus he suited the aspiration of making war more humane.78 Guibert was categorical on that subject: “It is beyond doubt that the employment of firearms has made war infinitely less bloody....It is equally beyond doubt that, considering the art with which battles are now conducted, they can no longer be as generalized, or as murderous and decisive [as before]....Today wars become less cruel....Philosophy, lumieres, the universal softening of manners have no doubt contributed to this revolution; but it is also the result of the system of modern war.”79 Guibert attributed this humanization to a far stricter separation of soldiers and civilians in the combat zone, as well as in peacetime activities. He also felt that the perfec¬ tion of war and the simplification of its principles went hand in hand, just as they did in politics and other branches of science.80 Thus the conduct of military operations, which, above all else, risked lives and aimed at death, was to fall within those same provinces of human improvement and life-enhancement heralded by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre earlier in the century. “Philosophy,” which had often regarded war as a blight on civilization, was actually conspiring to bring war within its reach. Condorcet, a passionate enemy of violence, seemed to concur: “War is a curse, but it is war itself and not the art of war that is evil. As that art improves, the evils that it engenders become less cruel; for, the more that victory depends on science and ability, the less will emotions and fury increase its slaughter and devastation. Thus at the same time that the progress of Enlightenment makes war more infrequent and less embittered, its progress in physics makes war less bloody and destructive.”81 The positions of Condorcet and Guibert were not entirely parallel: If, for the former, war was a curse, for the latter it was “an infallible result of the passions of the human race.”82 But the conjuncture of their thoughts is no less worthy of note. Of all the philosophes, Guibert felt, “the only one...who has looked at war from its true perspective and thus written on it not only as a philosopher but as a statesman is [Raynal,] the author of the Histoire des etablissemens europeens aux Deux Indes. He detests war 77. Ibid., 2:150-151. 78. Article “Guerre (homme de guerre),” Encyclopedie 7:995b. 79. Guibert, Strate'giques, p. 554. 80. Ibid., p. 161. 81. Condorcet, “Eloge a M. Patrice le comte d’Arci,” in Eloges de UAcademie royale 2:188. 82. Guibert, Strate'giques, p. 542.

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in itself; with the most blazing eloquence he publicly execrates the kings and ministers who wage it unjustly. But, at the same time, he feels that war is an inevitable curse....Thus no military detail escapes his attention in his immortal work.”83 In the Deux Indes, Raynal dramatically contrasts “war...that rage kindled by injustice, ambition, and revenge” and “peace...that blessing so earnestly wished for, [which] exists nowhere.”84 He frames the “illusion” that “the people who have brought [war] to perfection will become accursed; and the moment when these formidable instruments of death shall be gener¬ ally demolished cannot be far distant...[and] the universe will at length execrate those odious conquerors, who have rather chosen to be the terror of their neighbours than the fathers of their subjects....”85 “But,” Raynal concludes, “this illusion did not last long. I was soon persuaded that the disputes between kings would never end, any more than their passions, and that they could only be decided by the sword.” They would go on “bathing their feet in the blood of their friends and of their enemies, walking over their carcasses, and mixing songs of mirth with the plaintive accents of expiring men.”86

War as Literary Aesthetic

While it is easy to see why Guibert accepted Raynal’s conclusions about war’s fatality and why, since he himself was accustomed to declaiming verses in salons, he may have appreciated his friend’s sanguinary poetry, it is not so easy to square Raynal’s vision with the opinion that “today wars have become less cruel.”87 Some battles, especially in the War of the Austrian Succession, were exceptionally violent. At Fontenoy, one author records, when the carnage had stopped and quiet had descended on a field strewn with corpses, 83. Ibid., p. 543. 84. Abbe Guillaume-Thomas-Fran^ois Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, J.O. Justamond, trans. (New York, 1969; reprint of 1798 ed.), vol. 6, bk. 19, pp. 317-318. 85. Ibid., p. 318. 86. Ibid., p. 319. 87. Guibert was the actual author of the famous letter to the Constituent Assembly that Raynal published on 10 December 1789, protesting the invasion of the king’s prerogative: text in ibid., p. 676f.

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“d’Argenson was almost sick to his stomach; he needed smelling salts. Louis-Ferdinand [the Dauphin] wept.”88 The storming of Berg-op-Zoom after sixty-four days of siege in 1747 was a nightmare for the civilians: “finding themselves peaceful possessors of the town, our [French] soldiers fell to pillaging as if it were their natural right.” Townspeople by the hundreds perished. Lowendal, the French commander (promoted marshal), moved, but without head¬ long haste, to curtail the atrocity.89 Yet many of the tableaux given us by eighteenth-century literature are almost certainly overdrawn in their epic or horrific proportions. Whether composed by philosophes ardent to stress war’s brutality or by panegyrists eager to eclipse all else with its heroic properties, the painterly or hypervisual style is a constant. One might even say that it does duty for the ideological, rhetorical, and hyperverbal style that will come to characterize the deeds of the Revolution. Raynal, just cited, is working in this idiom. So is Freron: Muse, retrace-moi le choc des deux armees D’une egale fureur au massacre animees; Le fer, le feu, la mort lances dans tous les rangs, Des coursiers belliqueux les bouches ecumantes, Et les plaines fumantes Du sang des bataillons sous le glaive expirants.90 So is Causy: Ce n’est plus dans les coeurs noblesse de courage, C’est fureur, desespoir, c’est l’ardeur du carnage. La discorde en fureur s’echappe de ses fers, Tous les antres affreux qui menent aux enfers S’entrouvrent a la fois pour recevoir les ombres Que le feu meurtrier envoye en ces lieux sombres.91 88. La Fuye, Fontenoy, p. 193. 89. Plans et journaux des sieges de la derniere guerre de Flandres, rassembles par deux capitaines etrangers au service de France (Strasbourg, 1750), p. 102. 90. Elie-Catherine Freron, “Ode: La journee de Fontenoy,” in Charles Barthelemy, ed., Les confessions de Freron, 1719-1776 (Paris, 1876), p. 339: “Muse, call back the clash of the two armies / Driven to massacre with an equal fury: / Iron, fire, and death unleashed in every rank, / Warlike chargers, with their mouths dripping foam, / And the plains smoking / With the blood of battalions dying beneath the blade.” 91. Causy, “La bataille de Laufel [Lawfeldt]” (Paris, 1747), p. 18: “There is no more noble courage in their hearts; / All is fury, despair, and the thirst for slaughter. / The furious conflict bursts its chains; / And all the frightful passages to hell / Open at once to swallow up the shades / Sent to that dismal place by the deadly fire.”

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Mortal Politics

So is Rousseau: I see fires and flames, ravaged countryside, pillaged towns. Ferocious men, where are you dragging these piteous victims? I hear a fearful noise: what tumult! what cries! I draw closer; I see a theatre of murders, ten thousand men with their throats cut, the dead heaped up in piles, the dying trampled beneath the feet of horses, everywhere the image of death and agony.92 Such instances are legion (Morelly’s utopian work the Basiliade provides another example; and it would be superfluous to recite Voltaire’s gory passage on war from Candide). But it is instructive to spend attention on a single case that shows how style swells and for what purposes. After seizing the city of Prague by a daring maneuver in the autumn of 1741 in order to have the elector of Bohemia crowned there, the French forces were cut off in the bitter winter, forced to escape an encirclement and save themselves as best they could through an exacting series of forced marches carried out under the exceptional generalship of Marshal de Belle-Isle. That commander’s account of his difficult retreat is the following: Although I was continually harrassed by hussars from the front, from behind, and on my flanks, I lost only those who could not bear the fatigue and the indescribable rigour of the cold, both of which were beyond all imagination....Courage and spirit pushed my machine beyond its powers, but I feel well compensated by the success of a most difficult and perilous undertaking, in view of how very important the circumstances were for the service of the king and the good of the common cause. Nowhere was I thwarted: I left behind only the dead and those who could not follow.93 One of the dead left behind in the retreat from Prague was Paul-Hippolyte-Emmanuel de Seytres. Vauvenargues, then an officer and a bosom friend of the eighteen-year-old Seytres, survived the same catastrophe. Aggrieved by the enormity of his loss, the moralist turned the terrible event into an imperishable statement about war:

92. Rousseau, “L’etat de guerre,” in Vaughan, ed., Political Writings 1:303. 93. Cited in Chevrier, La vie de Bell’Isle, pp. 172-173.

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O evil war! Intimidating climate! Harsh winter! O earth that contains the ashes of your astonished vanquishers! Tombs, frightful monuments of the treacherous turns of fate! Fatal errand! Bloody walls! Glorified victim, you shall not escape from the field of victory: death has dragged you into a fearful trap; you breathe an empoisoned air; the shadow of mortality surrounds you. Weep, wretched fatherland, weep on your mournful trophies; you have spread your dauntless soldiers across all Germany, and revelled in your glory! Weep, I say, shed tears, hurl your pitiful cries; with great distress a few shreds of an army once so fine will look again on your favoured fields, and after what danger? I shudder. They flee; hunger and disarray march at their furtive heels; night swal¬ lows their footsteps, and death follows them in silence. You say, is that the army that spread fear before it? But, you must realize, fortune is fickle: this army, too, learns the meaning of fear (elle craint a son tour); it speeds its flight amid the woods and snow; it marches on without halt. Sickness, hunger, overburdening fatigue crush our young soldiers; you can see them sprawled out wretchedly in the snow, exhausted beyond human resources; bonfires ablaze on the ice light their last moments; the earth is their awful place of rest (lit redoutable).94 The rhythmic tension of this brief, moving, and terrible elegy mounts in a strange mixture of hysteria and dignity, almost as if the danse macabre were being played against the stately cadences of a funeral march. “Mutilated remnants of death,” Vauvenargues declares, “how fearsome a sight you offer me!”95 The nightmare of Belle-Isle’s retreat finally grows obsessive: “Open, frightful tombs; solitary ghosts, speak, speak to us. But what an impenetrable silence! O sad abandonment! O terror!”96 If we contrast the Belle-Isle document with Vauvenargues’s eloge, we gain some sense of how eighteenth-century war is transformed from professional report to living literature, motivated by the will and the message of the writer. Belle-Isle, who cannot be accused of dishonesty in describing an arduous but valiant action, is far exceeded in drama by the passion of one of his officers for the inconsolable loss of a friend. Moreover, Vauvenargues’s fidelity is vouched for by his professionalism, his well-known belief in the inev¬ itability of violence, his assertion of the right of the stronger, and his 94. Vauvenargues, Eloge de Seytres, in Oeuvres completes, p. 84. 95. Ibid., p. 86. 96. Ibid., p. 88.

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notion of the dialectic of gloire and vertu. It would be interesting to explore the contrast further: but we have yet a third mirror of inter¬ pretation in which to view this event. When Vauvenargues turned to literature, he was encouraged by Voltaire, who seems to have conceived an affection for the young nobleman to match that of Vauvenargues for Seytres. When the Eloge de Seytres was written, Voltaire declared: “Here is the first funeral oration dictated by the heart: all the others are works of . vanity.” Then Vauvenargues himself died, afflicted by a weak constitution. This determined Voltaire to repeat the experiment, seven years after the fact, in his Eloge funebre des officiers qui sont marts dans la guerre de 1741. This quite untypical work by an antimilitarist philosophe combines some accustomed themes with Voltaire’s desire to pay homage to (and perhaps rival) his deceased protege. At the end of his strange elegy, Voltaire addresses Vauvenargues with the tutoiement so foreign to his nature: “you are no more, sweet hope of the rest of my days! O gentle friend (ami tendre)...your loss planted in my heart the idea of bestowing some honour on the ashes of so many who defended the State, as well as raising a monument to your honour.”98 0*7

'

Voltaire begins the work by claiming the necessity of praising those who have been “utiles” as well as “grands.”99 We are reminded of a certain hierarchy featured in the ethics of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Or, as Voltaire put it elsewhere: “You know that with me the grands hommes come first and the heroes last. I call those men grands who have excelled in the utile or the agreable. Heroes are simply those who pillage provinces.”100 Now there is apparently an utilite that might even fall short of grandeur. Voltaire does not yet tip his hand; his grief for Vauvenargues advances his propaganda for a policy of peace: “Since war is a shocking curse combining all calami¬ ties and crimes, the greater should be our gratitude toward those brave compatriots who perished to give us that fortunate peace which should be the only goal of war and the single object of a true monarch’s ambition.”101 So far this is vintage Voltaire; but the rest of the piece becomes more and more curious. Voltaire uses the Eloge to flail the common soldier’s vocation: “thousands of mercenary plunderers, whose spirit of debauchery, immorality, and murder has drawn them from their native 97. Quoted in ibid., p. 620. 98. Voltaire, Eloge funebre, in Oeuvres completes 23:259. 99. Ibid., p. 250. 100. Voltaire to Theriot (1735), Correspondance, ed. Besterman, D864, 4:94. 101. Voltaire, Eloge funebre, in Oeuvres completes 23:250.

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regions....The day of combat arrives, and often the soldier formerly enlisted beneath the banners of his country has no remorse at the sight of the blood of his fellow citizens....”102 But, interestingly, the officer’s motive is a world apart: “Idolizing his honour and that of his sovereign, braving death with sang-froid while having every reason to love life, willingly (gaiement) leaving the delights of society for sub-natural hardships (pour des fatigues qui font fremir la nature•); humane, generous, fellow-feeling (compatissant), while barbarism everywhere glistens with hatred around him....”103 “What,” Voltaire asks, “have they not achieved, those heroes who have little know¬ ledge of the multitude?”104 Then, in an equally unexpected turn, Voltaire excoriates the modern luxury of which he was usually a reli¬ able friend in court: “Peaceful sybarites dwelling in our flourishing cities, absorbed in enervating novelties (raffinements de la mollesse), now insensitive to everything, even pleasure....”105 He contrasts these with “the five or six hundred families of the kingdom” who have groaned from the loss of a loved one. And he hastens to give examples: “...young Brienne, who with a fractured arm...climbs back up the ladder and says: ‘I still have one left for my king and my country’....Young Boufflers, a child ten years old, who in that battle [Dettingen] suffered a crushed leg, and having it cut off without a whimper, dies all the same....”106 Is this Voltaire? Although he hobnobbed with many of the great nobles and princes, and appreciated them to the extent that they held him in mutual esteem, he could bowl them down like tenpins when it suited his vanity. Moreover, except as it pleased him and his instinct of sociability, he had no love for military nobles (except for a few friends like Richelieu). While conceding to war’s elemental inev¬ itability,107 he had made his mark partly through his patented hatred of war. Yet the death of his friend Vauvenargues and the souvenir of their companionship prompted him to write a swollen encomium of the noblesse d’epee. Vauvenargues had himself been a warrior to the manner born. Never had his opinions on the value or necessity of violence corre¬ sponded to those of Voltaire. Only in the horror of personal loss had 102. Ibid., p. 251. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., p. 252. 105. Ibid., p. 253. 106. Ibid., p. 254. 107. According to Voltaire, war accustomed itself easily to the traditional four elements of earth, fire, air, and water. See article “Guerre,” Dictionnaire philosophique, in Oeuvres completes 27:180.

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he recoiled. Yet out of Vauvenargues’s anguish came a great monu¬ ment of antiwar literature. Voltaire praised the heroism of the French military nobility because he saw it concentrated in Vauvenargues; Vauvenargues, who knew battle all too well, was moved to condemn war because it had cost him a cherished friend; and each painted a far wilder tableau than the one represented in the modest, yet moving, dispatch of Marshal de Belle-Isle because their affective interests demanded it. And it is the account of the gens de lettres that posterity remembers.

Flabbiness

War could thus be made to seem larger than life, heroically inspired, liturgical, or diabolical. But an equally constant strain in the eight¬ eenth century is that of a degeneration of the specific martial quali¬ ties transmitted in the blood and soul of the military nobility and inculcated in the troops. Time and again it is lamented that civiliza¬ tion has become soft and voluptuous, and even that man has grown craven. Perhaps cravenness was even the normal human condition. Helvetius exalted personal security to a universal axiom, implying that bravery had something pathological about it: “[Man] will not brave danger and pain: he does not go looking after perilous under¬ takings unless the benefit of success is correctly proportioned to the danger he faces. This is a fact proved by universal experience.”108 Mably, conceding that men are not brave by nature, argued that they could be trained or induced to be so: “Wanting them to play the insane game of rushing into death is to go beyond the proper aim of politics,” he wrote. That is why republican Rome had given its soldiers superior equipment, sworn them to powerful oaths, and always made appropriate civic rewards.109 With more precise histor¬ ical implication, the Prince de Ligne wrote: “We have entered a time when, with all our talk about humanity, indifference, and relaxation (repos), we feel it is much more pleasant to spin out our days of gold and silk than to expose them to danger....We are afraid of every¬ thing...in a carriage, on horseback, on the sea; and the world takes it 108. Helvetius, De I’homme, sect.-7, chap. 6, p. 374. 109. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur les Roinains, in Oeuvres completes 4:385-386. y

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for granted: we laugh about it, like a woman’s fear; we get used to it; it has ceased to shame us....”110 This fear had been implanted by the douceur des moeurs so much approved by Voltaire; although, as we have just seen, even Voltaire could bestir himself against mollesse in his elegy for the dead of 1741. The Marshal de Villars often lamented the mollesse of Versailles, where he could not bring himself to stay very long. He didn’t want to be reduced to “aller chercher une partie de piquet chez Livry avec les autres faineans de la cour.”111 “What kind of sight do today’s nations present?” exclaimed Maurice de Saxe, himself a commander who liked to fight opulently. “We see a few rich, idle, and voluptuous men who secure their happiness at the expense of a multitude that flatters their passions....It was not with that kind of manners and those [flabby] arms that the Romans conquered the universe.”112 Vauvenargues was convinced that the century’s love of luxury was an unreformable curse.113 “What hasn’t one to fear from luxury,” wrote the Chevalier d’Arc.114 Why was the court itself so ashamed of the military calling of the nobility that it forbade them to appear in uniform, “the uniform of glory and honour?”115 D’Arc’s patriotic notion was that since luxury, opulence, and soft manners were invincible, they should be encouraged in other classes so that the nobles might shun them: the military would become Spartans in the Land of Cockaigne.116 This same animus is reflected in numerous contemporary accounts of the military life itself, many of which stress the behaviour of highborn incompetents for whom the choicest posts have been reserved. For example: Today all the colonels in France come from the premiere noblesse, which, for good reasons, the king wishes to attach to his service. These young nobles, scarcely out of school (college), find them¬ selves at the head of a regiment: everyone falls over backwards to court their favour and to stand in their good graces. Instead of inspiring them with zealous and warlike feelings for the service of 110. “De tous les animaux l’homme est le plus peureux,” Prince de Ligne, Memoires et melanges 3:156. Cf. Vauvenargues, “Sur les armees d’a present,” Oeuvres completes, p. 280. 111. Villars, Memoires de Villars, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 33:235; cf. p. 217. 112. Cited by Leonard, L’armee et ses problemes, p. 124. 113. Vauvenargues, Oeuvres completes, p. 197. 114. Philippe-Auguste de Sainte-Foix, chevalier d’Arc, La noblesse militaire, ou le patriote franQais (n.p., 1756), p. 24. 115. Ibid., p. 90. 116. Ibid., p. 91.

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the king and state, [these courtisans] only banter about gallantry and mollesse and the intrigues of the court; they are flattered and their youthful spirits are blinded....117 Guibert expostulates about this condition in his “Discours preliminaire”: “Each lives to himself, seeking to be isolated from the public woes, to take advantage of them, or at least to turn a deaf ear.”118 Softness of manners is calamitous to an army: “One must love the profession to do well in it....It is also a profession where one needs carefully to preserve all the prestige of glory and honour that exalts and ennobles it.”119 Unfortunately, “Paris is the tomb of talent: There character is washed away, courage is ennervated, morals are corrupted, and diligence is sapped; there only ideas of fortune rule, not ideas of glory.”120 Sebastien Mercier, whose contempt for the military was undisguised, confirms this judgement: “I believe I recog¬ nize a real weakening in our military virtue: And what a misfortune it is in a nation of consummate jealousies!”121 By 1787, Senac de Meilhan’s description of the future is one of satiated laxity and boredom, where men, weary of all ambition and bravery, will “despise glory and perhaps even despise spite.”122 Thus a whole chorus of voices accused the vices of court and city, the pernicious habits of ostentation, artificiality, and emulation, and indeed the whole rising tide of consumption and prosperity for a slackening of military fibre. Ironically enough, it was the royal appa¬ ratus, in theory the deepest well of military glory, that stimulated this complacency; while it was philosophy, bent on the perfection of war as science, that helped to drain the passions of combat from the spirits of soldiers. Either the symbolic system that instantiated the urge to self-sacrifice had to be miraculously reborn or France was in danger of military sclerosis. These criticisms leavened the momen¬ tous changes that lay ahead.

117. Sieur Donworth to the Minister of War, 30 April 1744, quoted in JeanLambert-Alphonse Colin, Les campagnes du mare'chal de Saxe, 3 vols. (Paris, 1901-1906), 1:150. 118. Guibert, Strategiques, p. 136. 119. Ibid., p. 560. 120. Ibid., p. 563. 121. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 106. 122. Gabriel Senac de Meilhan, Considerations sur Vesprit et les moeurs (London 1787), p. 197.

War: The Darkling Plain Chapter 7

The Troops

What of the ordinary soldiers who went off to fight and perhaps perish beneath the regimental standards of the aristocrats, “marching to war,” as Vauvenargues put it, “like Capuchins going to matins?” Did they merely submit to a necessary routine? Or, as a writer late in the Old Regime inquired: “Is it important for a citizen defending his hearth, his offended nation, to be persuaded of the justice of his cause; should he be only the plaything or instrument of the fickle will of his masters?...Is it enough, finally, for him not to be afraid of death, to have contempt for it?”1 Commanders needed disciplined and responsible troops to win their victories. Death for the state or for the fatherland, that ultimate demand of politics, achieved its greatest transparency in the reaction of the fighting men submitted to orders. Jacques Bonhomme could not be moved by his ancestral reputation or his place at court; he depended on a simpler, often shrewder, cost-benefit analysis that included its own brand of courage and sense of metier. No doubt the common soldier’s view could be sentimental, scep¬ tical, or mordantly realistic. This whole range is communicated by the popular poet Cottignies, nicknamed Brule-Maison, who wrote in both standard French and the dialect of Tourcoing at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession. First we see him dodging bullets, for which he consoles himself with a stiff drink: Allors je prends mon juste-a-corps, Je me leve craignant la mort! Je coure d’un autre cote, En croiant d’estre en seurete: 1. [M. de P., “Auteur d’Azemor”], Considerations sur I'influence des moeurs, p. iii.

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Un boulot traverse un pignon, Les pierres tombent sur mes talons, Au ciel j’adresse mes nouvelles, M’en voila eschappe d’une belle. Pour rafermir mon coeur chagrin, Je m’envoy boire du brandevin....2 When the siege of Lille is relaxed, Brule-Maison speculates that there would not be such savage war if people like him had their way. But it isn’t really up to him to judge: La paix est dans la province Tout du meme coup. Si tous les roys et les princes Faisoient comme nous, II n’y auroit pas icy Une si forte guerre; Cela passe mon esprit: Chacun sgais ses affaires.3 When their commander is killed in battle, the Tourquennois mourn him as a father: Ne parle pu de no Seigneur Car te me fe creve l’coeur, II etoit si honnete! Nous ne savons pu u tourne, Nous via d’z enfants abandonnes Et v’la no bourgue a le peste!4

2. Les complaintes de Brule-Maison et de ce qui luy est arrive pendant le siege de Lille,” 11. 2Iff., in Fernand Carton, ed., Francois Cottignies, dit Brule-Maison (1678-1740), chansons et pasquilles (Arras, 1965), p. 200. Now I stretch myself; / I get up in fear of death! / I dash to another place, / Thinking I will be safe. / A bullet hits the gable, / Stones fall at my heels. / I announce my news to heaven / That I’ve had a close call. / To stiffen my downcast heart, / I set out to drink some brandywine.” 3. “Les misferes du si£ge de Lille,” 11. 57ff., in ibid., p. 206. “All of a sudden / Peace is in our region. / If all the kings and princes / Acted like us, / We wouldn’t have / Such a bitter war. / But that is all beyond me: / Everybody knows his own business.” 4. “Le deuil des Tourquennois pour la mort du due d’Avre, leur seigneur,” 11. 56ff., in ibid., p. 128. “Don’t speak any more of our noble lord / Because you break my heart- / He was so fine a man! / Now we don’t know where to turn, / We’re just like abandoned children, / And look at our town—in ruins!”

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The poems of Brule-Maison put us in touch with both the insou¬ ciant debrouillard who mumbles a prudential “requiescat in pace” as he steps over a dead body and the wise innocent who knows, far better than les grands, what war is really like. But, on the whole, we have little direct knowledge of the soldier’s innermost thoughts. They are best inferred from the quality of specific campaigns and especially from the changing regulations that governed his way of life. Corvisier s study of the army from Louvois to Choiseul is rich in this kind of evidence, which there is no need to repeat here.5 Still, a few general observations seem essential. The troops of the eighteenth century can be dealt with in four broad categories. Three of these were, technically, enlisted or volunteer soldiers; a fourth was not. In the order in which I shall treat them, there were, first of all, the true professionals, often sons of soldiers, who had chosen the career of arms in consciousness of cause or had at least adjusted well to the military life, sharing some of the values of their officers. Often also, especially in the earlier half of the century, these men were local dependents of the company commander, persons whom he was prepared to trust and even pamper. Secondly, there were foreign mercenaries-Irish, Germans, and especially Swissprofessionals recruited in foreign countries, who customarily, though not always, fought in their own units. Thirdly, there were those who most easily reaped the scorn of the epithet recrues, young men more or less forced into enlistment by personal pressures or by the smooth salesmanship of recruiting officers and their sergeants or, indeed, by the agency of third parties (“racolage”). Though their legal status was the same as that of the gens de metier, their attitudes and capacity were very different, since they remained, to a large extent, recalcitrants from “civil society.” Finally, there were the mili¬ tias, who were not volunteers but draftees of local lotteries adminis¬ tered by the king’s intendants within their generality to fill the mili¬ tary quota that the threat or circumstances of war demanded. At the height of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, France had more than 200,000 men under arms at a given moment. The first category furnished the backbone of the army: many of them would become the natural commanders of the new volunteer batallions of 1792, and more than a few would rise to great careers in Napoleon’s Grande Armee. In the Old Regime it might be said that these soldiers shared a purpose and a community of danger with their officers and were, at the same time, precious commodities, for 5. Corvisier, L’armee franQaise, see numerous references.

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they were the indispensable stewards of properties literally owned by the commanders. Their bonds of discipline and trust, and even a shared ethos of gloire, are stressed in a perhaps apocryphal dialogue exchanged between Colonel de Chevert and a sergeant from his Alsace regiment who had volunteered to scale the fortifications of Prague (25-26 November 1741) and open the first breach: “You want to go up first, camarade?” -“Oui, mon colonel.” “When you get to the top of the wall, the sentinel is going to shout: Wer da?” -“Oui, mon colonel.” “You won’t say anything.” —“Oui, mon colonel.” “He will shoot at you and miss.” -“Oui, mon colonel.” “You will kill him.” -“Oui, mon colonel.”6 Probably not all soldats de metier scaled walls with the sang-froid of this sergeant. Perhaps he responded like the Capuchins. But the more likely quality he displayed was that of emulation, as well as soli¬ darity; he was of the sort that might expect to be commissioned from the ranks. The brave Colonel (later General) de Chevert was himself an officier de fortune; according to Duclos, he was the true hero of the battle of Lauterberg, but the credit went to others who were better born.7 Chevert had obviously won the respect of his men. In the paternalistic atmosphere of the times, they would be disposed to extend a kind of clan loyalty to intrepid and proven leaders, in the prospect of victory and reward. It was not always a devotion of discipline and service according to regulation. Richelieu, beloved by his troops, so indulged their appetite for pillage and pleasure that he gained the sobriquet “General Maraude.”8 His amatory prowess, like that of Saxe, was much applauded. When the monumental Saxe died, a verse was circulated: “Maurice a fini son destin; / Riez, Anglais; pleurez, catins.”9 However, the fatherly image did not need to be sexual; war emphasized other attributes of manliness. As the Chevalier de Folard wrote to Marshal de Belle-Isle:

6. Cited in La Fuye, Fontenoy, p. 18. 7. Duclos, Me'moires secrets, in Michaud and Poujalet, eds., Nouvelle collection 34:649. 8. Ibid., p. 642. 9. Favre, La mort au siecle, p. 26.

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“You have the gift of making yourself loved; cultivate it. It is the great and admirable quality for drawing from the troops everything you need for victory. Go to see them in the hospitals, embrace them."10 Without this leaderly gift it is doubtful that Belle-Isle could have turned the retreat from Prague into a kind of moral triumph. Affectionate bonds were complicated by social distancing and by punctilious prescriptions. But this tended to make the best soldiers subordinates in the family, not scullery maids. By the 1770s officers and non-coms were fraternizing freely in the Masonic lodges.11 Although, in the words of Corvisier, “no society, except for monastic ones, was made the object of such minute regulations,”12 freedom could be found on the fringe of the rules, amid the caprices of a furlough, or in the passions of combat. Garrison was the most trying period. As for the mercenaries, it must be remembered that in eighteenth-century warfare polyglot fighting conditions were the norm in virtually all armies. The Russian and Austrian empires were, by nature, multiracial. French Huguenots served with the Prussians. Catholic Irish and Jacobite English fought with the French. Above all, Switzerland was the great reservoir for mercenaries. The Swiss had literally mauled each other at Ramillies and Malplaquet.13 At the advent of the French Revolution, Swiss guards protected the thrones of Versailles, Turin, and Naples, as well as the Pope and his legates: France had twelve Swiss regiments, Holland six, Spain and Naples each four, and Sardinia two.14 Literary enthusiasm for “citizen armies” toward the end of the Old Regime (backed by the authority of Machiavelli) helped to disparage mercenaries and to create a climate of Revolutionary xenophobia. Yet the Revolution also had its internationalist dimension allowing for a fraternity of “peoples in arms.” And when in 1790 Swiss troops of the regiment of Chateauvieux in Lorraine revolted over conditions of pay and were savagely repressed by Marshal de Bouille, they were immedi¬ ately hailed as martyrs to the patriotic cause.15

10. Leonard, L’arme'e et ses problemes, p. 120. 11. See Gaston Martin, La franc-maQonnerie fran^aise et la preparation de la Revolu¬ tion (Paris, 1926), p. 29. 12. Corvisier, L’arme'e franqaise, p. 821. 13. La Mettrie uses the fratricidal example of the Swiss to illustrate his pessimistic view of the law of nature: L’homme machine, p. 87. 14. Wilhelm Oechsli, History of Switzerland, 1499-1914 (Cambridge, 1922), p. 237. 15. On the revolt of the Swiss, see Revolutions de Paris (Paris, 1789-1793), no. 60 (28 August-4 September 1790), pp. 365-388. Also, nos. 61 and 62.

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Mortal Politics

At least until the 1770s, there was little public consciousness that mercenary warfare was ignoble. Of course Voltaire had railed constantly against the practice: “Among our European nations, is there any fatherland for all those murderers who rent their services and sell their blood to the first king that pays them? They have less of one than a bird of prey that flies back every evening to the hollow in the rocks where its mother has made a nest.”16 But merce¬ naries easily survived Voltaire’s castigation. Even military reformers, approved by Voltaire, thought the hiring of foreigners a sound strategy. The Due de Choiseul, a gifted war minister, asserted that the foreign soldier was equal to three men: the one who had been purchased, the one whom the enemy could no longer purchase, and the French peasant thereby released to till his field.17 Mercenaries might desert in quest of better work and wages, but not at the overpowering rate of the native racoles.18 Indeed, they were often steadfast in loyalty, infused with the esprit of their fighting units: the defense of the Tuileries by the Swiss on 10 August 1792 was a spectacular demonstration of this. They existed on a separate but parallel plane of professionalism with the French soldats de metier. Choiseul had himself been commander of a Swiss regiment. The “others,” those recrues whose numbers swelled when it became necessary to fight major wars, invited the contempt of almost all observers. They were the products of a racolage where the recruiter and the recruits were personally unknown to each other. “Soldiers are the vilest part of each nation,” as Montesquieu had bluntly put it.19 Writers as different as Mably and d’Holbach agreed with him.20 The racoles gave the army its reputation of being “a scum of society.” They were, in the first place, violent by nature in a social order where “most men had no hesitation in using weapons, even the simplest.”21 They were often marginals, vagabonds, drunkards, 16. Voltaire, article “Patrie,” Dictionnaire philosophique, in Oeuvres completes 20:182. 17. Cited in Albert-Arsene Babeau, La vie militaire sous VAncien Regime, 2 vols. (Paris, 1889-1890), 1:351. The remark has also been attributed to Saxe; see Corvisier, L’armee franQaise, p. 260. 18. On desertion, see Corvisier, L’armee frangaise, p. 692f. Sedaine and Mercier both took this theme into the theatre. Cf. “Auteur d’Azemor,” Considerations sur I’influence des moeurs, p. 78: “In Prussia foreign soldiers desert a great deal, but the native troops very little. In France, it’s just the opposite.” 19. Montesquieu, trans. Lowenthal, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of Romans, p. 35. 20. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur les Romains, in Oeuvres completes 4:389; and Entretiens de Phocion, ibid., 10:153-154; d’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 1, chap. 15, p. 169. 21. Corvisier, L’armee fran^aise, p. 77.

War: The Darkling Plain

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bastards, or strangers, outcast from the normal rhythms of rural society. Communities were obviously disposed to keep their best citi¬ zens and expel their worst.22 In the army there was a chance that the outcast might improve on his low order of expectation; but there was a greater likelihood that his habits and attitudes would infect the military organization. Perfectly transparent traps were baited to capture unlucky and restless youths. Recruitment officers set out their signs near a welcoming tavern, sometimes in doggerel verse: Grivois de bonne volonte: Qui voulez aller a la guerre Venez a moi, vous ne sauriez mieux faire, Vous ne seriez point affronte. Je suis un brave capitaine Dans le regiment de Froulay. Ne craignez pas le coup d’essai, La victoire avec moi sera toujours certaine.23 By these robust persuasions captains attempted to fill out their companies in a self-defeating exercise that always left a need for the miliciens. The dregs of the racolage were certainly never very much appreci¬ ated by the military aristocracy. It was they especially who refused discipline, deserted abundantly, shunned the elementary precautions of hygiene, broke ranks, fled in battle, and pillaged even before victory was certain. Pillage was a great problem in eighteenthcentury warfare, not just because it violated rules of war (often honoured in the breach), but because it interrupted the consolidation of the victory and sometimes diverted the troops into defeat. Marshal de Villars approvingly recites a victory in 1703, where the soldiers (excepting the hussars) never broke ranks to pillage while capturing the enemy’s logistical train and only set to dividing the booty after the battle had ended.24 On the whole, there was nothing Roman about the racoles. Saxe described these troops as “a vile popu¬ lace in arms, more dangerous to the state even than its enemies.”25 22. Ibid., p. 120. 23. “I am Grivois, an honest man: / If you want to go to war, / Come to me, you couldn’t do better, / You won’t regret it. / I am a brave captain / In the Froulay regiment. / Don’t be afraid to sign on; / With me victory is assured.” Cited by Mention, L’armee de UAncien Regime, p. 38. 24. Villars, Memoires de Villars, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 33:129. 25. Saxe, Mes reveries 1:149.

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Mortal Politics

He would have preferred a more civic style of five-year conscription. Saint-Germain deplored them, but conceded their necessity: “...to make armies, one must not destroy a nation, and you would destroy it if you took only its best. In the present state of affairs, it is plau¬ sible that armies should be composed mainly of the dregs of the nation, of what is useless and harmful to society. It is up to military discipline to purify and harden this corrupt mass, to make it useful....”26 Guibert, with his early enthusiasm for citizen militias, declared that “the profession of soldier [is now] relinquished to the vilest and most wretched class of citizens.”27 This is an endless litany of those in authority. How might it be possible to achieve the civic and moral recuperation of tens of thousands of young Frenchmen with something more positive than racolage and brutal discipline? One possible answer was the citizen-soldier. Indeed, writers like the Marquis d’Argenson, Diderot, and Jaucourt, attempting to merge classical souvenir with practicality, had suggested such a route.28 And even the arch-aristocratic Chevalier d’Arc had made a lyrical apostrophe to the nation: “All thy children are Bayards and Turennes.”29 However, this was an army of the imagination. It would be very wide of the mark to think that our fourth category, the militia, was a natural breeding ground for citizens in the Old Regime. By royal order and local obedience, the regions of France-not on an entirely impartial basis-raised these auxiliaries during the century, except for the years 1715-1719 and 1721-17 2 6.30 After the establishment of an official list of “miliciables,” the unfortunates were chosen by lottery (tirage au sort). It goes without saying that many categories of status and profession (especially agriculture) were exempted and that small influence or small wealth could usually extricate a man from this service. As I read the partial findings of Corvisier, about 200 miliciens were drawn from every 100,000 of French population during the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century.31 About a hundred militia battalions were

26. Claude-Louis, comte de Saint-Germain, Me'moires St-Germain...ecrits par lui-meme (Amsterdam, 1779), p. 183.

de

M.

le

comte

de

27. Hippolyte de Guibert, “Discours preliminaire” to Essai general de tactique, in Guibert, Strate'giques, p. 137. 28. See Rene-Louis d’Argenson, Considerations sur le gouvernement ancien et present de la France (Amsterdam, 1765), pp. 286-289; and article “Legislateur,” Encyclopedic 9:358b. 29. Chevalier d’Arc, La noblesse militaire, p. 209. 30. Corvisier, L’armee franqaise, p. 109. 31. Ibid., p. 197.

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formed throughout France. Their major role was, in time of war, to occupy garrisons and to form a reservoir of replacement for the regular units. But the militias themselves were never regularly equipped, drilled, or armed until the Revolution.32 Obviously these were not citizen-soldiers and they were not exposed to any precise civic indoctrination by the Old Regime. The militiamen may have been, on the whole, more dependable soldiers than the worst specimens of the racolage; but that is not claiming a great deal for them. The bloodletting of Louis XIV’s last war had caused the militia to be widely mixed with the regular army, and they shared a moment of genuine triumph after the battle of Denain (1712), by which France had been able to pull its chestnuts from the fire during the negotiations of Utrecht. Their bravery caused the victorious commander, Marshal de Villars, to exclaim: “I recognize the nation now only in the soldier. His glory is infinite.”33 After the defeat at Prague in the War of the Austrian Succession (1742), several battalions of militia were rushed to shore up the stricken forces in Germany and Bohemia, amid clashing resentments in the high command. For, if the recrues were unpopular in French society, so were the milices. Arguments could be made in their favour: on the whole, they cost the state less than the delicate and unwholesome business of racolage; they could even be construed as a real “armee d’Etat,” robust, seasoned by country labour, and not debauched like the others.34 But these arguments were overweighed in a country mostly hostile to involuntary service: village civilians feared the violence of the militias; the landed nobility, wishing to preserve the productivity of its peasants, was opposed; the bourgeoisie deplored the irrational disruption of economic activity.35 The experience of the Seven Years’ War confirmed these attitudes. Critical voices were both shocked and stung into vituperative activity by the bungles and reverses of that war, where, as one histo¬ rian writes: “The nation entered the conflict without enthusiasm, fought without distinction, and emerged from it without victory.”36 32. See Mention, L’armee de UAncien Regime, p. 38. 33. Cited in Pierre Paul, Denain (Paris, 1963), p. 89. On Denain and succeeding operations, see Villars, Memoires de Villars, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds. Nouvelle collection 33:207-215. Also, Georges Girard, Le service militaire en France a la fin du regne de Louis XIV: racolage et milice, 1701-1715 (Paris, 1922), pp. 284-285. 34. See evidence in Corvisier, L’armeefranqaise, p. 111. 35. Ibid., pp. 112, 114, 116, 118-119, 122, 231. 36. Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years’ War: A Study in Military Organization and Administration (Durham, 1967), p. ix.

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Mortal Politics

As Duclos put it: “Armchair generals (generaux de cabinet) greedy for money and inexperienced or presumptuous, ignorant ministers who were jealous or bore ill will, subordinates prodigal with their blood on the battlefield but grovelling at court for the distribution of pensions: those were our instruments [in the war].”37 After the defeat of Rossbach, the first need was to refashion military disci¬ pline. France required an organizer with administrative gifts, polit¬ ical acumen, and impeccable feudal standing.

Options of Military Reform

“If I were king of France,” said Voltaire’s Ingenu, “here is the Minister of War that I would choose”: I would want a man of the highest birth, since he must give orders to the nobility. I would demand that he himself had been an officer, promoted through all the ranks to at least lieutenantgeneral, and worthy of being Marshal of France....It wouldn’t bother me if my minister was generous, although my royal treas¬ urer might occasionally be somewhat embarrassed. I would like him to be an effortless worker, and even to be distinguished by his sparkling wit (gaiete d’esprit), the mark of a man superior to his work that is so pleasing to the nation because it makes all his tasks seem less drudging.38 Choiseul had inspired this image. He could trace his ancestors to the twelfth century. His rise in the service had been meteoric: colonel at twenty-four, brigadier at twenty-seven, major-general at twenty-nine. Above all, he combined high birth, levity, culture, and an appealing lack of comeliness with an energetic reforming spirit. As chief archi¬ tect of French policy from 1762 until his disgrace in 1770 (allied to Pompadour, he later became the enemy of du Barry), he is widely 37. Duclos, Memoires secrets, in Michaud and Poujalat, eds., Nouvelle collection 34:637. Noailles, echoing with more distaste his earlier criticisms of the War of the Austrian Succession, added: “There are now no other means of succeeding than intrigue, cabal, favour, and protection: love of country has become a ridiculous thing; a false philosophy has taken charge and is leading us to luxury, softness, and idleness.” Noailles, Memoires de Noailles, in ibid., p. 380. 38. Voltaire, L’inge'nu, in Oeuvres completes 21:298.

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remembered for his diplomatic initiatives. But his most durable action was to conclude peace and confront the “desarroi militaire,” which was a problem both of morale and of organization.39 He was, Helvetius wrote, “the only minister in that war who could have imparted some energy to the nation...and inspired the French, had they been capable of inspiration.”40 During the summer of 1762, Choiseul writes, “foreseeing peace at the end of the year, I busied myself not only with the plan to reform Your Majesty’s army, but also took advantage of very favour¬ able circumstances to establish a uniform constitution, more military in all respects and more solid than the one existing, which also had the benefit of providing much needed military training for Your Majesty s troops. In reforming the army into a coherent organiza¬ tion based on logic, Choiseul was well aware of the barriers of preju¬ dice, laziness, and corruption that he was facing. Counting on the impetus provided by “the shock of Rossbach,” he had his plan fully debated by three consecutive sessions of the Conseil d’Etat.41 He claimed the status of “geometrical truth” for his reforms.42 For the first time, if he succeeded, France would possess a fighting force based on a “single principle, which is uniformity.”43 Could one make uniform an organization whose abuses had grown up organically together with its virtues, where feudal pretensions and national demands met so dramatically in a single problem? Strictly speaking, no. Nowhere more than in the army did the shadow of caste hang so stubbornly over imperatives of rational reform; while nowhere else was reform itself so directly the inspiration of caste vision. Choiseul introduced common standards of training and equip¬ ment, treated discipline, improved the education in military schools, balanced costs between the units, pensioned off many officers whose initiative and intelligence were deficient, and instigated hospital and medical reforms.44 What he could not do was to affect very much the social structure that determined the destiny of the army-its morale and principles of common action. This was a problem beyond

39. See Corvisier, L’arme'e franfaise, pp. 897, 955; Leonard, L’arme'e et ses problemes, p. 239. 40. Helvetius, De I’homme, sect. 9, chap. 31, p. 520. 41. cabinet 42. 43.

Etienne-Francois, due de Choiseul, Memoires...ecrits par lui-meme...dans son a Chanteloup en 1778, 2 vols. (Paris, 1790), 1:120-121. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 128.

44. See ibid., pp. 129-149. For a good summary, see Ernest Lavisse and Alfred Rambaud, Histoire generate du FVe siecle a nos jours, 12 vols. (Paris, 1893-1904) 9:346-350.

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his means and his horizon. His instinct was to favour the nobility against the aspiring bourgeoisie. Most of the reforms marketed in the waning years of the Old Regime attempted to correct the corruption of command, to reinstil the officer’s noble vocation. If this could be done, according to the trickle-down theory then prevalent, the soldiers would be galvanized by wise leadership and the nobility would regain the most precious part of its raison d’etre. The mission was not impossible, but it collided directly with three obstacles: the fact that a deeply contami¬ nated nobility could not suddenly be made pure; the push of the nation from below to be let into its affairs, even the sanctum sanc¬ torum of military command; and the contradictions of the monarchy itself-its congenital favouritism, its fatal hesitation between reform of itself and the dogmatism of old ways, and its precarious attempt to build sand-castles between the tides. Choiseul, favoured by national adversity, tried to stress organization in the hope that morale would follow. Although his reforms were provocative, and even welcome, they could not heal the breach between old glory and new practice. Those reforms were designed not only to correct failures in the positions of command, but to redirect the soldier toward his duties by providing him with an appropriate training. But if, despite the retirements and pensions granted to counterproductive officers, the soldier perceived only cosmetic improvements, what then? After all, for most French soldiers (except the few that served in North America) the exaltation that could come only in battle would await the third year of the Revolution. And if the younger and poorer nobles, entitled to serve France as officers, suddenly benefited from a break in the sluggish rate of promotion, were they not also affronted by new centralized regulations that challenged their inborn capacities? The problem, in both cases, was one of esprit, vocation, and ideology. In each case the Choiseul reforms gave professional pride back to the services. But he had slighted both ancestral pride and civic pride. In the last analysis, the question revolved around the necessary and sufficient conditions of offering one’s life for the prince, the faith, the common good, or the patrie: the perception of one’s situation in this affair. While Choiseul was still in office, a variety of hortatory attempts were made to extend the revitalization of the French army from an organizational focus to the more impalpable reaches of morale. French painting and statuary began to take on a more historical and patriotic style.45 Henriolatry surged: at least ten flowery eulogies of 45. See James A. Leith, “Nationalism and the Fine Arts in France, 1750-1789,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 89 (1972):919-937.

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the Vert-Galant were composed between 1763 and 17 7 5.46 The Encyclopedic contributed. And there is the very curious work by Pierre-Paul Labbe, L’heroisme, ou Vhistoire militaire des plus illustres capitaines qui ayent paru dans le monde (1766). Labbe, a Benedictine monk, offered his book at a time when the Jesuit enemies had just been expelled from France and when Gallican elements were demanding the construction of a truly “national” education.47 Choiseul favoured these efforts. Labbe dedicated his work to M. Paris du Verney, “conseiller d’Etat et Intendant de l’Ecole Royale Militaire,” inspired by the latter’s “travaux patriotiques.”48 Perhaps Labbe was even encouraged by the war ministry. The Ecole militaire had been founded in 1751 by Louis XV, on the project of Paris du Verney, an influential, wealthy, and ennobled financier who had made his fortune in military supplies.49 The Ecole militaire was open to five hundred gentlemen born without fortune, among whom the preference should go...to those who, by losing their father in war, had become children of the State.”50 It was, in other words, a centre for the revival of caste patriotism as described earlier. Such had been the thrust of the Chevalier d’Arc’s exaggerative claim for the military grandeur of the Second Estate.51 Labbe was obviously, though less stridently, of d’Arc’s persuasion. He hoped that his book might find its place in the “Bibliotheque du jeune militaire” (I have been unable to discover if such a project, perhaps modelled on the famous “Bibliotheque bleue” of the period, was ever contemplated or undertaken). There was also a deeper controversy between what may be called the “family” and “civic” models of military integration. In the first image, subordination and hierarchy are stressed, in an almost neofeudal sense. The officers are the preceptors and guardians of their troops, setting the standards, handing down the idiom of conduct, and conserving the norms by which military relations take place. Persons of higher rank are the natural parents, confessors, and confi-

46. Marcel R. Reinhard, La legende de Henri IV (Saint-Brieuc, 1935), p. 89. 47. See esp. the Essai d’e'ducation nationale (1763) by Caradeuc de La Chalotais. 48. Pierre-Paul Labbe, L’heroisme, ou Vhistoire militaire des plus illustres capitaines qui ayent paru dans le monde (Paris, 1766), p. xviii. 49. A good study of the activities of Paris du Verney and his brothers would be useful. This eminence grise, a powerful financier of the Regency and enemy of John Law, was always close to the affairs of state, and he was the planner and first intendant of the Ecole royale militaire. 50. Mention, L’arme'e de I’Ancien Regime, p. 78. 51. For commentary on the debate that pitted d’Arc’s work against Coyer’s La noblesse commerqante, see Grimm, et al., Correspondance litteraire 3:170-179, 207.

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dants of those beneath them. The military is a specific area in which national duties are to be regarded as duties of the family. In the second image, the resourcefulness and independence of each one in his place is ideally stressed. It is assumed that each, having chosen the military occupation, fights for civic reasons, for his portion of the common good and his involvement in the state. This does not abolish the necessary hierarchical functions of war or admit unskilled opinions to serious debate. But it does mean that military virtues are, so to speak, self-animating and commensurate with political knowl¬ edge and aptitude. Bravery and foresight are not the exclusive result of sang and race; they may be acquired. Filial devotion is not the primary inspiration of the soldier. Militias are the preferred solution to the problem of mustering fighting strength: voluntary societies for war which collaborate in a political demonstration of will directed to the survival of the nation. Still, the military as opposed to the polit¬ ical problem of order remains a special case where a stronger argu¬ ment can be made for paternal and hierarchical dispositions. While one can detect civic and more egalitarian impulses in the army of Louis XVI, its ideology continues to compass the interests of a single estate and a program of “downbreeding” rather than “crossbreeding,” as long as it can be shown that the nobility still possesses the special aptitudes assigned to it by history and lore. An interesting, little-known example of the “family model” as it was propagated in the waning days of Choiseul’s ministry is a work by Colonel Christian-Emanuel de Zimmermann, commander of the Swiss Guards, published in 1769. In the opening pages Zimmermann tells us that “the military art, treated by so many great men from its physical side, has not been up to now, so far as I know, dealt with in its moral dimension.”52 Zimmermann’s treatment of the moral dimension of the military career is noteworthy not only because it seems to deny some of the harsh realities of la guerre moderne, but because it appears to owe some of its inspiration to Rousseau’s Emile (1762). Indeed the work might have been subtitled Emile, officier. It features a colloquy between an uncle and an orphaned nephew that he is educating for the military profession. “...I will portray the glory you can win by shedding your blood for your country, to which you owe yourself entirely,” the uncle tells the lad.53 He does the core of his educating in chapters titled respectively “duties and virtues of a militaire,” 52. C.-E. de Zimmermann, Essais de principes d'une morale militaire et autres objets (Paris, 1769), p. 6. 53. Ibid., p. 14.

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“duties toward other men,” “duties of a courtier,” “duties toward women,” and “duties toward religion.” As in Rousseau, the pupil is, so to speak, mute and the pedagogue loquacious. Principes is not just a manual for the formation of the chivalric officer; it deals quite specifically with the etiquette that is required to make a whole army function. That code, as noted, is familial, cast in the paternal image of king and people, officers and soldiers. Officers should extend humanity to their men, reward courage and penalize excessive behaviour, instil discipline, set good examples, and know how to inspire loyalty with oratorical skill. Above all, they should teach virtue: “true valour can come only from a virtuous soul. Death is terrible for a criminal soul; but an innocent one knows how to face it.”54 Zimmermann proposes an imaginary “fete militaire,” where an officer kindles solidarity with a speech, the soldiers renew their oaths, and a second officer reminds the gathering of the regi¬ ment’s heroic deeds. Songs are then sung, of which the author provides a few of his own amateur composition: Un brave Helvetien quand il marche a la gloire Cherche un noble trepas ou cherche la victoire.55 Soldats, enfants de la Patrie, Ouvrons nos coeurs a son amour; Si nous en resumes la vie, Sachons la rendre a notre tour.... Le bonheur de mourir pour elle Est le sort le plus glorieux: Un coeur genereux ne voit qu’elle Au sein du carnage et des feux.56 Tends-moi la main, regois la mienne; En les serrant promettons-nous De nous aimer de foi chretienne, Combattre, vaincre ou perir tous.57

54. Ibid., pp. 25-26. 55. “L’education morale du soldat d’apres un livre du 18e siecle: de Zimmermann; Les principes d’une morale militaire, 1769,” Revue de Cavalerie 31 (1900):734. 56. Ibid., p. 735. 57. Ibid., p. 736. The author adds: “With this last stanza, the soldiers will touch hands: what heart of stone would not be moved by such a sight?”

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Mortal Politics

To conclude this ceremony another officer pronounces a benedic¬ tion: “Henceforth, noble and generous warriors, you will constantly remember that all of us together form a single family in a common cause....May our eyes be witness to it; and let us die, if we must, in the bosom of victory and glory.”58 This is not all. Zimmermann’s fete is followed by the elaborate recitation of a “catechisme militaire,” of which some representative excerpts will convey the flavour:59 -What is a Soldier? -He is a subject willingly engaged to serve his sovereign and his country in the armed forces, against the enemies of the State or their allies. -To what is he obligated by his engagement? —To sincere feelings of love, gratitude, obedience and devotion.... -What ought to be the Soldier’s desires? -To serve his patrie honourably as a citizen, and to advance in military grade by his conduct, his valour, and his prudence. Any Soldier without these goals is wanting in professional spirit....The profession of arms is the noblest and most glorious of all....A Soldier whose soul is properly tempered is a citizen deserving the respect of the patrie, the rewards of his Prince, and the esteem of his Superiors.... As for the officers: -A true Officer loves the honour and glory of the Sovereign more than his own life; he must calmly sacrifice the delights of society, tear himself without a murmur from the arms of his parents, his friends, the wife he adores, and expose himself blithely to the excessive perils and hardships that are his lot. Yet, full of gener¬ osity, humanity, and compassion, his heart cannot forsake these things, even in the horror of slaughter, even if he orders the death of one bold enough to resist him. The vanquished who beseech him find in their terrible foe a protector and a friend; proud to bear arms, gentle and polite in society, he is also beloved and respected....

58. Zimmermann, Essais de principes d’une morale, p. 74. 59. Ibid., pp. 77-82.

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This is a fascinating document to have from the end of Choiseul’s ministry, even if its influence was limited to neo-feudal connois¬ seurs.60 Zimmermann was obviously not only writing for his merce¬ nary Swiss but for the attention of elite regiments in general. His family ideology interweaves the themes of hierarchy, obedience, king, country, God, and humanity in a faded but charming tapestry. We glimpse, as if in a single panorama, the noble example of Turenne, the laconic heroism of the sergeant scaling the wall of Prague, the frugal remonstrances of the Chevalier d’Arc, and the moral repudiation of an army of sycophants leading the dregs of the racolage.

By stressing morale rather than organization, “famille” rather than uniformity, Zimmermann anticipated the ideology of the Comte de Saint-Germain more than he extended the thinking of Choiseul. Saint-Germain was Louis XVI’s first war minister. This pupil of the Jesuits, an officer of the petty nobility recently involved with the reform of the Danish army, had come to Turgot’s attention. However, when Saint-Germain was summoned to Versailles in 1775, he was bankrupt and his position was hardly brilliant.61 Turgot was temporarily lodged in the post of minister of the navy and about to become controleur-general; the new wind was behind his sails, and he sought like-minded colleagues to inaugurate the reign of the “meilleur des rois.” Louis XVI, a youth of twenty, was to be Henri IV; Turgot, Sully.62 It was not quite clear what role Saint-Germain was to play: his social views were certainly not those of a philosophe; yet his passion for thorough renovation aligned him in many respects with his sponsor. He envisaged the overhaul of the entire military organization, handing down more than eighty new ordinances during his two-year tenure, which actually outlasted Turgot’s “disgrace.” His efforts had a pronounced religious centre of gravity. “There are,” he wrote, “principles suited to all times and places, which will be eter¬ nally true and good because they are an emanation of divine wisdom, graven in all hearts and neglected only at the risk of the most 60. A year after Zimmermann’s publication, Louis de Boussanelle, a prolific writer on military subjects, presented his Le bon militaire (Paris, 1770). This work is also taste¬ fully backward-looking, covering the traditional topics of discipline, subordination, emulation, the duties of a commander, valour and courage, intellectual studies, religion, death, and so forth; but it is a potpourri of adages and citations without orig¬ inality. Boussanelle announces that he is inspired by “two principles alone: the spirit of religion and the love of his King" (pp. 118-119). The copy in the Bibliotheque natio¬ nal is dedicated by the author in his own hand to some religieux with quarters near the Place des Victoires: he asks their prayers for the living and the dead. 61. Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain, p. xlix. 62. Reinhard, La le'gende de Henri IV, p. 113.

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serious disorders.”63 The major principles were these. “Stability” (cf. Choiseul’s “uniformity”) in regulations, practices, and actions was to be main¬ tained by the constant watchfulness of a Conseil de Guerre.64 Renewed emphasis was to be placed on religion and morals, an “infallible thermometer registering the splendor of nations.” “Troops without religion and morals,” declared this minister at the impious flood tide of the eighteenth century, “will never be good!”65 For the promotion of officers, Saint-Germain preferred the basic criterion of time in grade, while adding that the good of the service must always outweigh this and all other concerns. Unfortunately the corruption of “interest” had replaced “honour” as a dominating career motive: if this defect could not be attacked at its roots, all the money in the state would not be enough to supply an effective army.66 Idleness in the military life was another corruption. It was “the source of all vices and the mother of incompetence and stupidity.”67 Saint-Germain’s reformist concerns were affected by his social perceptions. As a spokesman for the impecunious part of the noblesse d epee, he was equally hostile to the influence of court favourites and to the venal pressures of the rising bourgeoisie. There were, he noted, too many officers in the army; thus, “a wellborn man, a bon & ancien Gentilhomme, no longer wishes to remain in a subaltern state because he finds himself mixed together with too many persons of inferior rank.”68 Similarly, he was more than cool toward the idea of militias.69 If the regular troops that he was hoping to reanimate had to sacrifice privileges to local levies, there would once again, lower down, occur that mixing of social ranks which was unjust to those of better birth and education. If the soldier’s lot was mostly wretched, he was still somewhat appeased to know that he had inferiors.70 Saint-Germain is correctly described as “a partisan of permanent armies made up of old soldiers, fully trained, exposed to all the hardships of service through daily practice.”71 The treatment of these troops was according to the family model, through a disci¬ pline “douce et paternelle.” But the soldier was also to be granted his 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Saint-Germain, Memoires, p. 129. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 166f. Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain, pp. 144-150. Ibid., p. 151.

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dignity: officers were forbidden to use the tutoiement with their men. Corporal punishments were to be administered with the flat of the sword: this was less brutal than previous practices, but it was widely criticized as humiliating. Desertion, that military curse of the century, was hardest to deal with. In past times punished by barba¬ rous mutilations, it was now uniformly to be assigned the death penalty. The trouble with this was that “in peacetime the deserter was tracked down like a wild beast,” while at the slightest hint of war he was amnestied and bargained over by the potential belligerents.72 Above all, in Saint-Germain’s conception of a professional army, he wished his troops to become, if not exactly “citizen-soldiers,” at least capable of owning a small property. For, as he put it, “the man who has neither house nor plot has no patrie either.”73 This was entirely in line with Turgot’s thinking. For all his intense activity Saint-Germain was doomed to fail. Despite his breadth and vigour of conception, he lacked skill of application and mastery of detail; and the great nobles, who regarded his nomination as “both a menace and a scandal,” constantly sought to bring him down.74 An unfriendly biographer accuses him of “an excessive vanity that made him despise almost everyone” and a paranoia approximating Rousseau’s.75 Indeed, Saint-Germain was not exempt from self-pity. “What is the life of man on this wretched earth?” he wrote. “Pain and misfortune. Only religion and virtue can soften our woes a little.”76

War and Citizenship

The reference to Rousseau is not misplaced here. Rousseau did share with Saint-Germain a desire to recapture a way of life centred on predictable order and just deserts. He also shared an abhorrence of overweaning privilege and power. And in some of his works, at least, he insisted on the moral reference to “sagesse divine.” However, the differences are equally striking. Rousseau hated the privileged 72. 73. 74. 75.

Ibid., pp. 115, 123, and passim. Saint-Germain, Memoires, p. 170. Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain, p. 7. See “Vie de Saint-Germain,” preface to Correspondance particuliere du Comte de Saint-Germain...avec M. Paris du Verney..., 2 vols. (London, 1789), 1:126-127. 76. Quoted in Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain, p. xlix.

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martial cachet of noble birth as much as Saint-Germain defended it. Moreover, according to Rousseau, France was hypercultivated and unreformable.77 Rousseau would perhaps not have disagreed with Saint-Germain that militias or “citizen-armies” were unthinkable in France, although this was a degeneracy that he deplored. According to Rousseau, citizen soldiers were proper for rawer and braver peoples. This did not, of course, prevent an infusion of Rousseau’s ideas into French military thinking, especially since they were not his alone but also a part of the classical republican tradition that affected, among numerous others, Jaucourt and Mably. For twenty years Jean-Jacques had been an “old mole” working in this ground. He abhorred Choiseul,78 and obviously had no warmth for Saint-Germain’s petite noblesse militaire; but his patriotic belligerency (even if bestowed elsewhere, on Corsica and Poland) could make a certain common cause with the French reformers. It is perhaps no accident that his most reflective writing on the nature of military citizenship was done at almost the same time as Guibert’s Essai (during the supremacy of Maupeou and in the hiatus between Choiseul and Saint-Germain). Passages from the Gouvernement de Pologne are worth quoting at length because they assert an equation between combat, country, and liberty that would prove so powerful a generation later: The use of firearms, making bodily strength less important in war, caused the latter to fall into discredit. And so it comes about that, quite aside from qualities of mind, which are often ambiguous or wrongly directed, which can deceive in a thousand ways and which the people judge badly, a man, though privileged by birth, has 77. This is a leitmotiv announced in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, pursued through subsequent polemics, and carried to its highest pitch in the preface to Narcisse. 78. Rousseau and Choiseul subscribed to a cult of mutual hatred. Rousseau believed that Choiseul, the friend of Voltaire, was in the thick of the “complot” directed against his person and reputation, managed by Grimm, Diderot, and Madame d’Epmay. See, on this, the letter from Rousseau to Claude Anglancier de SaintGermain (a retired captain of dragoons, not to be confused with the war minister), 26 February 1770, in Henri Gouhier, edRousseau: lettres philosophiques (Paris, 1974), esp. pp. 198, 204-205, 209. Some contemporaries believed that Voltaire had persuaded Choiseul to purchase and annex Corsica out of spite to Rousseau, who had been asked to legislate for that island during its brief spell of independence from Genoa. See Auteur d Azemor, Considerations sur Uinfluence des moeurs, “Essai sur les moeurs considerees dans leurs rapports avec Part militaire,” p. 333. This writer was clearly both an admirer of Rousseau and a follower of Saint-Germain. He recycles the dictum of Saint-Germain and the Chevalier d’Arc: “sans religion toute troupe ne sera jamais bonne” (p. 341).

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nothing within him to distinguish him from any other, to justify his fortune, to show him superior by natural right; and the more the outward signs are ignored, the more those who rule us become effete and corrupted with impunity....The state should not go undefended, I know; but its true defenders are its members. Each citizen should be a soldier by duty, none should be one by profession....Why shouldn’t a real militia be created in Poland, exactly like the one in Switzerland, where every inhabitant is a soldier, but only when he has to be?...A single thing makes [a people] unconquerable: love of country and the liberty inspired by virtues that are inseparable from it.79 If one compares Rousseau with Guibert, an immediate contact is sensed. This alliance of temperament leaps from their prose as well as from their specific notion of reform. Yet Guibert was on the staff of Saint-Germain. In his Preliminary Discourse to the Essai of 1772, he begins by paying an adulatory, but not blind, compliment to the Romans (“jamais peuple n’a eu autant de grandeur, autant de gloire, et n’en a autant merite par son courage et par ses verms”).80 He then goes on to indict the contemporary political systems of Europe: ...Tyrannical, ignorant, or weak administrations; the strength of nations suffocated beneath their vices; particular interests prevailing above the public good; morals (moeurs), often more effective than the laws themselves, ignored or corrupted; the oppression of the people refined to a system; the expenses of administration greater than its income; taxes beyond the capacity of the taxpayers; a small and arbitrarily scattered population; primary arts neglected for frivolous ones; luxury sapping all states; and, finally, governments indifferent to their peoples’ welfare, and peoples, in reprisal, indifferent to the fortune of their govern¬ ments.81 What solution does Guibert offer to this dismal picture? “Let us suppose,” he writes, “that there should appear in Europe a hardy people, with genius, means, and [a sound] government; a people that joined to its austere virtue and to a national militia a fixed plan of expansion?...”82 He considers Russia, and reaches Rousseau s 79. Gouvernement de Pologne (1772, probably written in 1771), in Vaughan, ed., Political Writings 2:435, 486, 487, 491. 80. Guibert, Strate'giques, p. 135. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., p. 137.

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negative conclusion about Peter the Great.83 All the European nations now are “timid athletes, covered with sores, and constantly armed, which exhaust themselves in watching and fearing each other...whose weakness perpetuates their quarrels....”84 Instead, nations should seek to fortify themselves internally with stable and just government, thereby recovering the affection of their peoples: then they would be in a position to act externally with deliberate prudence and maximum morale and strength. “If,” Guibert argues, “there is one nation, especially, to which this wise policy is appro¬ priate and which should hasten to adopt it, it is my own, fortunately placed in the middle of Europe, with the best climate, having a mostly fertile soil; surrounded, almost everywhere, by barriers seemingly natural, perhaps strong enough to fear nothing and desire nothing.”85 But, the author then concedes, France is declining with terrible rapidity; her vices are the most destructive of all. Only his plan of regeneration” can save her. Guibert hopes that his proposed militia can help improve the morals-the frugality, patience, and physical strength-so lacking in the armed forces.86 Guibert wants something resembling an autarchical state, “where subjects are citizens...not afraid of rolling up their sleeves (ou ils ne craignent pas les travaux).”87 This nation will then be inwardly prepared to wage fierce defensive war without benefit of alliances.88 It might even be the favoured mediator of other nations’ wars.89 As we have seen, Guibert s ideal France will not be formally republican, but essentially a return to the balanced monarchy of Henri IV under modern conditions.90 He asks for a state that will at the same time strengthen the throne, while not degrading the common people.”91 In such a system the antagonism of a king’s pretensions and a people’s jealousy can be reconciled in a mutual enlightenment of prosperity and respect, permitting the common good to emerge and inducing citizens to die for it, if necessary. Thus, the civic model is gaining some impetus. A year later, d’Holbach will write: “In a country jealous of its liberty, every citizen should be ready to bear arms. If military training were part of public education, no force 83. Ibid., pp. 138-139. 84. Ibid., p. 139. 85. Ibid., p. 140. 86. Ibid., p. 473. 87. Ibid., p. 145. 88. Ibid., pp. 148-149. 89. Ibid., p. 149. 90. See above, p. 138. 91. Guibert, Strategiques, p. 151.

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could usurp the just rights of a people.”92 In 1780, Joseph Servan de Gerbey (later a Revolutionary minister of war) published a work called the Soldat citoyen (evidences are that the work was finished earlier, but that Servan declined to publish it because of the accession to the throne of Louis XVI). The author’s focus of reference was surely Montesquieu; for in his “Observations preliminaires” he proposed to “develop new information from stud¬ ying the military art of the ancients.”93 Soldiers are formed, he says, by national character, by education, and by government. Then he declares: “...today’s Frenchman is still what he was when he was a Gaul under Caesar. Quick to decide, eager to attack, ardent in combat, easily dismayed....”94 Given this character, Servan will attempt to describe the appropriate military education. Servan had no sympathy for either feudal prerogatives or for the monarchical reorganization of Louvois. His position was that only free citizens could provide for the defense of the state. Their zeal should also (a la Zimmermann) be reinforced by repeated oaths and patriotic ceremonies. He recommended an ideological education for the troops, based on the classical Polybian example: “What was patri¬ otism for the ancients? A superstitious mixture of religion, respect, and esteem for the different orders of the republic, of tenderness for one’s kin and one’s fellow citizens, and of pride (orgueil) melted into the glory of the fatherland. Couldn’t the French be made to have these feelings?”95 Servan recommended the creation of a national militia, arguing that it could support itself by application to public works and agricul¬ ture.96 According to the author, “out of the uncultivated land of the kingdom 16,200 arpents of land” could be assigned for the mainte¬ nance and profit of these troops.97 The frame of mind is not exactly that of Zimmermann or Saint-Germain. Religion does not play a major role, although the state does. Moral as well as technical infor¬ mation should be imparted through instruction, and the old should teach the young. Soldiers’ lessons should be taught in a room deco¬ rated with portraits of great men and a bust of the king. A solid military career should lead to promotion and reward in this life: 92. D’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 1, chap. 4, p. 49. 93. Joseph Servan, Le soldat citoyen: ou vues patriotiques sur la maniere la plus avantageuse de pourvoir a la defense du royaume (Neufchatel, 1780), p. 7. 94. Ibid., p. 16. 95. Ibid., p. 50. 96. As Leonard points out (L’armee et ses problemes, p. 254), this makes the book rather utopian. 97. Servan, Le soldat citoyen, p. 112.

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death for the patrie is not a special glory. But it is always understood that a good soldier should advance his country’s interest as well as his own. This theorist’s populism was not quite that of the ancients, nor his monarchism that of his century. He did not even take up the subject of actual warfare until well along in his book (in the chapter entitled “Emploi du soldat comme soldat”). He was more interested in the military life as a mode of civic training. Like Zimmermann, he wanted the mystique of the army to be incorporated with that of the nation. Like Rousseau, he wanted the defense of the nation to depend on the voluntary virtue of its citizens. Like Voltaire and d’Holbach, he wanted soldiers to perform useful public works. He wanted to chasten monarchism with republican mores: but for all that he endorsed the ideal of the “soldat proprietaire” of Saint-Germain. He wrote a work of mixed perspectives.

Morale and Mission

As the Revolution approached, the military problem could be stated as follows. Militarily, the state was weaker in moral incentives than it had been previously. This was, in general, a condition that plagued most of the European nations, except Prussia; but the French slip¬ page was most striking. An exemplary marshalling of force and disci¬ pline by the king of Prussia had put France to shame, for, if noted for its legerete, France had long been thought the warrior nation par excellence. There were two sides to the problem. One was a growing deficiency of command and instinctive military authority, with the notable exception of Saxe, who died at mid-century and was a foreigner, besides. The other was an acknowledged mediocrity in the common soldier, linked to his recruitment, status, and horizons, worsened by the slackening quality of leadership, and sealed by the encroachment of the moeurs du siecle. From about 1750 on (even before the debacle of the Seven Years’ War), military leaders like Noailles were greatly disturbed by the situation. In the decades to follow, painful reforms granted little relief because of the nature of the prevailing royal-aristocratic-military constitution. France was on the horns of a dilemma. Could the nation afford to recapture its spirit and greatness by reaching down? No: for it could

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not be foreseen where that might end, and the whole highborn profession of national defense might be cast into jeopardy. Moreover, all other parts of the system would be undermined. And it was by no means certain that diamonds would be found among the “dregs.” What efforts of education would it take in a monarchy like this to ennoble the lower parts of society? But could the nation manage to revive its warlike vigour from original sources, pledging the nobility as a caste to its promised sacrifices on the field of battle, soothing the commons with an old formula? No: for that nobility had already given too many proofs of its laxness and want of virtue. In such a dilemma it is easy to see how the myth of Henri IV, with his balancing of the estates of society, could gain prominence, although this restoration was out of reach. To some extent, the “family” and “civic” models converged. In their different ways, theorists in both camps were patriots, wishing France to be strong and prosperous within natural boundaries. Neither faction wanted to make war with polissons and “dregs.” The extravagant habits of Versailles revolted both groups. But the one wished to rescue the nobility, “toujours renaissante,” from its pit of mollesse, while the other wished to submerge it beneath the gathered power of the nation. Since the French army fought no wars (except for the American interlude) between 1763 and 1792, it is not so simple to judge the effects of these doctrines on the troops. However, it seems likely that the cumulative results of the family model, brought to an apogee by the reglement Segur of 1781 (which prescribed four quarterings of nobility for officer-entrants),98 ruptured the familial motives of service more than they rerooted them. As Sebastien Mercier stated with bitterness: “The favorite prejudice of officers is to consider themselves as the men most necessary to the human race, and thus to have contempt for all [the other] estates.”99 Almost as a rebuttal to this charge, the Prince de Ligne was writing: “The court and the city must be persuaded that they are nothing, and owe their exis¬ tence to the army.”100 This animosity went deeper and deeper into the ranks as the monarchy slid toward its final crisis: Corvisier’s research strongly suggests that retired soldiers were later among the most persistent carriers of the revolutionary message.101 Up to the 98. For the significance of the reglement Segur, see David D. Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction, and Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 85 (1979):68-98. 99. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 2, chap. 106. 100. Prince de Ligne, “Fantaisies militaires,” Memoires et melanges 3:286. 101. Corvisier, L’armee franQaise, pp. 946-947.

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mutinies of 1788, however, when whole units were affected by the rebellious behaviour of their officers, it may be doubted that the civic model of military service had a great deal of direct influence on the troops. This model had been confined to salon speculation; it was propagandized within narrow boundaries, often with an unreal air of classical nostalgia. It needed the unfettered press of 1789 to burst into prominence. Medical practices and life expectations surely played a significant role in affecting morale, performance, and obedience. Cynical apho¬ risms about medical treatment remained common currency in the eighteenth century, e.g., Montesquieu: “Ce n’est pas les medecins qui nous manquent, c’est la medecine.”102 Military medicine was not so much invaded by the charlatanism of the cities or the homeopathic sorcery of the countryside; but the conditions, especially when an army was deployed, were deplorable. “I wish,” Rousseau wrote, “that for once informed men might wish or dare to give the public the details of the horrors committed in the armies by the entrepreneurs in supplies and hospitals.”103 Disease was rampant in all armiesespecially cholera, venereal disease, pulmonary disorders, and skin lesions. Naval service was perhaps even more exposed to illness: At the naval hospital of Rochefort toward 1780, “the hospital logged 14,494 admissions and registered 1,890 deaths....In 1782, out of 13,915 admissions, 1,574 succumbed.”104 Hospitals were a particu¬ larly grim experience, overloaded, filthy, and unaired: a kind of morgue avant la lettre. Sick soldiers regarded them with terror and made almost any excuse to avoid them.105 The military wounded provided a spacious laboratory for experimental surgery, especially amputation and trepanning, encouraging genuine advances in anatomical knowledge and recuperative therapy.106 But despite these small blessings, encouraged by war ministers and enlightened professionals, medical care could seem a worse horror than combat. And by mid-century a rising population (although this was contested by many) and a perceptible increase in life-expectancy107 helped to

102. Montesquieu, Pense'es, no. 729, Oeuvres completes, ed. Caillois 1:1197. 103. Rousseau, note to Discours sur I’Inegalite, in Vaughan, ed., Political Writings 2:204. 6 104. Auguste-Alfred (M.A.) Lefevre, Histoire du service de sante de la marine militaire (Paris, 1867), p. 216. 105. Mention, L’armee de UAncien Regime, p. 276f. 106. See especially Jean des Cilleuls, “Chirurgiens militaires de l’Ancien Regime,” Revue historique de I’Armee 6 (no. 1, 1950):7-18; and his “Les medecins aux armees de l’Ancien Regime,” ibid. 6, no. 4 (1950):7-24. 107. See Chaunu, La civilisation de l’Europe, pp. 79-81.

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alter the soldier s calculus of life and death, prudence and bravery, as well as his incentive to accept unconditional obedience. To conclude, we must return briefly to religion. In the preceding chapter we noted the desultory religious practices of the eighteenthcentury French army. Military impiety was a constant source of concern for the policymakers after 1750. That concern was explicitly utilitarian: it bore not on the salvation of souls but on providing reinforced conviction in battle. Even Montesquieu, in arguing against Bayle’s “commonwealth of atheists,” had declared that, from a civic point of view, “[Christians] would be extremely enlightened citizens regarding their duties and zealous in fulfilling them; they would be very conscious of the rights of natural defense; the more they believed they owed to religion, the more they would think they owed to the nation (patrie). ”10 But the French troops were not very demonstrably Christian. For one thing, their elementary spiritual needs were badly serviced. “[The chaplains] should take care before battle,” wrote the Prince de Ligne, “to call upon the God of armies and to invoke him movingly in favor of the brave, and them alone....”109 Perhaps there were some effective cases of such oratory: A certain Sulpician named Piquet, appointed chief of chap¬ lains in 1758 by Vaudreuil, the royal governor of Canada, seemed to have this spirit. “Before the battle of Ticonderoga he made a short speech: ‘Be stalwart in battle, my children. Have courage! God and his divine Mother will protect you.’ Then he pronounced a general absolution....”110 But troops may have discovered a pull of religion in the wilds of North America that was not sensed in Europe. In another phase of the Seven Years’ War, it is reported from Brittany: “My brothers, the abbe's...enjoy life. Part of their time they spend in singing the praises of Our Lord and the rest in honest distractions. The state of the military is very dangerous for the young. Corruption reigns, passions rule, and religion is almost extin¬ guished.”111 The military chaplains, like the recrues, had a universally bad repu¬ tation. In the War of the Spanish Succession, Puyguyon had commented: “this one (ga) says mass with a flick of the wrist, that one (qa) confesses a whole battalion in a couple of hours, the other one (ga) grants absolution the way he says bonjour. ”112 Despite 108. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 24, chap. 6. 109. Prince de Ligne, “Oeuvres militaires,” in Memoires et melanges 3:171. 110. Msgr. Olivier Maurault, “Les aumoniers des troupes francpaises au Canada,” Revue historique de I’Armee 12 (April-June, 1956):30. 111. From Audierne, near Quimper, 1 July 1762. Lacour, ed., Les freres Prunelle, de Vienne 2:93. 112. Corvisier, L’armee franqaise, p. 866.

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intermittent efforts to find them elsewhere, most chaplains came from the Recollets, an order of low status. The church itself was reluctant to send its pious and valuable servants into the den of iniq¬ uity that the army was felt to be. Many of the clergy who accompa¬ nied the troops were partners in their laxity of morals and contempt for sacred obligations. Thus the chaplains tended to be treated as pariahs if they tried to return to other religious pursuits. In the 1780s a project was set on foot for a seminary in the context of mili¬ tary schools, but nothing came of it.113 Military sermons were also of the most banal sort; one ended with the plea: “Why should God be served so badly by men who serve their King and their Nation so well?...”114 From the ministry of Belle-Isle on, military chiefs had attempted to promote religion as one of the components of an army’s morale. Endlessly it was said: “sans religion toute troupe ne sera jamais bonne.” But to the extent that the innoculation was tried, it never took. Wherever religion survived in the ranks, it was apt to be of the most naive and confused sort.115 A ministerial attempt to enforce an evening prayer after retreat “for the King, the royal Family, and the prosperity of the State” apparently remained dead letter.116 Up to the Revolution itself, writers in both the “family” and “civic” modes of military thought would continue to insist on the power of religion to animate armies and on the intimate connection between love of God and love of France. On this point connoisseurs of the Roman republic and pious servants of the Gallican monarchy could agree. “Particularly in wars involving the defense of the fatherland,” a writer asserted in 1788, “through the hope of heavenly rewards, [the sovereign] can get [the soldier] to perform incredible feats of valour.”117 That this continued to be a subject of exhorta¬ tion is perhaps not so much explained as neo-feudal utopianizing as by an awareness that some spiritual element was lacking in the French army which, if restored, could make it dauntless. But it

113. Jean des Cilleuls, “Les aumoniers aux armees de l’Ancien Regime,” Revue historique de t’Arme'e, July-September 1956, pp. 5-16. 114. Cf. Abbe du Rupt, Sermon preche aux carabiniers de Monseigneur le comte de Provence pendant les quartiers d'hiver des campagnes d’Hanovre (Careme 1761, 1762, 1763), cited by Corvisier, L’armee frangaise, p. 866. 115. See army memoire, “De la necessite et des moyens de placer utilement des aumoniers dans chaque regiment des armees de France,” cited in Corvisier, L’armee frangaise, p. 869. 116. Ibid., p. 868. 117. “Auteur d’Azemor,” Considerations sur I’influence des moeurs, p. 263.

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would require a new mystique of the sovereign nation to revive the magic of the God of battles and give ordinary Frenchmen superior courage to die.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine Chapter 8

The Spectacle

Capital execution in the eighteenth century was surely, to our way of thinking, “cruel and unusual punishment.” Old Regime and Revolution proceeded from different metaphysical views of politics and a different raison d’Etat. The latter alleviated physical torture with the substitute of ideological torture. Yet there are stern conti¬ nuities: a phenomenological importance of spectacle and a clinging, despite Enlightenment, to the principle of retribution. The eighteenth century was certainly not squeamish about death as legal punishment. Although it may seem peculiar to many to presume to kill a crime with another crime, the state’s justice has an anthropological meaning: to cause death in this fashion is somehow to control it and dispose of its mystery.1 In the Age of Reason the death penalty was affixed to a wide range of offenses; according to the jurist Pastoret there were 115 capital crimes in the Old Regime.2 Death was in public, and the methods prescribed for it were arduous and gruesome. It is in the sphere of public criminal death that the habits of the spectacle-oriented “baroque” lasted the longest;3 this kind of death was both a carnival and a massive propi¬ tiation of the divine and the diabolical. The Revolutionary Terror fed on this deeply rooted instinct, although with special modifica¬ tions that we shall see. Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the famous magistrate, used to make

1. Cf. Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mart (Paris, 1975), p. 119. 2. Jean Imbert, La peine de mort (Paris, 1967), p. 121. 3. On “baroque” in this context, see especially F. Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou; Michel Vovelle, Pie'te baroque et dechristianisation en Provence au XVIlie siecle: les attitudes devant la mort d’apres les clauses des testaments (Paris, 1973); Aries, L’homme devant la mort; and Chaunu, La mort a Paris.

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light of the fact that his birthdate (6 December 1721) coincided with the execution of Cartouche, a famous criminal.4 Little did he surmise that he, too, would suffer a “criminal death” before a large audience. Whether much or little had changed in death practices in the course of the century, crowds still flocked to see the enemies of public order sent to their reward. But by the time of Malesherbes’s execution the blood-letting was so advanced that the spectacle had become mechanical, regardless of the pathos or theatricality of the victims: It had become a routine political summons as well as a grave show of terrible edification. This had not been so before the Revolution altered the ghoulish substance of the criminal death act. As Lebrun writes of Anjou: “Wheel or hanging, beheading or bonfire, the execution unfolded in true dramatic proportions. The scaffold was the stage, the execu¬ tioner and the condemned were the two principal actors, the gawking idlers who rushed there in a crowd, the audience. These latter followed all parts of the presentation as demanding connois¬ seurs.”5 If the victim showed bravery or defiance, he was duly applauded; if the hatchet-man was clumsy, he was hissed into the wings. Like the carnage of the Roman arenas, though far more intermittent, this was an accepted part of the century’s moral and visual experience. As Boileau wrote of his fellow Frenchman: “...il voit la justice en grosse compagnie / Mener tuer un homme avec ceremonie.”6 Dubos, the aesthetician, explained: “People go in crowds to see the most fearsome spectacle that men could watch, I mean the torture of another man according to law on the scaffold, who will be led to his death in frightful torments....The emotional pull is stronger for many than wise reflection and the counsels of experience.”7 And as Voltaire, who had prodded humanitarian opinion in the Calas episode, thundered: “Certain people seem to require the pleasure of killing their neighbour ceremoniously...and making him suffer frightful torments as an agreeable diversion. These people live on the forty-ninth parallel; just where the Iroquois 4. Jean-Baptiste Dubois de Jancigny, Notice historique sur Chre'tien-Guillaume Lamoignon-Malesherbes (Paris, 1804), p. 4n. Dubois was Malesherbes’s devoted servant. 5. F. Lebrun, Les hommes et la mart en Anjou, p. 420. The crowd at the execution of the famous smuggler Louis Mandrin in Valence in 1755 was estimated at 6,000 persons who had come from miles around. See M.-H. Bourquin, “Le proces de Mandrin,” in Emmanuel Hepp et ah, Aspects de la contrebande au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1969), p. 29. 6. Satire VIII, lines 295-296, in Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, Oeuvres completes, ed. Frangoise Escal (Paris, 1966), p. 48. 7. Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Reflexions critiques sur la poe'sie et sur la peinture, 3 vols., 4th edition (Paris, 1740), vol. 1, pt. 1, sect. 2, p. 12.

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are situated. Maybe they will one day be civilized.”8 Voltaire’s hoped-for civilization had not arrived by the time of the Revolution, which mixed savagery and humanitarianism in its sanguinary rite of virtue and terror. Public death was, then, both horrible and showy in the eighteenth century. The executioner, a civil employee whose office was heredi¬ tarily transmitted, was a famous figure in this community. In the words of Sebastien Mercier: “The lower classes know him by sight: he is the great tragic actor for the coarse elements, who rush in a crowd to those frightful spectacles from the same mysterious impulse of curiosity that attracts a more polite gathering when the crime or the criminal are of distinction....These hawkers know the history of the hanged men and the executioners, just as a man of polite society knows the history of the kings of Europe and their ministers.”9 At the same time, as major-domo of the slaughter-house, the bourreau was a kind of outcast or pariah in society. As Sanson, the last execu¬ tioner of his family to serve Paris, wrote in his memoirs: “The glaive de la loi was transmitted in my family like the sword among the aris¬ tocracy, and the sceptre in royal families.”10 However, scorned from all sides by their fellow citizens and anxious for official approval of their metier, the executioners of Revolutionary France petitioned the National Constituent Assembly for recognition of their merit, choosing Charles-Henry Sanson, grandfather of the memoirist and shortly to become the killer of the king and so many others, as their spokesman. In his piece justificative Sanson represents his function as the ultimate administration of justice and royal sovereignty; he then goes on to compare criminal execution with military defense: There is nothing base or humiliating in shedding human blood when the good of the State demands it: it is in fact an honourable function, as witness the esteemed function of arms, although one only studies there how to spill the blood of the enemy. Ask a soldier what his profession is; he will answer, as I do, that he is a killer of men....But, I ask you, whom does that soldier kill? He kills innocent, perfectly honourable people who have committed no crime but have only done their duty!...while I, I only purge a society of monsters who come to trouble its peace.11 8. Voltaire, article “Supplices,” in Dictionnaire philosophique, in Oeuvres completes 20:458. 9. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, chap. 279. 10. Henri Sanson, Sept generations d'exe'cuteurs 1688-1847: Me'moires des Sanson..., 6 vols. (Paris, 1862-1863), 1:23. 11. Ibid., 2:435; cf. 3:373.

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Thus the politics of the executioner was neutral; his profession was separated from his private feeling, which, if we are to believe Sanson, was often fairly volcanic and remorseful.12 To be a good executioner was to be a man doing his job proficiently and taking orders from constituted authority, be it Louis XV or the Committee of General Security. Little wonder that Maistre made him the God-like symbol of the Revolution itself in a cruel and powerful passage.13 In fact, the executioner was quasi-eternal: Sanson lived on, while Louis XVI, Brissot, Danton, Robespierre, and Fouquier-Tinville perished. His was also the last hereditary office in the Republic of Virtue. What of the other participants in the drama of public death? The victim, rarely reprieved, knew the price he would have to pay and what it would cost him in suffering before a discriminating audience. These hideous events are all recorded in the annals of the times: a criminal could still make a “good” or a “bad” death in the judgement of the spectators. Damiens, who had attempted to take the life of Louis XV in 1757, was the last victim of the eighteenth century reserved for quartering: he was bound hand and foot to four powerful horses pulling in opposite directions until his limbs were separated from his torso.14 Quartering had been generally assigned to the crime of lese-majeste'.15 As the Sanson memoirs record, Louis XV was not a cruel king, but “he was very sincerely persuaded that an attack on him was an attack on God...which no circumstances could extenuate, and that there was no right to clemency.”16 Shortly after this event the executioner Gabriel Sanson resigned, to be followed by Charles-Henry. Charles-Henry was not left idle; but he was inexperienced in the learned variations of public execution: he took almost an hour, on 27 January 1765, to strangle Marie Croison, accused of theft.17 Diderot estimated that, toward 1770, about three hundred criminals a year were condemned to death in France.18 The first three years of the reign of Louis XVI (1774-1777) featured thirty-two instances of public execution in Paris alone: hangings, flay-

12. Ibid., 4:9: “...Charles-Henry Sanson finally lost even the notion of his own personality. He acted like an automaton....” 13. Joseph de Maistre, Les soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, ou entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence..., 2 vols., 3d ed. (Lyons, 1836), septi£me soiree. 14. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, chap. 280; vol. 9, chap. 711. 15. See below, p. 218. 16. Sanson, Sept generations d’executeurs: Me'moires 2:316. 17. See Claude Manceron, Les vingt ans du roi: de la mort de Louis XV a celle de Rous¬ seau 1774-1778, (Paris, 1972), p. 451. 18. Diderot, Oeuvres completes 3:62.

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ings, burnings, for crimes such as murder, assault, rape, sodomy, breaking and entering, and “domestic theft.”19 One of the most brutal executions was that of Desrues, accused of murder, stretched on the wheel and burned after an exacting preliminary torture, on 13 December 1774.20 There is no use in multiplying these examples. The century was sentimental; the century was cruel; the century vacillated between primitive instincts and polished manners. But what is most shocking about these paradoxes is that the royal government, source of posi¬ tive justice and, by its own claim, agent of the Almighty, was totally insensitive to the atrocities it perpetrated for the sake of order. Witness Jean Meslier’s complaint: “The judges and magistrates set up to maintain justice and order...pursue and punish the petty criminals severely: they have them hanged and stretched on the wheel, but they dare say nothing...to those great and powerful murderers who lay the whole world waste....”21 However, as D. Muller points out in an excellent article, “the death penalty was not a phenomenon that could be juridically isolated. It was integrated to monarchical legiti¬ macy, to the person of the king and to the whole apparatus of power. Thus there were obvious political obstacles in reforming a repressive instrument which, in all its justification, was so deeply lodged in the legitimacy of the regime.”22 The crown’s chief adver¬ sary, the parlements, which, from time to time, presumed to speak for the nation since other representative voices had been silenced, were scarcely more delicate in their interpretation of criminal justice. Although they were willing to suffer censure, banishment, and disgrace by objecting to new taxes, it little occurred to them to remonstrate over the inflictions of torture and excessive or dispro¬ portionate punishment. Altogether, there were some “timid reforms. 23 But at best, toward the end of the century, parlementarians were insisting not on punitive review, but on a wider share of judicial decision-making. According to the jurist Muyart de Vouglans, the king, unable alone to dispense justice and condemn to death, “has the right to establish subaltern magistrates to whom he confides the exercise of justice...because of the vast expanse of his 19. Manceron, Les vingt ans du roi, pp. 451-452. 20. Ibid., pp. 443-454, passim. 21. Abbe Jean Meslier, Le testament de Jean Meslier, cure d’Etre'pigny et de But en Champagne, dece'de en 1733, ed. Rudolf Charles, (pseud. Rudolph Charles Meijer), 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1864), 2:282. 22. Muller, “Les magistrats frangais et peine de mort,” p. 84. 23. See Jacques Goulet, “Robespierre: la peine de mort et la Terreur,” Annates historiques de la Revolution frangaise, annee 53, no. 244 (April-June 1981), p. 222.

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states,” reserving to himself the right of pardon.24 And the popular instinct itself was, as we have noted, also little concerned with pity. It was not that the French lower classes were so sunk in demands of horrible retribution for crime that they fell upon the victim with their hoots and cheers when the state demanded an execution. They also saw their better and worse selves in the victim, and reacted accordingly. There were mixed elements of sympathy, curiosity, and narrative possibility. Asked as a defender of the common man why so many of them went avidly to public executions, Rousseau replied: “For the same reason that you go to bawl at the theatre while watching Seide cut his father’s throat or Thyeste drinking the blood of his son. Pity is such a delicious feeling that we shouldn’t be surprised when people go out of their way to experience it. Besides, everyone has a secret curiosity to study nature’s motions at the onset of that fearful, inevitable moment. Add to that the pleasure of spee¬ chifying to the neighbourhood for two months in pathetic tones about the belle mort of the latest man stretched on the wheel.”25 The menu peuple recognized that the scaffold was not only made for others; they had a lively appreciation that it was made for the unlucky. And if that person died bravely, as a real costaud, his viola¬ tions of law could swell popular legend.26 Such a hero was Louis Mandrin, a resolute and dangerous captain of smugglers executed in Valence in 1755 (there is still a bistro named after him on the rue Guillaume-Tell in Paris; Yves Montand had a song called the “complainte de Mandrin”).27 In the wake of Mandrin’s death, his exploits were burlesqued in the winning style of the funeral oration: With a peaceful gaze he sees death coming toward him. His soul has no fear of the threatening blade gleaming above his head. Without anxiety he counts all the steps of death and all the minutes leading to the last minute. As a hero, he receives all the blows that death can strike him with; his unconquerable soul keeps all its strength and courage; it clings, yes clings, to his body,

24. Pierre-Francois Muyart de Vouglans, Les lois criminelles de France dans leur ordre naturel (Paris, 1780), p. 38. 25. Rousseau, “Lettre a M. Philopolis,” in Vaughan, ed., Political Writings 1:226; cf. Diderot, Jacques le fataliste in Oeuvres completes 6:179-180. 26. Cf. Mercier’s comment on popular literature in Tableau de Paris, vol. 4, chap. 463: “We still have sad tales about criminals hung and flayed, which the lower classes read with tears in their eyes and snap up from the bookstalls.” 27. For an exhaustive treatment of the populist importance of Mandrin, see L.S. Gordon, “Le thfhne de Mandrin, le ‘brigand noble’,” in M. Duchet, E. Lemay, et al., Au siecle des Lumieres (Paris and Moscow, 1970), pp. 189-207.

190

Mortal Politics

not letting go until the determined moment that destiny has chosen. Only then it flies aloft; it soars with the speed of lightning toward the heavens.28 If it is not exactly by such images that populist hopes stay alive, it is on them that the marginal humour of the poor is floated. The masses who went to view the executions were not homogene¬ ously “popular,” although the well-to-do usually attempted to keep a certain distance.29 Numerous accounts of the century testify to the vivacity of the crowds. Cartouche himself, according to a contempo¬ rary witness, was hung by candlelight at ten o’clock in the evening with a great crowd around. “The roofs of all the houses of the Greve [present Place de l’Hotel de Ville], and even the chimneys, were covered with people. A man and a woman fell into the square, injuring others. One noticed many women, even some of distinc¬ tion....”30 For a later period, Mercier is a mine of information: “The people stream out of the workshops and boutiques and gather around the scaffold to see how the sufferer will fulfil the important act of dying in public amid his torments....The people watch the town-hall clock and count the hours striking; they fidget, they muse, and fall silent. But tomorrow another criminal will have his scaffold built....The people will return to witness the same show.”31 However, Mercier and other contemporaries are agreed that it was not just the dregs of society who took their ease at famous execu¬ tions, such as that of Damiens. Let Restif de La Bretonne continue the narrative: While the wretched man suffered [on the wheel], I examined the audience. They chattered and laughed as if they had been at a parade. What revolted me most was a very pretty young woman, who seemed to be with her lover. She burst into laughing and joked about the demeanour and cries of the condemned. I couldn’t believe it! I stared at her five or six times. Finally, not caring for the consequences, I told her: “Mademoiselle, you must have the heart of a monster, and from what I see of you this evening, you must be capable of any crime. If I had the ill luck to 28. [Anon.], Oraison funebre de Messire Louis Mandrin, Colonel-General des Faussaniers et Contrebandiers de France (n.p., n.d.), p. 4. The character of the burlesque is illumi¬ nated if we recognize that Mandrin is here granted a nobleman’s execution. 29. On public curiosity, see Favre, La mart au siecle, pp. 352-353 and references. 30. Edmond-Jean-Frangois Barbier, Journal historique et anecdotique du regne de Louis XV, 8 vols. (Paris, 1857-1858), vol. 8, no. 10, p. 54. 31. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, chap. 278.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

191

be your lover, you would never see me again.”32 The Revolution would involve a continuation of these customs, transacted more soberly, and mingled with the effects of ideology and public caution. The tricoteuses are not “pretty young women.” For the “enemies of the state” in the Old Regime were not the same kind of political enemies. They were offenders against the laws of a politico-religious continuum of unreflective morality, not the chal¬ lengers or nay-sayers of a fragile republic. Nevertheless, the ever memorable public spectacles of the Terror did not need to be rein¬ vented in the fertile brains of the radical “patriots”; they derived authentically from ceremonials as old as public justice itself, firmly planted in the everyday experience of the Age of Reason. And the theatrical executions of the Old Regime had been ostensibly political, if one intends by that term exemplary moral coercion, not ideolo¬ gical instruction. As Suard, a Holbachian litterateur who lived through great sea-changes, wrote, in the Aristotelian vocabulary that would soon find new fortune: Tortures are political spectacles that should affect souls by the same techniques as dramatic spectacles. The moral purpose of tragedy is to forewarn against the dangers and errors of the passions by impressions of terror and pity; executions are designed to produce the same effect on the people en masse. They are intended to strike the imagination vividly; but more by terror than by pity.33

The Humanitarian Reaction

I have rapidly delineated executioner, victim, and audience. Nothing yet has been said of the mechanics of justice that sent wretched criminals, and some of the innocent, to the torturer’s chamber, and thence to the rack, the noose, the block, or the bonfire. Perhaps we

32. Nicolas-Edme Restif de La Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, ou le spectateur nocturne, ed. H. Bachelin (Paris, n.d.), p. 126. 33. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, “Observations sur les lois penales,” in Melanges de litterature, 5 vols. (Paris, 1804), 4:149.

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Mortal Politics

do not need to dwell on this much more. Justice was, by the stan¬ dards of the time, “regular.” The judgement of crimes was a high calling, venal no doubt, but enrooted as a noble responsibility in the ancestry of the families that administered it. The courts heard evidence with an impartiality flavoured by caste bias. The problem was not so much the procedures as the terrible inflictions of pain which the laws, handed down from more barbarous times, exacted. Yet we would not easily recognize our own rules of justice in these proceedings, in part owing to the character of the society: “in their interrogations, the judges placed extreme importance on the words spoken by the accused before the crime, the threats made to the victim....In a rural society, each word is weighed and carries full consequence...a trait of peasant mentality opposed to the greater volubility and offhandedness of urban vernacular.”34 As the Old Regime drew to its close, two important phenomena regarding the death penalty are to be noted. In the first place, the grounds of its legitimacy appear to have been shifting. Whereas formerly, in a more “normatively” structured society, it had been justified by the “elimination of undesirables” and the motive of extracting vengeance, safety and public utility have now become increasingly the watchwords. According to Muyart de Vouglans, the goal was now “to purge society and to preserve it from the contagion which an assortment of malefactors would not fail to spread” and “to assure public order.”3j Secondly, we notice, according to graphs established by Muller, a progressively heavier concentration of crimes against property, indicative no doubt of approaching social confrontation.36 But it is now proper to correct the impressions of the Age of Reason thus far given. I have drawn a sketch of existing society, but have said nothing about the mitigations of philosophy and humanitarianism. The humane impulses of Enlightenment philosophy contested the powers of darkness on many fronts; by the second half of the century, one of the chief ones was capital punishment. We should not, however, abruptly conclude that the philosophes were united against the death penalty; what they detested was cruelty.

34. Andre Abbiatecci, “Les incendiaires devant le Parlement de Paris: essai de typologie criminelle (XVIIIe si£cle), in Abbiatecci, et al., Crimes et criminalite en France, p. 15. 35. Muyart de Vouglans, Les lois criminelles, p. 54; and by the same author, Refuta¬ tion du traite des de'lits et des peines, pp. 85-86, cited in Muller, “Les magistrats frangais et peine de mort,” p. 85. 36. Muller, “Les magistrats fran?ais et peine de mort,” pp. 94-96.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

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Montesquieu had resoundingly attacked torture in the Esprit des “One must be careful not to inspire in men too much contempt for death; other¬ wise they would escape from the legislator.”37 However, a few years later the Italian Cesare Beccaria argued against the death penalty, on both moral and deterrent grounds, in his On Crimes and Punishments, which made a deep impression in France in Morellet’s translation (1766). As Beccaria wrote: “What manner of right can man attribute to themselves to slaughter their fellow beings? Certainly not that from which sovereignty and the laws derive.”38 At about the same time the jurist J.-M. Servan was attacking prevailing practices of capital punishment as unjust and arbitrary “because crimes that are completely different in nature, the most horrible and sometimes the slightest, are confused in provoking the same manner of punish¬ ment.”39 The philosophes were not so sure that the state should be deprived of its ultimate sanction. For Diderot, “the wrongdoer is a man who must be destroyed and not punished.” Although man is not technically free, he is certainly susceptible to prudential modification: Thus executions should be in public. Capital punishment is not a question of right; it is a constant of nature.40 Helvetius was of a similar opinion, especially given his sanguinary view of “conditioned” human nature: The just king who has a criminal killed is preferable to a mild king who pardons him and places the lives of fifty citizens in jeopardy.41 D’Holbach as well: Gibbets and punishments are for the state like gutters that a man places around his house to drain off the rainwater before it can undermine the foundation.42 It is no great surprise that most of this kind of argument comes from the materialist camp: The spiritual onus of the act of execution is subli¬ mated in human necessity. Moreover, with the materialist elimination of any God of rewards and punishments from a cosmos of uncreated matter in motion, state and law become the exclusive ramparts against dangerous and destructive behaviour. lois (1748), but in his private notes he cautioned:

37. Montesquieu, Pensees, no. 228, in Oeuvres completes, ed. Andre Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950-1955), 2:95. 38. Cesare Bonesana, marchese di Beccaria, Essay on Crimes and Punishments, trans. Henry Paolucci (Indianapolis and New York, 1963), p. 45. 39. [Joseph Servan], Discours sur Vadministration de la justice criminelle (Geneva, [1767]), p. 122. Cited in Muller, “Les magistrats franqais et peine de mort,” p. 102. 40. Denis Diderot, “Lettre a Langlois,” in Oeuvres completes 4:61-62. 41. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, De Vesprit (Paris, 1758), p. 10. 42. Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, Systeme de la nature, 2 vols. (London, 1781), 1:94.

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Mortal Politics

But the philosophes did baulk at needless cruelty, gradually preparing a younger generation of public opinion for drastic changes in the punitive psychology of the Old Regime. For a while it was touch-and-go with the notion that the punishment should fit the crime, but there was considerable support for the idea that punish¬ ments should at least be moderated and have “public utility.” Not only Montesquieu, but Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, and d’Holbach lent their voices to the suppression of torture, both for the extrac¬ tion of a confession (“la question preparatoire”) and for obtaining evidence (“la question prealable”). Suard, the theorist of the pity and terror of supplices, still deplored them: “nature has condemned all men to the necessity of dying, but not to the necessity of suffering.”43 Since man had been made “sensitive,” it followed that he had not been made to suffer.44 As a recent historian comments: “This unanimity of opinion and triumph of the sentiment of humanity are impressive and only draw attention to the unhappy fact that the settled routine of the magistrates continued, generally speaking, to support ongoing legal practices.”45 However, torture had, at least theoretically, been abolished before the Revolution: the question preparatoire in 1781 and the question prealable in 1788.46 Philosophy, or so it was claimed, arrived in power with the forma¬ tion of the National Assembly in 1789 and its de facto assumption of the law-making power of France in the absence of a fixed constitu¬ tion.47 As early as 23 December 1789, the Assembly held a debate on the death penalty. Against it: the unlikely coalition of Clermont-Tonnerre, Duport, and Robespierre. But the final judge¬ ment on the matter did not come until the promulgation of the penal code in late September and early October of 1791, after an impassioned debate by a fatigued Assembly the previous spring. With reference to our subject, the law states simply: “The death penalty will consist of the simple privation of life without any torture of the convicted.”48 This decision was taken in opposition to the more advanced sentiments of a number of the deputies, partly in deference

43. Suard, “Observations sur les lois,” in Melanges de litterature 4:150. 44. Rousseau, Emile, bk. 4, p. 345. 45. Paul Savey-Casard, La peine de mort, esquisse historique et juridique (Geneva, 1968), p. 57. 46. Gerard Aubry, La jurisprudence criminelle du Chatelet de Paris sous le regne de Louis XVI (Paris, 1971), p. 190. 47. We should not ignore that the General Cahiers of 1789 had frequently regis¬ tered hostility to prevailing practices. See Beatrice Fry Hyslop, French Nationalism in 1789, According to the General Cahiers (New York, 1934), p. 140. 48. Quoted by Savey-Casard, La peine de mort, p. 74.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

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to internal disorder in France, and contrary to the report and draft of the penal code which the relevant committees had submitted. That report had been composed by Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, a young, wealthy, and radical member of a prestigious noble family of the robe, who was later assassinated on the evening after he had voted in the Convention-as simple Michel Lepeletier—for the death of Louis XVI, thereby becoming a martyr of the Montagne. The project for a modern penal code was the joint work of the committees on the Constitution and on Legislation of the National Assembly. Their membership included some of the most distin¬ guished minds of the Constituent: in the First instance, Thouret, Sieyes, Target, Talleyrand, Desmeunier, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Tronchet, and Le Chapelier; in the second, Beaumetz, Freteau, La Rochefoucauld, Duport, Chabrol, and Dinocheau. Although the legislation in its final form probably owed most to Adrien Duport, it was Lepeletier who wrote the report and presented it to the Assembly in late May 1791 (less than a month before the king’s “flight to Varennes”). The keystone of the code is a wholly advanced philosophy of punishment reposing on the abrogation of the death penalty. The prisons of the new order are to become a kind of secular purgatory for the rehabilitation of virtue and citizenship: By our institutions let us call the heart of the guilty to repentance. May he be reborn to virtue, if he is but given the hope of being reborn to honour; may he cease to be wicked through the interest you offer him in being good. After a long part of his life spent in being punished has acquitted his debt...and, once handed back to society, may he even yet win back his esteem through the trial of irreproachable conduct, and finally deserve that the nation (patrie) itself should wipe from his brow the stain of a crime satisfactorily expiated.49 This passage illustrates the whole lofty tone of Lepeletier’s exposi¬ tion. After an adverse and haughty remark on the brutal style of public executions in England, “unworthy of a humane and enlight¬ ened century,”50 the rapporteur sets forth all the arguments from the

49. Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, “Projet de code penal, presente a l’Assemblee Constituante par Michel Lepeletier,” in Oeuvres de Michel Lepeletier Saint-Fargeau (Brussels, 1826), p. 107. 50. Ibid., p. 109.

196

Mortal Politics

natural law tradition and the maxims of prudential statecraft that provide for the right of public authority to take lives. Nothing, he concludes, will ever wipe crime from the face of the earth, not even the threat of capital punishment. But if natural law is founded on the legitimate right of self-defense for particulars, the model of this extreme situation cannot be, eo ipso, extended to the state’s powers of punishment, especially if other means can serve as effectively: “If the basis of the right [to kill in self-protection] is incontestable, the legitimacy of its exercise can come only from its necessity; and just as an individual can kill in self-defense only when there is no other way to save his life, so society cannot legitimately exercise the right of life or death unless it is shown to be impossible that all other means are ineffective in repressing crime.”51 The problem, then, is to devise other, less drastic means. Lepeletier was not entirely sanguine that the Assembly would accept his reasoning, for he had prepared a fail-back position: “if the death penalty is maintained, everyone agrees that it should be reduced to the simple privation of life, and that the use of torture should be abolished....”52 This is the solution that was finally adopted. For, as the rapporteur pointed out: “We live in a country where the death penalty had prodigiously multiplied the most drawnout and frightful forms of torture.”53 How did Lepeletier himself propose to deal with those crimes for which the death penalty would no longer be available? It was a rather remarkable regimen of rehabilitation, quite likely suggested by Morelly’s Code de la nature,54 “The condemned will be bound in his dungeon, without daylight or other illumination, by a chain or belt of iron. He will carry irons on his hands and feet. He will have only bread and water for nourishment. He will be given straw to sleep on. He will always remain solitary.” One redeeming feature: “he will not be kept in the dungeon more than twenty-four years.”55 We are not quite sure after reading this passage of Draconian enlightenment just what Lepeletier and his colleagues meant by the abolition of torture. To the thirty-one-year-old aristocrat with 51. Ibid., p. 117. 52. Ibid., p. 118. 53. Ibid., p. 123. But see above, note 46. 54. Morelly, who opposed both capital punishment and torture, wanted his prisons built “in the least pleasant spot...near the burial ground...kinds of caverns...heavily barred,” where prisoners would remain for life. Morelly, Code de la nature, p. 134. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Theorie des lois criminelles (Berlin, 1781) is another obvious source of Lepeletier’s project. 55. Lepeletier, “Projet de code penal,” p. 128.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

197

Spartan tastes, the plan would lead to “the softening of the barba¬ rism of punishments without weakening the salutary feeling of fright that they should inspire.”56 This is quite at the antipodes of the Terror, where death was swift and surcharged, insofar as it had a moral purpose, with a warning to the living, not a reformation of the guilty. Yet motives of terror and civic austerity are not absent from this earlier conception. Cartouche and Louis Mandrin might have considered their fates relatively fortunate. What Lepeletier and others saw, in the long run, through their idealistic and patriotic focus, was a withering away of most crime and the regeneration of the French race, prodded by the austere vigour of institutions: It is in the future that public morality, truly regener¬ ated, will achieve the stature of our new constitution.”57 The Assembly held a long debate on Lepeletier’s project, retaining its general progressive outlines, but dividing into multiple separate views concerning the death penalty. Prugnon spoke with a characteristic conservatism: At what moment are you proposing to abolish the death penalty! At a time of anarchy when all your combined strengths are not enough against a multitude which has been taught that it could do anything...at a time when religious feeling is ready to expire among several classes of society, and when morals in general are not very pure. Don’t imagine that you are going to conjure up out of the earth a generation fit to receive your laws....58 He was joined by Brillat-Savarin, the father of the French cookbook, who simply asserted that since some men are incorrigible, the right to impose death must be the basis of all politics.59 Robespierre’s effective speech against the death penalty has often caused him to be taxed with hypocrisy in view of the political carnage he later encouraged. The thrust of his argument is that the legislator has a responsibility toward society like that of a tutor to his pupil: “by the frequent use of cruel punishments, he bestializes and degrades the soul of his pupil; finally he weakens and wears out the springs of government because he wanted to draw them too taut.”60 In presenting Lepeletier’s case, Robespierre debated more cogently 56. Ibid., p. 124. 57. Ibid., p. 149. 58. Le Moniteur universel, Reimpression 32 vols. (Paris, 1863-1870), 8:546. 59. Ibid., p. 549. 60. Ibid., p. 547.

de t’ancien Moniteur...mai 1789-novembre 1799,

198

Mortal Politics

for the government’s power of moral example against cruelty than on behalf of the abolition of capital punishment itself. If the words were not hypocritical,61 they were at least prophetic: if “public morals, source of all liberty, source of all social happiness...cause human blood to flow that might have been spared and that they have no right to shed; if they display cruel images and corpses bruised by torture before the eyes of the people, then they change, in the hearts of the citizens, the ideas of the just and the unjust; they bring to birth in society’s midst fierce prejudices which, in their turn, will produce others.”62 Jerome Petion, then a close collaborator of Robespierre, repeated Lepeletier’s position in a pithier language: “The power to dispose of man’s life does not belong to society....Like you, I want the guilty punished, but it is not to be done by means of a murder, but rather through prolonging his punishment and applying it to every moment of his existence.”63 Duport, speaking for the same principle, fell back on the idea of public morality and the power of example: “We propose to you a foolproof way of teaching men to respect the life of their fellows....Nature is revolted at the sight of a man massacred in cold blood by several others....”64 General Adam-Philippe de Custine (later a very severe military disciplinarian) requested that if capital punishment was maintained, executions should not be in public; but Lepeletier countered him: “The principle of all punishment is that it be repressive by example; thus it should not be secret.”65 This was why capital punishment, unaccompanied by torture (now universally decried), could be consid¬ ered ineffective as a means of social control. Of all the speakers of the debate, it was Barere, already discovering the compromise role that would carry him through so many revolutionary storms, who best sniffed the wind and articulated the Assembly’s will. In prin¬ ciple, he was hostile to capital punishment. If one were attempting to legislate for a brand-new people, there would be no alternative but to reject it. However, the French of 1791 were not in that enviable state of “social perfection.” It would thus be better to exercise a 61. Capital punishment for treason was granted by Beccaria, Essay on Crimes and Punishments, p. 45. Thus, in a strained sense, Robespierre remains his faithful follower. 62. Reimpression de I’ancien Moniteur 8:547. 63. Ibid., p. 548. 64. Ibid., p. 553. 65. Ibid., p. 565. Pufendorf, for example, had argued that “in publicly punishing the guilty in an exemplary manner...one obtains public utility and security.” See Muller, “Les magistrats fran^ais et peine de mort,” p. 85.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

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“cautious wisdom,” preserving recourse to the death penalty, but only for cases like assassination, arson, poisoning, counterfeiting, and treason. 6 It was this solution that carried the day, obstructing the maximum program of the humanitarians. Still, the French seemed to have a code informed by ‘philosophy” that could be conceived in the spirit of Rousseau: “There is no wicked man who cannot be redeemed for something. [The state] has no right, even for making an example, to execute anyone whom it can leave alive without danger.”6' Barere’s restrictive catalogue of capitally punishable crimes would be expanded, however, by a series of arbitrary meas¬ ures in the three years to follow. Many different kinds of acts would be telescoped into the single crime of anti-civic conspiracy, puni¬ shable by death. Eventually the Jacobins would announce a scathing contempt for the whole work of the Constituent Assembly in this area. As Couthon was later to say of the 1791 penal code: “It is the work of the most infamous conspirators of the Assembly. The name of Duport soils its frontispiece.”68 This is the same Couthon who would declare on 22 Prairial, an II (10 June 1794): “It is less a matter of punishing than of executing....We are not interested in a few examples, but in exterminating the implacable satellites of tyranny. Any indulgence toward them is an atrocity.”69

The Simple Machine

If death were retained “without torture” as a recourse of public policy, how was it then to be carried out? What new adjustments would the Sanson family and their fellow executioners have to make? Already, in keeping with the principle that the French nation was composed of citizens equal before the law, a decree of 21 January 1790 had stated: “In all cases where the law has pronounced the death penalty against an accused person, the manner of execution will be the same, regardless of the crime: the criminal will be decapi¬ tated, and this will be done by a simple machine.”70 Actually, this 66. Archives parlementaires, de 1787 a 1860, lere serie (Paris, 1867-1914), 26:686. 67. Rousseau, Contrat social, bk. 2, chap. 5. 68. Cited in Savey-Casard, La peine de mart, p. 76. 69. Philippe-Joseph-Benjamin Buchez and Prosper-Charles Roux, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution franqaise, ou journal des assemblies nationales depuis 1789 jusqu’en 1815..., 40 vols. (Paris, 1834-1838), 33:187. 70. Sanson, Sept generations d’exe'cuteurs: Memoires 1:113.

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Mortal Politics

was not quite the case: hanging was not abolished until 27 September 1791. The “simple machine,” other than the execution¬ er’s axe (available to nobles in the Old Regime), was not yet in sight. It was Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a Parisian member of the National Assembly, who proposed this manner of death. But it was Doctor Antoine Louis, permanent secretary of the Royal Academy of Surgery, who was charged with investigating the problem. His report was delivered in a delicious clinical style: ...Experience and reason demonstrate that the past method of cutting off the head of a criminal exposes him to a more frightful torture than the mere privation of life, which is what the law states formally. To fulfil this, the execution should take place instantly and with a single blow; [previous] examples show how difficult it is to achieve this. Everyone knows that cutting instruments have little or no effect unless they strike on the perpendicular. In examining them under the microscope, one sees that they are, in reality, more or less delicate saws which must be forced to act upon the body that is to be divided. Considering the structure of the neck, whose center is the vertebral column, composed of several bones whose connec¬ tion forms networks with obvious joints, one cannot be assured of a prompt and perfect separation if the act is performed by an agent who might strike variably for moral or physical reasons. For the assurance of the procedure, it is necessary to depend on mechanical means that are invariable and whose force and result can be calculated. The frame of the instrument should be strong and heavy enough so that it acts effectively....Its force, of course, varies with the height from which [the blade] falls. It is easy to have such a machine infallibly constructed according to the spirit and wish of the new law; there will be no difficulty in testing it on corpses and even on a live sheep. Thus one will see if we have to support the head of the victim by a crescent which would follow the shape of the neck at the level of the base of the skull; the prolongation of this crescent might be regulated by cotter-pins underneath the scaffold.71

71. Ibid., 1:123-124. Louis, whose surgical experience gave him a clinical famil¬ iarity with death that theoretical physicians lacked, was author of the significant Lettres sur la certitude de la mort (1752).

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

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Doctor Louis’s research bore fruit: the “humanitarian way of death” was soon on its path to the proving ground. Guillotin himself was convinced that he had contributed a salutary invention to humanity, without forebodings of its repetitive and reproductive power. On 31 April 1791 he disclosed his findings to the Assembly. A German mechanic named Schmidt was apparently responsible for the first design of Doctor Louis’s “guillotine.”72 As the author of the Sanson memoirs comments, not without sophisticated irony, about the creation of the new apparatus: “It was the worthiest form of torture; it struck man in the noblest and most powerful of his organs, the supposed site of thought and intelligence.”73 That apparatus was intended to grant instant release. Did it? Mercier discussed the pros and cons in one of the vignettes of his Nouveau Paris: “No people has ever believed that life, and hence sensibility, could survive that muti¬ lation, even for a few instants. Yet the opposite opinion has been growing for some time.”74 After the Terror had ebbed, the famous Dr. Cabanis expressed his conviction that human sensation ceased with the blow of the blade, despite observed convulsive reactions.75 Trading on the contemporary medical distinction between “sensibilite” and “irritabilite,” he denied that the severed head of Charlotte Corday could have blushed when offensively slapped by the executioner.76 Cabanis, as a hospital administrator, had been initially involved in Dr. Louis’s experiments with cadavers at Bicetre: invariably the blade did its work in the twinkling of an eye (“avec la vitesse du regard”).77 But the experimental physician and fellow ideologue Xavier Bichat, who denied the possibility of “coherent death,” was given authorization in 1799 to observe victims of the guillotine. It seemed that some of the cadavers, after several minutes, were not quite “dead.”78 The first victim of the guillotine was one Jean-Nicolas Pelletier, condemned to death for robbery and assault; he was executed on 25 72. Sanson, Sept generations d’executeurs: Memoires 3:395. 73. Ibid., p. 389. 74. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, “Est-ce un supplice doux que celui de la guillotine?” in Le Nouveau Paris, 6 vols. (Brunswick, 1800), vol. 2, chap. 39. 75. Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, “Note sur l’opinion de MM. Oelsner et Sommering, et du Citoyen Sue, touchant le supplice de la guillotine,” Oeuvres philosophiques de Cabanis, 2eme partie, ed. Claude Lahec and Jean Cazeneuve (Paris, 1956), p. 496. Cf. also Que penser enfm du supplice de la guillotine?, a pamphlet by R. Castellier (Paris, an IV [1796]). 76. Cabanis, “Note sur l’opinion de MM. Oelsner et Sommering,” p. 498. 77. Ibid., p. 497. 78. Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, 3d ed. (Paris, 1805), p. 339.

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Mortal Politics

April 1792, just nine months before the King of the French. On this occasion, Roederer, the procurator-general-syndic of Paris, felt obliged to send the following message to the commander of the National Guard: “Monsieur, the new mode of execution-the punish¬ ment of beheading-is sure to draw a large crowd to the Greve [where executions were first held, until moved to the present Place de la Concorde], and you would be well advised to take measures so that no damage is done to the machine.”79 Necrophilic Luddites? Death by the guillotine was, as its authors intended, a death that subtracted considerably from the emotions of a jaded audience and the suffering of the victim. But, the crowds quickly demanded that the executioner raise the bleeding head for all to see. In conception, the guillotine was a compromise between the public display of death, the hatred of suffering, and the love of order: an instrument seem¬ ingly created for the temperament of a Robespierre. But, like many machines, it quickly took on propensities and a personality of its own. Cabanis, who denied the guillotine any power of causing more than instant pain, nevertheless urged its abolition, precisely because it was both banal and bloody. “The death of a man ordered in the public interest,” he wrote, “is probably the greatest act of social power: the instrument [of death] itself should make the supplice rarer and more trying; also it should not accustom the people to the sight of blood.” Not only did the guillotine lack dramatic dignity: “spectators see nothing; there is no tragedy for them; they haven’t time to be moved.” It also induced people “to spill blood themselves with less repugnance.” Finally, and not least: “this fatal instrument brings back too many memories of the temps affreux, which we should want to efface totally....”80 The guillotine had not merely been an avenging sword of the new order in the hands of secular saints. The reputation of the instru¬ ment belies the image of prim politics. The “popular” and Left Montagnard press was capable of some very lively scaffold argot, in the mood of “la grande joie du Pere Duchesne”: By virtue of the holy guillotine we shall beat your gold and your assignats out of you; the name of this great saint makes you quake with fear. With the guillotine we shall bring the profiteers to account; with the guillotine we shall force the money out of the holes where the speculators have hidden it; with the guillotine we have driven the muscadins out of sight; thanks to the guillotine the 79. Sanson, Sept generations d’exe'cuteurs: Memoires 3:406-407. 80. Cabanis, “Note sur l’opinion de MM. Oelsner et Sommering,” pp. 502-503.

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masks of the priests have been cast off; and they themselves have been forced to show us their conjurors’ tricks and to confess that they were rogues and imposters who lived for fifteen hundred years at the expense of fools.81 For the Hebertistes and sectionnaires the machine of execution quickly became known as the “rasoir national,” the “collier national,” the “petite fenetre.” An enemy, an aristocrat, a moderate “mettra la tete a la fenetre,” in the language of Hebert. Commonly used terms for the act of execution were “racourcir” and “couper le caquet.” The office of the prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville was the “comptoir de la boucherie.”82 All this recalls the carnival grotesquerie of public executions since time out of mind. To be sure, the guillotine deprived the executioner of his most professional skills and the crowds of their basest desires; it was not made for the social theatrics of barbarism, but for the chastisement of politics: to this day it horrifies us by its relentless impersonality, although it may well be more merciful than other standard forms of execution. It could well suit the humanitarianism of the powerful and fearful. But at the same time it wedded the scenery of the baroque to the ceremonies of republicanism. The guillotine even touched the French sense of frivolity. As a royalist rhymester put it: De sa main Fait soudain La machine Qui simplement nous tuera Et que l’on nommera Guillotine.83

Killing the Past

When Revolutionary justice claimed its prerogative-beginning in September 1793—it was accompanied by a great swell of populist

81. Le Pere Duchesne, no. 312 (n.d., early an II). 82. See Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue fran^aise des origines a 1900, vol. 9: La Revolution et I’Empire (Paris, 1937), pt. 2, pp. 877-880. 83. “Guillotin, Medecin, Politique...,” Les Actes des Apotres, ed. J.G. Peltier, et al. (Paris, 1789-1791), no. 10, pp. 15-16. “From his own invention / Suddenly he makes / The machine / That will kill us easily / And that we call / The guillotine.”

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panic and pride against what David called “the idols of tyranny and superstition.”84 At this juncture delegations of activists persuaded the Convention without much difficulty “to place Terror on the agenda.”85 A particularly overdetermined illustration of this moodbecause it lashed out at persons and artifacts alike-is furnished by the fate of the Gothic statuary on the portals of Notre-Dame, bril¬ liantly crafted figures of kings subsequently resculpted in the nine¬ teenth century by Viollet-le-Duc and until very recently known to us only by a few fragments and the 1729 engravings by Bernard de Montfaucon. In 1977, quite by accident, excavations were made by workers at no. 20, rue de la Chaussee d’Antin, on the site of a former hotel particulier constructed in 1796 by Jean-Baptiste Lakanal-Dupuget (the brother of Joseph, the regicide member of the Convention). They revealed, carefully placed in a ditch, twenty-one heads of the twentyeight enormous statues that had previously decorated the Galerie des Rois of the cathedral.86 This discovery, a major event for the art world, led to archival clarifications of a story already basically known. In the wake of the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, the minister of the interior had prescribed the suppression of “signs of superstition and feodalite. ”87 It was not, however, until the following August that Chaumette, then procurator of the Commune, noted the satisfying elimination of “all those repulsive (avilissans) traces of royalty that were sculpted or painted on almost all buildings and private houses” and warned the municipality “not to forget to decapi¬ tate all those stone kings that line the portal of the metropolitan church.”88 Chaumette’s advice came at a time when the Parisian 84. Jacques-Louis David, speech of 17 November 1793 (27 Brumaire, an II), cited in Frangois Giscard d’Estaing, “Heurs et malheurs des rois de Notre-Dame,” in F. Giscard d’Estaing, Michel Fleury, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, Les rois retrouve's, NotreDame de Paris (Paris, 1977), p. 8. 85. For Royer’s initiation of the slogan, see F.-V.-Alphonse Aulard, ed., La societe des Jacobins, 6 vols. (Paris, 1889-1897), 5:383-384. 86. See Giscard d’Estaing, “Heurs et malheurs,” p. 9. 87. M. Fleury, “Histoire d’un crime,” in Giscard d’Estaing, et al., Les rois retrouve's, p. 14. 88. See Revolutions de Paris, dediees a la nation et au district des Petits-Augustins, vol. 17 (Paris, 1789-1793), no. 212, p. 124.

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plebs was particularly overheated and the Jacobins were consoli¬ dating their grip on power. The precedent of beheading royalty had been established six months earlier, and there would shortly be “revolutionary festivals” where, sporadically, ritual beheadings of living kings would be performed.89 Although the cathedral statues actually portrayed the kings of Judah, as well as prophets and apos¬ tles, it was widely believed that they were likenesses of the kings of France: if the patriots could not strike at the dead, they could at least visit justice on their images, abolishing the shame of a servile history. Already a large statue of Henri IV (so dear to the philo¬ sophies) near the Pont-Neuf had been earmarked for destruction. However, the mistaken identity perhaps mattered less than the deter¬ mination to efface all vestiges of “fanaticism” and “royalty,” leavened by an age-old prejudice of French arbiters of taste against all work done in the “barbarian” Gothic style. The revolutionary vengeance against the statues was powerfully stimulated by David’s speech of 17 November demanding that “those worthy predecessors of Capet [Louis XVI], all of whom, up to now, having escaped the law by which you have struck down royalty, ought, in their Gothic effigies, to bow beneath the terrible revolutionary judgement of posterity.”90 His suggestion was enthusiastically taken up by the Commission of Public Works and endorsed by the Committee of Public Safety.91 With revolutionary precision, the sculpted kings were first decapi¬ tated, in imitation of Louis XVI, after the jewels of their crowns had been cut off, by a stonemason named Varin, “entrepreneur patente du Departement.” It then took laborious and costly effort to send the torsos crashing down from the facade of the “Temple of Reason” into the cloister on the north side of the cathedral, pounding them to fragments.92 These symbolic destructions were largely a collaboration between the theologians of the Republic of Virtue and some avaricious contractors. Until the removal of the sculptures in 1796 to the rue de la Chaussee d’Antin following Lakanal’s purchase of them, the heaps of stone appear to have served as a public latrine a I’improviste, affirming their desacralization by the citizens. At least, according to Mercier (who, in royalist times, had praised the grandeur of this 89. See Albert Mathiez, “Les rois de l’Europe guillotines par contumace a SaintEtienne en l’an II,” La Revolution franQaise: revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 4:249. 90. Giscard d’Estaing, “Heurs et malheurs,” p. 8. 91. “La Commission des Travaux Publics aux Artistes,” arrete of 5 Floreal, an II [Paris, 1794]. 92. Fleury, “Histoire d’un crime,” pp. 17-18.

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church), that was the destiny of “those kings of the portal of Notre-Dame, those shapeless masses as thick as elephants....” Adding republican insult to injury, he commented, concerning their plight, “it is of small consequence that their sight and odour are equally offensive to their condition; already their history had a bad smell.93 In this fashion, and in less spectacular desecrations elsewhere (notably at Saint-Denis), the blade of the law struck not only at the quick but at the dead, at past as well as present outrage, and at necks of stone as well as flesh.94 The long-consecrated execution of effigies was given a new twist. Yet the principal drama was reserved for the living. Given their civic character mingled with residues of traditional spectacle, were the public executions of the Year II analogous to the revolutionary festivals discussed phenomenologically by Mona Ozouf? Let us recall her description: “the abolition of divisions between rich and poor, nobles and commoners; the extinction of religious and personal quarrels; and also the loss-in which the festival is very close to heroism-of the feeling of individuality.”95 Indeed there were some negative resemblances. In the first place, the guillotine was an unambiguous warrant of the levelling action of republican moeurs. Some of the cahiers had lamented the distinctive modes of execution reserved to nobles and commoners.96 Now death touched all by the same means and in the same spot. No doubt, also, the tangibility of the executions, aside from their cautionary purpose, bore a special significance for the revolutionaries, empiricists for whom “reflection was never emancipated from sensation, and the man defined by his quality as a sensuous being was not guided by principles, but by objects, shows, and images.”97 Moreover, it is likely that festival and execution alike had repercussions of both solemnity and release.98 Sometimes, as the composer Gretry recalled, the Place de la Revolution was panoramic enough-in a bizarre milieu that mixed pastoralism and political energy-to provide for both country music and dancing and the steady thump of the simple machine.99 93. Louis-Sebastien Merrier, “Figures du portail de Notre-Dame,” Nouveau Paris, vol. 6, chap. 238. 94. See Gabririe Sprigath, “Sur le vandalisme revolutionnaire (1792-1794),” Annates historiques de la Revolution frangaise, no. 242 (October-December 1980) pp 510-535. 95. Mona Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1976), pp. 26-27. 96. See above, p. 109. 97. Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire, p. 241. 98. Ibid., pp. 122, 325. 99. Andre-Ernest-Modeste Gretry, Memoires, ou essais sur la musique, 3 vols. (Paris 1829), vol. 2, chap. 17, p. 116.

From Gibbet to Simple Machine

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However, festivals are exceptional and celebratory breaks in the quotidian calendar. It was the sterile monotony of the guillotine that finally debased it as a symbol of sacred unity, even for raging patriots, when, after some months, the Terror grew banal and familiar, as well as freakish, and gave no sign of relenting. It proved an impoverished rite of solidarity and civic foundation when its visible emphasis was so completely on vengeance and irreparable amputation, on a “transparent” politics of good and evil, truth and error, contrary to the basic lessons of most human experience. There is pictorial evidence in the Musee Carnavalet that local engravers were reacting with scorn and bravery to the empty endlessness of the blade. One specimen depicts “A blindfolded citizen delivered to the mercy of all the political furies, Force, Injustice, and Death.”100 Another picture shows us “Robespierre guillotining the executioner after having had all the other French guillotined.” We are told that the engraver, named Hercy, “paid for his work with his head.”101 Montesquieu had written: “When a republic has managed to destroy its opposition, it should make haste to put an end to vengeance, punishments, and even rewards. One cannot inflict great punishments, causing great changes [of condi¬ tion], without placing inordinate power in the hands of a few citi¬ zens.”102 The Old Regime had not heeded his counsel in matters of punishment; neither did the Republic of Virtue. The executants of the Terror finally lost the sense of whether they were deterring crime or eradicating evil, avenging their fathers or purifying the nation. 100. It is reproduced in Jean-Leon Jaures, Histoire socialiste de la Revolution frangaise, 8 vols. (Paris, 1921-1924), 8:369. 101. It is reproduced in Andre Blum, La caricature re'volutionnaire, 1789 a 1795 (Paris, n.d.), facing p. 212. 102. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, bk. 7, chap. 18.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation Chapter 9

The Doctrine of Majesty

We have reserved for special discussion the most specific and extreme cluster of crimes punished capitally. Traditionally, in politics and history, the crime of treason has been the excuse for the most axiomatic application of the death penalty. The offense is abhorrent not only to members of a realm, or to the prevailing sense of moral judgement and the standards of society, but to the very fabric of the human community and the spiritual or material threads that hold it together. Treason is a crime against God’s arrangements on earth. Like an unpardonable sin against God it cannot be expiated but must be punished relentlessly. But, aside from the divine order, who is the victim of this crime, demanding full reparation, and what are the forms that the crime may take? The answers are a matter of some debate, immediately implicating the further question of sovereignty or summa potestas. If God is the acknowledged sovereign of all being, what are His appro¬ priate lieutenancies? Here clarity dissolves, and we are committed to analyzing the tangled relationships between God and man, as well as between man and the types of political regime that have been humanly provided, whether or not they were divinely ordained or so claimed. In the main development of western political thought from the collapse of the western Roman Empire to the waning of the Old Regime there were two poles of sovereignty, “two swords” as the medieval analogy had it, against which conspiratorial or sinful man might direct this most atrocious of crimes-the pope, human image of the spiritual order, and the king, wielder of God’s temporal sword and father of his people. The ultimate treason was against their

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

209

legitimate authority, which does not mean that on many occasions popes were not deposed or kings and emperors murdered by their subjects, often with rejoicing and impunity. But such instances bore a burden of sacrilege, as well as the intimation of redress. The tradition of divine authorization for human political arrangements—and the medieval duality of regnum and sacerdotium (meaning, as Walter Ullmann has so well shown, that the dichotomy of church and state makes little sense until after Aquinas)1 —ordained that the religious and secular notions of high treason (or lese-majeste) would be inextricably linked. Even with the growth of temporal power and the rise of non-theological doctrines like raison d’Etat, the very fact that kings began to usurp attributes of spiritual supremacy assured that this confusion would continue (witness the bitter controversies in France at the beginning of the eighteenth century over the legal registration of the unpopular papal bull Unigenitus, making recusants criminals). The cumulative French notion of treason was rich and confused. As late as 1760 the Encyclopedic can state, not necessarily with any tacit approval, that “the crime of lese-majeste divine is an offense committed directly against God, such as apostasy, heresy, witchcraft, simony, sacrilege, and blasphemy”-spiritual crimes ultimately to be punished by the agents of a sovereign secular power.2 For majesty in Bourbon France was both “divine” (pertinent to God alone) and “royal” (pertinent to the sovereign cast in God’s image). As wielder of the temporal sword, the prince was bound to punish both sorts of offense, what¬ ever it might please God to do in the hereafter. Technically, the crime of lese-majeste divine was inclusive of all secular treasons, since they were blows struck against God’s anointed. These complications cannot occupy us in this chapter: for the category of lese-majeste divine (alone) had become blurry in the eighteenth century, and our focus is not on it, but on the state.3 Since we are speaking of France and not of a wider sphere, let us abandon the term “high treason” (which was current in England, but not France) and refer only to lese-majeste, thus bringing to the fore the concept of “majesty.” But what was majesty? In the basic sense, as understood by most eighteenth-century French, it resided in the 1. Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Harmondsworth, 1965), pp. 17-18. 2. Article “L£se-Majeste,” Encyclopedic 9:400a. 3. For clarification, see Orest Ranum, “Lese-Majeste Divine: Transgressing Bound¬ aries by Thought and Action in Mid-Seventeenth Century France,” Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History, ed. John F. Sweets (Lawrence, Kansas, 1982), pp. 68-80.

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Mortal Politics

king, who was the possessor and personification of public power. Many controversialists of that century, among them the proponents of the these nobiliaire, like the Comte de Boulainvilliers, and the Gallican parlementary opposition to Louis XV, presumed that there were “fundamental laws” or a “constitution” which placed fixed limits on the royal will. Yet, even if France were held to be a tempered monarchy and not an absolute one, the method of enforcing these limits remained obscure. The king embodied the state. Any attacks on majesty-and they were widely defined to include libels, deroga¬ tory utterances, and counterfeiting-were assaults against the monarch in his public personality and, as such, against all his wards who constituted, beneath him, the kingdom. And yet, in Western political and legal thought, there was a contrary tradition whose roots ran deep, for they were grounded in certain sources of Roman law and in the historical souvenir of the republics of antiquity with their very different notion of majesty. If majesty was certainly not plebeianized in Roman times, it was recog¬ nized as founded in the populus or the citizens, so that as the Encyclopedic suggests (a little subversively), “in the Roman republic there was a law de majestate against those who might commit some criminal violation (attentat) against the Roman people.”4 Nor had a subterranean republican tradition ceased to exist.5 Thus it is simplistic to assert (except de facto) that in France majesty had no wider reverberations or application than the posture of the monarch qua public person; we shall presently come upon abundant evidence that it did. As we saw in the first chapter, the king held his summa potestas from God, was answerable to God, and was a being apart from other men. In France he was even a roi thaumaturge, possessed of superna¬ tural powers of healing. He was also, so to speak, the occupant of an eternal office that descended without intermission or forfeit through the male hereditary line, providing for an unbroken succession of dignity, tradition, and achievement. Finally, the king was (whether this is to be understood symbolically or mystically) the “father” of his subjects, in whom love of country and love of family converged, the source of a paternal love, wisdom, and stricture whose rhetorical echoes still resound-at least par politesse-in most of the cahiers de

4. Article “Lese-Majeste,” Encyclopedic 9:400a. And cf. Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of Romans, trans. Lowenthal, chap. 14, p. 129 (no doubt the source of the observation). 5. See esp. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1974).

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

211

doleances of 1789.6 In the words of Bishop Bossuet, much cited in the parlementary controversies of the eighteenth century, public power must be one; although government may include complex juris¬ dictions and bureaucracies, they are all melted into one power and one will, because they are directly subordinated to a single person. Without this assurance, the political community lacks cohesion and security.7 To complete the circle of royalist argument, “the person of kings [in which the state is manifest], is holy, and...to assault them (attenter sur eux) is a sacrilege.”8 We see royal ideology in retrospect as a perverse mixture of theo¬ logical and paternal claims, raison d’Etat, and Hobbesianism in a rather paradoxical brew. Moreover, the circumstances and events of the Regency, informed by scepticism and libertinism, the repercus¬ sions of Unigenitus, and the somewhat later entry of Lockean doctrines into France began to undermine the royal position. The revival of some of the political theories of antiquity, often spread by the colleges in the care of the Jesuits, reinforced this assault. As early as 1733 the cure Jean Meslier, in obscurity, was writing his lengthy and inflammatory appeal for regicide and communism. Yet as late as the famous “seance de la flagellation” of 3 March 1766, when chal¬ lenged by the parlementary assertion of “classes, unite, indivisibility,” a doctrine of solidarity in the sovereign courts brewing for over a decade, Louis XV could pronounce the most intransigent interpreta¬ tion of royal power and majesty.9 But the assertion of majesty was also, indirectly, the confession of a loss of majesty, which had been vitiated by Philippe d’Orleans and by certain of the policies of Cardinal de Fleury. As one recent histo¬ rian writes: The continuing and universal regard for the ancient principles of French kingship, whose roots lay beyond the fourteenth century, was a source of great strength for the crown and helps to explain why even the capricious and excessive policies in which Louis XIV

6. I do not mean to play down the great importance of currents of constitution¬ alist thinking; but these issues have become narrowed under the later Bourbons. See Julian H. Franklin’s Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Trea¬ tises by Hotman, Beza, and Mornay (New York, 1969) and his John Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973). 7. Bossuet, La politique tire'e, p. 185. 8. Ibid., p. 65. 9. For the remonstrance in which the Parlement of Paris announced its doctrine and the king’s seance, see Jules-Gustave Flammermont, ed., Remontrances du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe siecle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1888-1898), 2:138, 566.

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Mortal Politics

indulged from time to time did not seriously jeopardize the posi¬ tion of the monarchy. But in the eighteenth century the crown evenually lost the prestige which had so far enabled it to reconcile traditional values with the demands of an increasingly bureau¬ cratic state.10 Another important circumstantial element in the degradation of majesty, touching not only king, court, and ministry but the whole hierarchical edifice on which the Old Regime rested, was the multi¬ plication of libels, usually with salacious overtones of perversion, debauchery, and impotence-the perversions and impotence of both men and a system. Darnton calls particular attention to the influence of Morande’s Le gazetier cuirasse, ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France (1771), and concludes of scribblers like Morande: “They hated the system in itself; and they expressed their hatred by desanctifying its symbols, destroying the myths that gave it legitimacy in the eyes of the public; and perpetrating the counter-myth of a degenerate despotism.”11 Yet the libels lacked any motive of reform. Thus the intellectual problem of majesty also has a psychological dimension. Loss of prestige means precisely loss of majesty, a quality never to be recovered, even in the well-meaning and hopeful opening years of the reign of Louis XVI, who disclosed his weakness with the words: “Je suis bien jeune pour regner.”12 Majesty was an uncertain property in the Age of Reason; thus seeds of ambiguity have been sown into the interpretation of the associated crime of lese-majeste.

The Corrosion of Majesty

We now trace a process by which this ambiguity corrodes the word itself so that, by 1789, articulate or political France is well prepared for the notion that high crimes against the state are blows against the body politic understood as a “nation” and not specifically against him who wields the sceptre. The concept of lese-nation did not, 10. J.H. Sherman, The Parlement of Paris (Ithaca, 1968), p. 284. 11. Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France, in Douglas Johnson, ed., French Society and the Revolution (Cambridge, 1976), p. 81. 12. Manceron, Les vingt ans du roi, p. 107.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

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however, spring fully armed from the events surrounding 14 July 1789; it had a long and complicated history in which, analytically, we can isolate at least five elements: (1) the confusion of the idea of majesty that I have already alluded to, where gradually a subversive republican (and largely literary) tradition began, at about mid¬ century, to contest the exclusive claims of the “state in the person of the prince”; (2) the waning of princely majesty, even when most boldly asserted by Louis XV in the words: “The rights and interests of the nation, which one [i.e., the Parlement of Paris] dares make into a body separate from the monarch, are necessarily united to my own and placed within my hands alone”;13 a “philosophical critique” or onslaught against many or most of the elements that were earlier held inseparable from majesty and hence from the crimes against majesty; (4) the slow dissemination (again at first largely literary) of a notion of fraternal and patriotic unity, contained in the symbol of France and not in that of the monarch, well expressed in the words of the Abbe Coyer, who wrote a critical text Sur le vieux mot de patrie in 1755, where he charged: “What we lack is to be able to think in common”;14 and (5) finally, in a sense very much linked to the other developments, the evolution of a representative rather than an omni¬ potent notion of kingship; if Frederick II of Prussia boasted of being “the first servant of the state,” why should Louis XV be a thaumaturgical and paternalistic king, semi-divine and endowed with a power “sans dependance ni partage”? The last three of these points will deserve further comment, espe¬ cially (3), which is most substantial and tangible. As for (4), Coyer’s essay, with its antique and republican echoes, had more of an enthu¬ siastic than a subversive purpose, but its populism, mingled with the strains of classical appreciation so abundant among the literati, inves¬ tigated elsewhere by Daniel Mornet,15 clashed heavily with existing political claims of the monarchy and had its repercussions among the Encyclopedists.16 The after-glow of classical republicanism, pushing to the fore the notion of patrie, causes the line to become blurred between the semblances of majesty and the actualities of tyranny, with the English case of the seventeenth century always at hand; this 13. Flammermont, ed., Remontrances du Parlement de Paris 2:557. 14. Cited in Jean-Yves Guiomar, L’ide'ologie nationale: nation, representation, propriete (Vienne, 1974), p. 24. 15. Daniel Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la Revolution francaise, 1715-1787, 2d ed. (Paris, 1934). 16. See Jean Fabre, “L’article ‘Peuple’ de VEncyclopedic et le couple CoyerJaucourt,” in Henri Coulet, ed., Images du peuple au dix-huitieme siecle: colloque d’Aix-enProvence, 25 et 26 octobre 1969 (Paris, 1973), esp. pp. 73-76.

214

Mortal Politics

is substantiated in Jaucourt’s articles “Tyrannie,” “Pouvoir,” and “Trahison” in the Encyclopedic. In all this the shadow of popular sovereignty lies in the background. As for point (5), there are variant interpretations; that it was blurred is bound up with the emergent notion of popular sover¬ eignty or, as Ullmann has expressed it, “ascending government.” The notion of power (and conceivably majesty) residing originally in the people is of course an ancient doctrine, but it was armed with new warheads, relativized by Montesquieu and then greatly radicalized by succeeding philosophes, despite their monarchical proclivities. Raynal, d’Alembert, and Volney were all advocates of popular sover¬ eignty; Raynal was driven from the country and had his property confiscated in 1780. Diderot, in his article “Souverains,” affirms that rulers are those “to whom the will of peoples has conferred the power necessary to govern society.”17 D’Holbach insists in his Systeme social that “the people is in a state of legitimate defense” against the arbitrary acts of despots; and Diderot says in his article “Autorite politique” that “the crown, the government, and the political authority are possessions of which the body of the nation is the proprietor, and of which the princes are the usufructory agents (usufruitiers), the ministers, and the depositaries.”18 We must not, however, conclude that philosophy suddenly wished to dispense with kings or deprive them of all the attributes that would render them defenseless against lese-majeste. The philosophes wanted many, often contradictory, things; but essentially they desired a political system of shared guarantees, with independent, rational, and equitable judicial practices. At the same time they were confronted politically with the notion of the “unity of power,” the traditional assertion of the royal doctrine. Few followed the path of Montesquieu in wishing to “temper” that power by separating its attributes. If power-and ex hypothesi majesty-were one, and there was a question of attributing it either to the monarch or to some new mystical substance called the “nation,” a possible solution was to concede to that monarch an effective and exemplary executive majesty, while conceding him also a large role as representative of the nation and its laws. The parlements of the 1760s did not care for this crystallization of the solu¬ tion (although the Parlement of Rouen once suggested the summoning of an Estates-General)19 which had at the same time 17. Article “Souverains,” in Diderot, Oeuvres completes 17:166. 18. D Holbach, Systeme social 3:11-12; and Diderot, “Autorite politique,” in Ency¬ clopedic 1:898a. 19. See Egret, Louis XV et I’opposition parlementaire, p. 127n.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

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both “modernizing” and centralizing overtones; and the revitalized “feodalite” of the restoration of the provincial estates in the pays d’election commenced by Necker in the 1780s could not address the problem in time or in the spirit of the age. As yet, before 1785, the notion of a sovereign national assembly, to which the people’s majeste was deputized, was too daring an idea. Thus we cannot trace a simple evolution of the transfer of the majesty of the state from Bossuet’s “public power” to a sovereign republic in embryo, passing by way of the 1791 chimera of dual representation and the separa¬ tion of powers. We must first see how the vision of monarchical majesty was altered. Here, if we take the altitudinous view of several centuries, we witness a movement of the monarchy away from its popularity toward closure in a coalescing entity called “the state” and, somewhat later, a transverse movement of the reclamation of the state by the “live forces” of society under a semi-transparent, ambivalent ideology of the peuple. But this motion was not accom¬ plished by means of a simple opposition of royal ideology to populist ideology, the clash of the rising and waning principles. A more complex transaction needed to be concluded behind the simple rhet¬ oric of sovereignty and majesty. It has been suggested by J.-Y. Guiomar that for at least three centuries the symbolization of the monarch passed from its primus inter pares aristocratic origins into a model of focalization of “the rule of the individual, the representation of the individual,” and that, eventually, even at the point when the Bourbons, anachronistically, were making their most expansive claims to personify majesty and the law, “the nation of the individual in bourgeois thought was creating itself from the model of the king” and endowing itself with “worth” and “value.”20 Thus: The king is the locus and center of a process which, between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, brings about the triumph of the model of the individual, structured from the motives of love and normative authority, from a moral motive which the bour¬ geoisie will take upon itself during the second half of the eight¬ eenth century when the aristocratic system falls apart. The bour¬ geoisie puts itself then in place of the king as a subject representing society, no longer in the eyes of God but in its own regard. The concept (signifiant) patrie connotes this motion, expressive of the moral conscience and of the bourgeoisie’s demand for responsibility.21 20. Guiomar, L’ide'ologie nationale, p. 53. 21. Ibid., p. 65.

216

Mortal Politics

This psycholinguistic explanation of the “model” transfer of moral representativeness and majesty from king to people, without sacrifice of unity, by means of the intervening ascendancy of a class, may be somewhat too clever by half. Still, there is a sense, from at least 1750 on, in which the king’s majesty diminishes because his repre¬ sentative or symbolic function is grasped differently. This does not make the king superfluous or the role of the society of individuals axiomatically paramount. However, it joins the issue at a moment when the king’s liaison with the privileged estates makes the situ¬ ation fluid. Royal majesty is to be made “executive” and “inviolable” rather than “normative”; national unity (depending on king and people) is to be made prescriptive rather than axiomatic, and tied to the constitutional behaviour of the monarch. This is not immediately clear in the politely chiselled language of the cahiers, many of which continue to stress unity within the monarch and to blame his “unworthy counsellors”: the following may be given as an example: The dignity of men and citizens, up to now reviled, will be restored, of that there can be no doubt, in this august assembly [the Estates-General], where a just and charitable king, surrounded like a father in the midst of his children and discussing with them the interests of his enormous family, will restrain the greed of some, hold in check the pretensions of others, welcome the grievances of the oppressed, dry their tears, and break their chains.22 Within a few short weeks that paternalistic tone will vanish from the rhetoric of the “representatives of the nation” who proclaim bluntly in Article Three of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that “the prin¬ ciple of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. Nobody, no individual can exercise an authority not expressly emanating from it.” But amid the contrary doctrines of the constitutionalists there will still be insistence on a strong monarchy whose share of majesty issues from its solidary executive function. Such is fundamentally the argument of Mirabeau in his forty-fourth “secret note to the Court” (dated 4 December 1790): “We must immediately for good or ill bring the Constitution to a close to avoid a general blowup, and yet

22. Goubert and Denis, eds., 1789: Les Franqais, cahier of Lauris (Senechaussee d’Aix), p. 41.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

217

benefit from every occasion to restore some vigour to the executive power, to revive and recreate this power; and if no success is possible during the present session, one should take precautions to obtain it from the next legislature.” “Above all,” Mirabeau writes, “we must save the kingdom so that the kingdom may have a king.”23 Of course Mirabeau’s confidential communications were self-serving as well as intelligent. But they also bespeak a consistent doctrine where, with limits drawn, majesty becomes what majesty can do. Otherwise deposition and regicide are to be feared. The symbolization of monarchy—with virtually all traditional royal doctrine shed like excess baggage-has been placed within the boundaries of an imposed majesty.

Crime and Punishment

Finally, we must backtrack once again to mid-century to consider the crime of lese-majeste directly in order to see how it had been typically defined in the days of absolutism. Then we will witness how “philosophy” proposed to cut its articles of accusation down to size. The appropriate Encyclopedie article commences with lip-service to the traditional theory: “The crime of human lese-majeste is an offense committed against a king or other sovereign: this crime is also very serious, given the fact that sovereigns are the images of God on earth, and that all power comes from God....”24 We learn that there are several more or less serious instances of the offense. The gravest is a conspiracy against the state in the person or the life of the sover¬ eign; a second heading is when the honour of the king is defamed by libels or broadsides, or when the people are inclined to sedition or rebellion. Then it is pointed out that lese-majeste includes also coun¬ terfeiting, duelling, and the transgression of safe-conducts issued by the prince to enemy emissaries. In connection with this crime, evidence by all sorts of persons, however infamous or unreliable, may be admitted, even by fathers against sons or by declared enemies of the accused, though none of this testimony is obligatory.

23. Honore-Gabriel de Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, Correspondance entre le comte de Mirabeau et le comte de La March, pendant les anne'es 1789, 1790 et 1791, ed. Adolphe Fourier de Bacourt, 3 vols. (Bruxelles, 1851), 2:382-383. 24. See article “L£se-Majeste,” Encyclopedie 9:400a.

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Those who conceal knowledge of the crime of lese-majeste are treated as equally guilty parties.25 “Attempts on the life of a king are treated as parricide, because kings are considered to be the common fathers of their peoples.” All such crimes are to be punished most rigorously, the accused being drawn and quartered by the strength of four horses (the fate of Damiens in 17 5 7).26 All goods of the accused, in such a case, become the possession of the king, to the exclusion of all other cred¬ itors or heirs. It is against such ideas and practices that Montesquieu wrote tellingly in book 12 of the Esprit des lois, launching, as it were, the philosophical and legal debate in France. His chapters on this subject are studded with a galaxy of geographical examples, but the major message is clear: “It is enough for the crime of lese-majeste to be vague for the government to decline into despotism.”27 In rather quick succession Montesquieu directs his acerbity upon the applica¬ tion of lese-majeste to criticism of the king’s agents (the Cinq-Mars vs. Richelieu case) rather than the monarch himself, to loose talk, predictions, idle thoughts, and various expressions that have no dangerous or criminal results. “I claim not at all,” he writes, “to lessen our proper indignation against all those who wish to impugn the glory of their prince; but I must say that if one wants to temper despotism, a simple correctional penalty will better suit these occa¬ sions than an accusation of lese-majeste, terrible always to innocence itself.”28 Montesquieu concludes by defending the liberty of the press (it must be remembered that France was subject to a meticu¬ lous, though often porous, censorship on matters pertaining to faith, morals, politics, injury to highly placed institutions or persons, and yet other indelicacies): “Writings contain something more permanent than words, but, when they are not preliminary to the crime of lesemajeste, they cannot be involved with that crime.”29

25. Ibid. 26. Damiens’s act was a rarity in the Age of Reason. For analysis, see Franklin L. Ford, “Assassination in the Eighteenth Century: The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (no. 3, 1976):21 1-215. Nevertheless, suspicions were aroused regarding the complicity of the Jesuits, with their doctrine of regicide, in the affair. Helvetius distinguished pointedly in De Vhomme (sect. 7, chap. 9) between “ambitious regicide” (defined as an action taken by les grands ) and “fanatic regicide,” the work of the religiously inspired (as in the assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV). Helvetius opposes interest to vengeance and politic amorality to fanatic self-destructiveness in these categories. 27. Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois, bk. 12, chap. 7. 28. Ibid., bk. 12, chap. 12. 29. Ibid., bk. 12, chap. 13.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

219

The effect of Montesquieu’s treatment of lese-majeste and of the subsequent work of Beccaria, whose Dei delitti e delle pene was trans¬ lated into French in 1766 by the Abbe Morellet, was to sensitize French intellectual opinion to the disproportionate atrocity of the definition of capital criminal acts and the severity of punishment attached to them (see previous chapter). Several themes of the Enlightenment converge in this issue: the reduction of the king’s “majesty” to more functional and rational proportions in keeping with the moeurs du siecle; the growing repulsion over the perpetration of cruel torture and barbarian modes of execution for delicts of expression of opinion or against property; and, especially, the muta¬ tion of the concept of treason itself in the light of the new under¬ standing of the “nation,” its composition and centre of gravity. The punishment meted out against Damiens, horrible as it was, was at least the state’s response to a willful murderous attack on the prince; but could the monarch logically be so attacked by every whis¬ pering campaign against his policies or his favourites, by every coun¬ terfeit coin passing from hand to hand in the provinces? With the raising of these questions we note the demise of the organic notion of the state and its association with the king’s body or the articula¬ tion of the royal person. The state owes itself the protection of the law against crime; but it is no longer held that the king’s “body” can be wounded in the merest of its members so as to threaten the security of monarchy itself. Moreover, concepts of state and nation are in process of being redefined by the intellectuals, by the parlements, by the “liberal nobles,” and by a rising current of opinion among the commons. The progress of the debate over lese-majeste is well illustrated by three learned papers delivered before the Academy of Chalons-sur-Marne in 17 8 0.30 Aside from an anonymous Tableau proportionnel des de'lits et des peines, there is a long discours by Brissot de Warville, one by Joseph-Elzear-Dominique Bernardi of Aix, then quite unknown but later illustrious as a legal historian, and a third whose authorship is uncertain. These works agree in reserving the supreme punishment to unabashed instances of lese-majeste; in Brissot’s words: “subversion of the French form of govern¬ ment...attacks against the sacred person of the King...sedition, revolt,”31 to which is often added delivery of portions of French

30. The items are bound and published by the Academie de Chalons-sur-Marne (1781). 31. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, “Tableau proportionnel des peines et des debts” (Chalons-sur-Marne, 1781), “Les moyens d’adoucir les peines,” p. 54.

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territory to an enemy, as, for example, in the “tableau proportionnel” appended to the Bernardi discours. Bernardi concludes that since these high crimes “essentially concern the state and the nation...[attacking] its liberty, property, and political existence” or “its internal tranquillity and its government, of which the Sovereign is chief and his children the [future] hope,”32 the following punish¬ ment shall be applied: For these reasons, besides the confiscation of most or all the goods of the guilty parties, the “question” or torture will be employed against them if the judges believe it absolutely neces¬ sary, but only as a preliminary and so as to secure knowledge of all the accomplices. These are extraordinary and basic cases where one overrides general principles in favour of that decisive reason, salus populi suprema lex esto.33 In all these discourses there is an extreme reluctance to admit any but the most crucial applications of lese-majeste, and a tendency to associate the crime not with the monarch but with the people and the state. Bernardi even introduces simultaneously the intermediate concept of lese-patrie; as other texts show us, the term lese-humanite later comes into vogue.34 Brissot recoils in horror at the crime of Damiens (“O patrie! O societe! O peres des peuples!”), but he feels that such days are past: “Renowned for the gentleness of its char¬ acter, the French nation is even more famous because of the inalter¬ able love it holds for its kings and for its perseverance in bearing the easy chains (chaines legeres) of the tempered monarchy.”35 He cannot be convicted of clairvoyance. If we were to summarize the discourses of Chalons, we would note principally that they called for (1) a separation of religious offenses from the crime of lese-majeste, amounting to a plea for religious toleration; (2) an elimination of lesser offenses such as counterfeiting and smuggling from the definition of the crime; (3) a condemnation

32. Joseph-Elzear-Dominique de Bernardi, “Discours a l’Academie de Chalons-surMarne” (Chalons-sur-Marne, 1781), “Tableau proportionnel,” no. 8. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 43. As the Revolution approached, the term lese-humanite enjoyed a modest vogue. It appears in the general cahiers; see Hyslop, French Nationalism, pp. 159-160; also in Revolutions de Paris, 18-25 July 1789, p. 30; and cf. the poem “Fragment sur Charles IX," by Ponce-Denis Ecouchard Lebrun at the outbreak of the Revolution: “Roi bourreaul criminel de lese-humanite, / Qu’oppose a ce forfait ta vaine majeste.” In Poesies nationales de la Revolution, p. 9. 35. Brissot de Warville, “Les moyens d’adoucir,” p. 43.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

221

of the “tyrannical” use of lese-majeste' (Richelieu against Cinq-Mars, cited by Montesquieu); (4) adequate safeguard for freedom of speech and writing; and (5) a separation between the notion of treason against the king’s person and other forms of treason against the public weal, “public” and “royal” having become distinct. In brief, lese-majeste was now virtually reduced to conspiracy or revolt against the state, regicide, or attempted regicide, or assaults against the royal lineage, a great abbreviation of the crimes catalogued in the Encyclopedie. After 1785, and, especially with the calling of the first Assembly of Notables in 1787 (which debated and rejected the reforms of Calonne), the idea of “nation” begins to take shape in a public glare, at first confusedly and yet militantly. While the Estates-General are mooted, the phrase “National Assembly” is heard to drop from a few lips. Sieyes brazenly and brilliantly gives the idea form, definition, and marching orders in his pamphlets of 1788, notably in Qu’est-ce que le Tiers Etatf. The nation is the Third Estate; it is the commons: for it implies the equality of citizenship, with privileged orders excised. The nation is the public power by virtue of its constitutive pre-existence; it deputizes a public authority through its common law.36 The king is not the public power; he is merely an emanation of public authority in one of its allotted constitutional roles; he is scarcely royal, he is an agent. All majesty has passed from him; he is at best a victim of the evil throng surrounding him: “The People has grown used to distinguishing between the monarch and those who exercise power. It has always considered the King as so certainly misled and so defenseless in the midst of the active and all-powerful Court that it has never thought of blaming him for all the wrongs done in his name.”37 This is an ironic inversion of an earlier thesis, emphasizing the monarch’s pathos, not his eternality.

The Nation Triumphs

No doubt the pamphlet of Sieyes is doctrinaire and uncompromising for its time.38 At the same moment, the cahiers flooding into the

36. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes, What is the Third Estate?, trans. M. Blondel, ed. S.E. Finer (New York, 1964), p. 61. 37. Ibid., p. 66. 38. But cf. Brissot de Warville, in Le patriote frangais, no. 47 (19 September 1789):

222

Mortal Politics

provincial capitals and thence into Versailles (documents which Louis XVI is supposed never to have examined) bespeak the love and respect of the people and their hope in his person. The majesty of the monarch is clutched to the bosom of a large part of the nation up to and indeed after Louis’s death. But from 1789 on, much has changed. The most militant law-makers in Versailles (after 12 October in Paris) have shipwrecked the old conception finally, after seventy years of attrition. “Sa Majeste” is still the form of address; but court ceremonial is adapted to new needs of parliamenting with the Assembly. Even those constitutionals who most cherish monarchy are well aware that if there is to be majesty or if the monarchy is to have majesty, that quality must be founded on a new basis, a rever¬ ence regulated by law and function.39 The conservative Mounier (who will leave the Assembly after October 1789 and eventually emigrate to Geneva, spouting the direst warnings to his colleagues) may write: “The organization of a monarchical government should be such that the Monarch can enjoy all necessary authority to insure the execution of the laws, maintain internal safety and tranquillity, and protect the state against its enemies.”40 But even Mounier knows that the majesty and dignity of the monarchy can be guaranteed only by conditions of utility and function embodied in a constitutional document: because the king is, among other things, “the representative of the majesty of the French people...great brilliance should accompany his eminent dignity.”41

“The rights of the Nation are abused if, before declaring the Crown hereditary and indivisible, it is not stated that the power of the Crown derives from the People, which has the right to withdraw as well as to confer it, and which it grants only...of its free consent.” 39. Bernard Groethuysen, Philosophic de la Revolution franQaise (Paris, 1956), p. 208, states the case more extremely than I would put it: “Only the people has rights. The king has only functions and prerogatives; he is the highest functionary of the people. 1 here are many who would wish to see the king anew as a representative of the people, a permanent, hereditary representative. But kings are not elected, and without election there cannot be representation. Therefore the king is not a representative; he is a functionary, a delegate of the nation." 40. Jean-Joseph Mounier, Considerations sur les gouvernemens, et principalement sur celui qui convient a la France (Paris, 1789), p. 24. 41. Ibid., p. 26.

From Lese-Majeste to L'ese-Nation

223

“A king,” writes Lanjuinais, the Breton deputy who evolved swiftly in a conservative direction, is a magistrate, but the primary and most necessary of magistrates, especially in a widespread country (empire) like France; he is the head of a family holding it together, a centre of unity without which there would be only a disorderly heap of uncoordinated tribes...he is the vital support of the people, the cornerstone of our social edifice.”42 In these statements the old images mingle with venturesome constructions. But it is clear that the king s majesty has become reflected light and his fatherhood a kind of geographical fix, even though we are still far from the day when (in lieu of execution) Tom Paine will recommend his banish¬ ment to America to practice a trade.43 The Revolutionary legisla¬ tion and constitutional debate will much further affirm the transpar¬ ency and fragmentation of majesty in the ambiguity of a transient regime. Yet we would not expect the king’s majesty (an accrual of several centuries of habit, belief, and ceremony) to fall to dust in an instant. It does not; it must almost be captured, held, and engorged by the interested parties of the nation: We shall presently see how. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 was, if not the first, the most famous act of violence of the Revolution; it induced what has been called the “first emigration” and thereby set up the scenery for the official attribution and judgement of the crime of lese-nation. In the wake of this event, the “patriot” forces detected conspiracy in the actions of the Baron de Besenval, lieutenant-colonel of the Swiss Guards, who had transmitted orders to fire to the unfortunate commander of the Bastille, Colonel de Launay. Besenval, in the meantime, sought the protection of his superior, Marshal de Broglie, minister of war. But Broglie, after having helped to persuade a reluctant king and queen not to abandon Versailles after the popular disorders, himself lost his resolution, resigned from office, and fled to Lorraine, finally seeking safety in Luxembourg. The same night of 16 July the Marshal de Castries determined to emigrate, as did the Comte d’Artois, younger brother of the king (later Charles X), the princes of Conde and Conti, and other members of the high aris¬ tocracy. These events created a wave of popular suspicion and agita¬ tion, and sent the monarchy temporarily reeling. As Carre writes:

42. Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, “Preservatif contre l’avis a mes compatriotes,” in Oeuvres de J.-D. Lanjuinais...avec une notice biographique par Victor Lanjuinais..., 4 vols. (Paris, 1832), 1:139. 43. See Paine’s speech to the Convention, 7 January 1793, cited in Walzer, ed., Regicide and Revolution, p. 212.

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Mortal Politics

The flight of the Comte d’Artois...was variously interpreted: some thought he had wished to place his children in safety; he knew that the Due d’Orleans was plotting to kill the whole royal family so as to gain access to the throne, and he had ruined his plan. Others felt that he had left France so as to more easily make counter-revolutionary plans, and that Louis XVI was in connivance with him.44 Carre’s description conveys the idea of incipient mistrust of royalist designs in the earliest stages of the Revolution, and the swift genesis of the duality “king-nation” or “royalist-patriot.” In Paris indeed there was a coup by which Lafayette and Bailly organized the municipal government and its military force, the National Guard, against the royal administration (and eventually against the hazy Orleanist counterplot). In September 1789, on the motion of Lafayette, the National Assembly, distrusting the military maneuverings of the court and perhaps of others, like the Due d’Orleans, who had come to fish in troubled waters, decreed the punishment of crimes of lese-nation. Besenval, Broglie, and others (out of the reach of justice) were incul¬ pated. In the incredible mixup of royal and patriot institutions of administration and justice that characterized the first part of the Revolution, the cases were handed over to the ancient criminal court of Paris, the Chatelet, composed of professional magistrates of the Old Regime, a body hardly prepared to dispense Revolutionary justice.45 It finally dismissed all these accusations on 31 January 1790, causing a furor which the Revolutionary press of Brissot, Marat, and Prudhomme did much to inflame. A few days later, on 19 February 1790, the Marquis de Favras, implicated in tortuous plotting for, it appears, the departure of the king and the elevation of Monsieur (later Louis XVIII) to the Regency (possibly with Mirabeau’s connivance: He touched all bases), was, by popular demand, delivered over to capital execution. To the relief of some, he took his darkest secrets to the grave.46 Our purpose here is not 44. H. Carre, Noblesse de France, p. 365. 45. See Albert Soboul, La premiere re'publique 1792-1804 (Paris, 1968), p. 120. Nonetheless, Edmond Seligman notes the original popularity of the Chatelet with the masters of the moment and their judgement of its fitness to deal with political crimes. After its indictment of the Due d’Orleans and Mirabeau, both deputies, for the events of 5-6 October 1789, this favour evaporated. The Chatelet ceased its functions on 24 January 1790. See Edmond Seligman, La justice en France pendant la Revolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1913), 1:179, 251, 351. 46. For an account of the Favras affair, see H. Carre, Noblesse de France, pp.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

225

to blur these incidents, important in themselves, but to show the rather confused and arbitrary genesis of lese-nation and its complete and revolutionary separation from the purpose and privilege of the monarch. In 1790, Vasselin, a Paris law professor, published a trea¬ tise where, in arguing against both the morality and the utility of the death penalty, he forcefully conceded one exception: the crime of lese-nation. We are indeed still far from the point where, judicially, the nation’s interest and security and those of the king will be on a total collision course; but, in this atmosphere of panic, plot, and credulity, the rough-and-ready idea of a “national justice” is already appearing in parallel with exclusive rights of the nation and demanding peremptory jurisdiction. After July 1789 we enter on an extraordinary period when the majesty of the king is not exhausted but is drained of its selfsufficiency. Legislatively this can be traced through the debates of the Constituent Assembly over the royal veto (28 August-11 September 1789) and over the right to declare war and make peace (15-22 May 1790). It is the outcome of these issues and the adminis¬ trative and judicial reorganization of France, especially, that induce Mirabeau’s lament that “the king has neither enough influence nor enough power, nor sufficient means to exercise the incomplete power delegated to him.”48 Yet, if the monarch is critically weak¬ ened, he is still a talisman to be possessed by whoever can control his majesty or turn it to practical uses once the ambiguous claims of the Due d’Orleans or, conceivably, Monsieur have been rejected by soberer heads. While this was going on, the king resolutely fought off or duped all the constitutional factions and forces that attempted the operation-a Lafayette acting very much like the maire du palais (the apparent winner in the events that forced the return of the royal family to Paris on 6 October 1789), a Mirabeau secretly advising the court, the Feuillant Barnave, later performing a similar function, Roland and the Girondin ministers. “Taking possession” of the king versus the possibility of the king’s “escape” is now the para¬ mount issue affecting the uses and scope of the monarch’s majesty. This issue, after all, was the original motive for defining the crime of lese-nation, as we saw in the Besenval-Broglie affair. The flight to 413-419, also Gabriel Le Barrois d Orgeval, Le marechalat de France des origines a nos jours..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1932), 2:8-10. 47. Georges-Victor Vasselin, Theorie des peines capitales, ou abus et danger de la peine de mort et des tourmens, ouvrage presente a I'Assemblee nationale (Paris, 1790), p. 180. 48. Comte de Mirabeau, Correspondance entre Mirabeau et La March 2:426. The forty-seventh note to the court, from which this is cited, is an enormously trenchant analysis of the plight of the monarchy.

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Mortal Politics

Varennes (20-21 June 1791) does not precisely end this manipulation of majesty; for although the monarchy is briefly suspended, the embarrassed Fayettists and the ascendant Feuillants join forces to create the political fiction of the king’s abduction, and they secure acceptance of the revised and ill-fated Constitution of 1791 (3 September, sanctioned by Louis XVI on 13 September). However, it is from this time that a significant republican defection, steeped in a very different ideology of majesty, commences to be heard. As Albert Sorel writes: “With majesty transferred from the king to the people, the crime of lese-majeste is diverted from the person of the king, and there arises a conception of treason toward the State by which the king, who formerly could only be the victim, can now be imagined as the primary transgressor.”49 We already saw this separa¬ tion suggested in the Chalons discourse of Bernardi, as early as 1780. The period discussed also brings into prominence the question of allegiance. Depending on the time and point of view, these “allegiances” can be regarded as supplementary or incompatible-the emigres and the radicals assuredly found them incompatible; the constitutional royalists saw them as complementary. To render alle¬ giance one swears an oath. The National Guards swore an oath to the nation and the king; the military officers to the nation, the king, and the law (27 November 1790). A civic oath was established for all Frenchmen. By decree of 4 July 1790, the National Assembly fixed the oath to be sworn by its members; on 9 July an oath was prescribed for the king; and on 12 July another for the civil clergy. Then, too, there was an oath of “federation” (14 July 1790). With the king suspended from his functions after the flight to Varennes, he was deleted from the military oath; commissioner-deputies were dispatched from the Assembly to the armies and garrisons to secure this new swearing of allegiance-with the result of an accelerated emigration. The most expressive constitutional reduction of the monarch’s majesty-itself a matter of mechanics more than prestige-was contained in his quality of “inviolability” (shared with his immediate heir and the national representatives), hemmed in by articles presuming cases of automatic abdication.51 This benefit was 49. Albert Sorel, L’Europe et la Revolution frangaise, 8 vols. (Paris, 2:137.

1904-1911),

50. See Marcel Reinhard, La chute de la royaute, 10 aout 1792 (Paris, 1969), pp. 158-161. 51. Cf. Constitution of 1791, chap. 3, esp. article 8: “After the express or legal [my italics] abdication the king will join the class of citizens and can be accused and judged

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

227

conspicuously not extended to Marie-Antoinette or other members of the royal family. It was, in part, that other attribute of majesty, the suspensive veto (especially those of 11 June 1792), which led to the “abdication” (deposition) of the monarch on 10 August 1792. Inviolability was, of course, washed away in the December debates of the Convention. The republican ideology (much stimulated by the patriotic war against Austria and Prussia) is by now ready at hand. In the words of Thomas Paine: What is called republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing. It is a word of a good original, referring to what ought to be the character and business of government; and in this sense it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which has a base original signification. It means arbi¬ trary power in an individual person; in the exercise of which, himself, and not the respublica, is the object.52 In other words, here is the complete inversion of Bossuet’s notion the state is in the person of the prince,” from which we began our exploration. As Paine’s friend Condorcet declared as early as July 1791: “The nation...has outdistanced its timid preceptors; and, if you aspire to conduct it, have at least the courage to keep pace with its rapid strides.”53 Keeping astride is indeed what the Legislative Assembly commences to do in its dying moments. It changes the seal of the state, removing the symbol of the king; henceforth the seal “will bear the figure of Liberty, armed with a pike, wearing the bonnet of liberty,” and featuring the legend “in the name of the French nation.”54 It only remains for the National Convention to abolish royalty in a rather passive bewilderment, on the motion of Collot d Herbois, on 21 September 1792. Majesty and the crimes against it like them for acts posterior to his abdication.” 52. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Phillip Sheldon Foner, 2 vols. (New York, 1945), 2:191. 53. Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, “Sur l’institution d’un Conseil electif,” in Oeuvres completes de Condorcet, ed. D.-J. Garat and P.-J.-G. Cabanis, 21 vol. (Paris, 1804), 16:266. 54. Decree establishing the Conseil Executif Provisoire, art. VI, in John Hardman, joint ed., French Revolution Documents, vol. 2: 1792-1795 (Oxford, 1966-1973), p. 4.

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Mortal Politics

have now totally changed hands. If the transition from lese-majeste to lese-nation has accompanied a dramatic evolution from a traditional regime to a novel one, a certain circular motion is also described. For in both instances, majesty comes to be tarnished by arbitrariness, and in the latter instance, by Terror. The shakier the Republic is, the more unassai¬ lable must its majesty be. Foundations, as Machiavelli reminds us, are not peaceful or merciful events. Although Montesquieu had main¬ tained that “it is dangerous in republics to punish too much the crime of lese-majeste, ”5^ this first French Republic was not a republic of pardon. The celerity and harshness of its acts are of course much excused by the perils of the ideological war, the conspiracies by royalists within and without, and the populist panics. Nonetheless, when we visualize the development of lese-nation within a provisional and revolutionary regime, we do get a certain sense of deja vu. Already by decree of 4 December 1792 the Convention had prescribed the death penalty for anyone proposing to establish in France “royalty or any other power hostile to the sovereignty of the people, whatever label it takes (sous quelque denomination que ce soit).” And on 20 January 1793, Louis Capet is condemned to die, all majesty spent, for “conspiracy against public liberty” and “assault against the general security of the state.” It remains only to put the Terror in place, with its laws of exclusion and of suspects, and finally with its resacralization of lese-nation (Robespierre’s Etre Supreme and his observation that “only aristocrats are atheists”), to obtain some resemblance to the panoply of crimes pursued under the old rubric. With Terror, majesty is revolutionized as well as nationalized. The nation is sovereign, but the exercise of sovereignty is aleatory and up for grabs.

The King is Dead, Long Live?...

Before concluding about majesty, however, it is necessary to add some remarks about the most famous political trial and death of the century. An abundant literature (much of it hagiographic or scornful) has been written about the last days of Louis XVI: we restrict ourselves here to questions raised in this chapter about that 55. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, bk. 12, chap. 18.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

229

monarch’s tribulations.56 Particularly at stake is the political and symbolic context of the execution as the eighteenth century would have understood it, as opposed to ones we too promiscuously read back on it. This means, in the first place, that the paternalistic image of kingship which so thoroughly suffused the Siecle des Lumieres should not give unbounded license to the Freudian imagination. It is more than an exaggeration to write: “The common man remained psychologically tied to a sort of childhood, subject and victim...of an institu¬ tion that began from the top....But the solemn execution of the father...created conditions of a slow but sure reversal of these morbid psychic traits.”57 No doubt the king himself was imbued with the sense of a fatherly mandate, but it was no longer under¬ stood as one of fear and trembling, d la Bossuet. His own parent¬ hood illustrates this. As the manifesto found on his person at Varennes stated: Love for its kings is one of the virtues of the French, and His Majesty has personally received instances of this too touching ever to be forgotten.”59 We do not really know what the average man thought about the metaphysics of monarchy in late 1792. The image of the political father must still have been strong in an age that could induce Americans to label Washington as “the father of his country. But Washington was a father precisely because he had “founded” a republic and defended it by the sword. Contrary to earlier hopes, Louis XVI had founded nothing: He had been brought low amid foundations not of his own making. As we have noted, there is a deflation of paternalistic rhetoric after its last outburst in the cahiers. In any case, neither the dethronement nor the execution can be represented as a sudden psychic jolt (not least because France received news from Paris at intervals up to three 56. For our purposes, the most useful items are: Albert Soboul’s comprehensive, though partisan, anthology of primary texts with comment, Le proces de Louis XVI (Paris, 1966); Arthur Conte’s lively and well-documented account of the Convention’s activity, Sire, Us out vote la mort, la condamnation de Louis XVI (Paris, 1966); David P. Jordan’s fair and distinctive account, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley, 1979); and Michael Walzer’s provocative theoretical analysis of the issues at stake in the trial in his introduction to Regicide and Revolution. 57. Jean-Pierre Peter, “Malades et maladies a la fin du XVIIIe siecle,” in Jean-Paul Desaive, et ah, Me'decins, climats et epidemies a la fin du XVIIIe siecle (Paris and The Hague, 1972), p. 165. 58. See various testimonies in Gaston-Louis-Emmanuel du Fresne, marquis de Beaucourt, Captivite et derniers moments de Louis XVI..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1892), regarding his fatherly attention while a prisoner in the Temple, e.g., 1:19 (by his daughter); 1:38 (by the Comtesse de Bearn). 59. Quoted in Reinhard, La chute de la royaute, p. 446.

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weeks’ time).60 “The reversal of...morbid psychic traits” was assuredly “slow,” and slow in the years to follow. Royalism in France was not decapitated with its “tyrant,” who had, after all, been also an ex-constitutional monarch. If fatherhood was a component of the king’s majesty, it had been much diminished in 1789, while royalism survived for other venerable or interested reasons. No more acceptable is this argument as applied to the revolu¬ tionary leadership: “radicals...seemed to be rhetorically killing the king, their father, long before the Convention actually voted the death sentence.”61 The record mostly shows that “radicals” (e.g., Marat) accepted the king-and surely not as a “father”-so long as they felt that they could use him against other antagonists; and that they came quite soon to regard him as part of a fraternity of “tyrants” from all ages and climates, but especially from France, like those exposed in the “dialogues of the dead.” Saint-Just, often sybilline and quotable, said in a Convention roll call: “If the people had not granted me the right to judge the tyrant, I would have had it from nature.”62 Nature more readily grants the right to judge tyrants than to slay fathers. The pressure for the “appeal to the primary assemblies of France,” which was by far the most serious obstacle the Jacobins faced in their determination to kill the king (and which was rejected because of a widespread fear of civil disorder and litigious turmoil),63 was little affected by any belief that filial feelings would save or kill the ex-monarch. In attacking the “appel au peuple,” Lequinio, one of the main Jacobin spokesmen, suggests that supersti¬ tion might be added to intrigue in this operation, but he nowhere cites paternal ideology. What he accuses are “residues of former idolatry for kings stirred up by troublemakers,” “hypocrisy...brandishing the lighted torch of fanaticism over an unenlightened multitude,” and “interest and intrigue pouring out their poison.”64 Aside from very tangible provocations that might have been expected, Lequinio really feared religion and tradition. “Fatherhood” may have had some place in this brew, but only as one

60. See, on this, J. Letaconnoux, “Les transports en France au XVIIIe siecle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 11 (1908-1909):103-104, 292; and Guy Arbellot, “La grande mutation des routes de France au milieu du XVIIIe siecle,” Annates E.S.C., 28 (1973):789-791. 61. Journal 62. 63.

Lynn Hunt, “The Rhetoric of Revolution in France,” History Workship: A of Socialist and Feminist Historians, no. 15 (Spring 1983), p. 83. Soboul, ed., Le proces de Louis XVI, p. 211. Ibid., pp. 145-172, passim.

64. Reimpression de Vancien Moniteur, no. 365, vol. 14, p. 873.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

231

of a wide range of arguments that might have been used to show that Louis XVI was neither a “tyrant” nor a “traitor.” Moreover, if the “father” Louis XVI were killed semi-judicially as an example to extinguish paternal pretensions in politics, there was, according to French royalist doctrine, another father waiting in the wings: the eight-year-old child Louis XVII. That he could be a child and a father, too, made no difference: France had experienced such anomalies before. That he was a prisoner who might be killed was immaterial, for the Salic law could provide another “father” beyond him. That the Jacobins did not kill him is significant: Far from worrying about psychological fantasies of fathers and children, and beneath their own rhetoric of “the just punishment of the last king of the French,” they found it politically prudent to have the claimant to the throne a fragile boy rather than an adult Comte de Provence safely in exile. Another interpretive venture to be avoided, despite its cosmic appeal, is Albert Camus s correlation of the slaying of the king and the slaying of God (perhaps indebted here to Heinrich Heine). According to Camus, this dual act achieved man’s rupture with the traditional world and his unhappy imprisonment in unending cycles of revolution from which he is obliged to draw self-created meaning.65 As myth this is extremely powerful; as history it is dubious, even though its credentials are better than the Freudian myth of the slaying of the father. Surely Walzer is right to object to Camus’s contention that this was a “deliberate attack upon the moral structure of the universe.”66 Chipping away at that universe had begun years before and would still be going on a century later. The less exalted, but more exact, intention of the Jacobin Left was “tyrannicide.” For the others, it was punishment of “lese-nation.” Walzer’s very able and informed interpretation brings us back down to earth and is fashioned in the legal and political terms that the regicides and defenders used in their debates: not a language, surely, of perfect transparency, but one in which they could discourse, argue, and even persuade. The Girondins, he points out, wanted the king’s trial to be a lesson of judicial “majesty” for more benighted governments and peoples. The Montagnards were far less interested in form, and more in results; but they coherently used the language of tyrannicide, the “state of nature,” and lex salus to sway the trimmers to the position that in executing Louis XVI they were

65. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York, 1956), p. 120. 66. Walzer, Regicide and Revolution, p. 87.

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performing their harshest and highest political duty in order to establish the Republic.67 Above all, they were transferring majesty from a place where it had once been and never belonged, and from an ambiguous place to which it had drifted, to a redoubt where they hoped it might be secure. In this they were mistaken. As a commen¬ tator I have criticized correctly says: “The charisma of the king, the traditional and sacred centre of society, steadily eroded, but no one person, institution, or document succeeded in taking his place.”68 Perhaps, in the dissolution of majesty, charisma is the better word-although it has a disagreeably contemporary ring. The one Bourbon who especially had this quality, in the minds of the French of 1792, was Henri IV. To destroy the passion for kingship in France one had to destroy the memory of Henri IV, even after the head of the so-called “last King of the French” had been cut off. Neither Freudianism nor existentialism nor sober political theory can adequately tell us why this was so. The historical record must speak for itself. It was in the “Vert Galant” that the French found their most effective symbol of majesty; and it is not accidental that, decades later, the fatuous Comte de Chambord, raising his banner as “Henri V,” gained a clientele beyond his meagre deserts and his natural political supporters. From the onset of the Revolution, Henri IV had been a magnet of attraction. Previous chapters have made reference to this. Throughout 1789 crowds gathered around the imposing statue of Henri IV on the lie de la Cite to express feelings and register grie¬ vances: as Reinhard writes, “the statue of the Pont-Neuf was connected with a great many demonstrations.”69 And as Bensenval recounts, patriots forced the wealthy and titled from their carriages “to kneel before the statue of Henri IV.”70 At the feast of 15 July 1790, in honour of Saint-Henri, “people living in the Place Dauphine built an altar [in front of the statue]: They illuminated the statue and sang the Te Deum in the presence of the clergy, the National Guard, and municipal officials.”71

67. Walzer, ibid., is especially astute in pointing out that the trial and execution of Louis XVI were not the beginning or part of the Terror (p. 78). He is somewhat more to be questioned on his own teleological assumptions about how political maturity is won: see pp. 88-89. 68. Hunt, “Rhetoric of Revolution,” p. 79. 69. Marcel Reinhard, La legende de Henri IV (Saint-Brieuc, 1935), p. 120. 70. Pierre-Victor, baron de Besenval, Memoires du baron de Besenval, introduction by M.-F. Barriere, in Bibliotheque des memoires relatifs a Vhistoire de France pendant le 18eme siecle (Paris, 1846), 4:349. 71. Reinhard, La legende de Henri IV, p. 123.

From Lese-Majeste to Lese-Nation

233

When, on 17 July 1791, a petition was presented demanding the destitution of Louis XVI, “the people decorated the statue of Henri IV with a municipal scarf, put a cocarde nationale beside him, and placed a crown on his head.”72 This was not “paternalism”: It was kingship by election, even by fraternite, the charismatic idealization of a monarch remembered for his political skill, mastery of arms, virility, and nationalism. The propagandists for Louis XVI attempted to trade on his affinity with the beloved ancestor. Bailly, the mayor of Paris, had flatteringly compared them in his famous speech of 17 July 1789.73 At the Festival of the Federation of 1790, it is reported that the Pont-Neuf statue “was decorated and became the focus of public rejoicing. An inscription said: Henri IV was loved by his people; Louis XVI is his heir.”74 And in early 1792 the radical Revolutions de Paris commented acidly on a political engraving featuring the anagram “XII et IV font XVI,” meaning transparently that Louis XII (another popular king) plus Henri IV equals Louis XVI. “In the Old Regime,” the paper wrote, “the artist would have been rewarded with the cordon noir. ”75 Louis XVI, whatever his private and Christian virtues, could not sustain the comparison. He was “protected,” imprisoned, judged, and finally executed by French revolutionary assemblies. But it remained to dispose of Henri IV. After the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, the radical intentions of the revolutionary Commune of Paris were bent to this purpose. They caused the “section Henri IV” to be renamed the “section Pont-Neuf.” They had the famous statue pulled down, together with all other marks of “royalty and superstition.” Shortly after, the hearts of Henri IV and Marie de Medicis were confiscated and burned. Finally, on 12 October 1793 (almost eight months after the “just punishment” and two days after the declaration of Revolutionary government), the tombs of the French kings at Saint-Denis were desecrated and their remains scattered in ditches.76 But even the most stalwart of the republican vandals were repelled by the thought of visiting this act on the most truly popular of the French kings, who, to make things even more disconcerting, had 72. Ibid., p. 124. 73. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Me'moires d’un te'moin de la Resolution..., 3 vols. (Paris, 1804), 2:231. 74. Richard A. Etlin, “L’architecture et la Fete de la Federation, Paris, 1790,” in Jean Ehrard and Paul Viallaneix, eds., Les fetes de la Revolution: colloque de ClermontFerrand (Paris, Societe des etudes robespierristes, 1977), p. 148. 75. Revolutions de Paris, no. 136 (11-18 February 1792), p. 310. 76. Reinhard, La legende de Henri IV, pp. 127-129.

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been not in the least disfigured thanks to the cares of his expert Italian embalmer. It took two days for the power of the authorities, expressed through the vociferous orders of the committed terrorist Javogues, to cause the body to be removed and desecrated. Henri IV obviously met his fate as a “tyrant” amid much popular reluctance. When it came the Marshal de Turenne’s turn (by the express command of Louis XIV he had been buried in the royal basilica), not even this persuasion would suffice (was he a tyrant; was he not a great French hero? and, besides, he also was miraculously embalmed). Turenne therefore escaped the fate of the tyrants: his corpse was sent off to a medical laboratory in Paris to be studied/7 It is in that vein that we have studied the intricate problem of majesty, and the crimes against it. It came to inhere neither in princes nor in peoples nor in institutions, but in idealized leadership. The meaning of treason became equally problematic. 77. Alphonse-Marie-Louis de 1852), 5:282-283.

Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins,

6

vols.

(Paris,

The Music of Mortality

Chapter 10

A Revolution in Death?

Nothing is more predictable than death. Each of us will die without any need to take adventuresome risks. But death’s meanings and motives change when risk is exalted. “The risk of death,” Morin writes, “is the supreme paradox of man facing death because it totally and radically contradicts the horror of death. Yet, not less than horror, it is a fundamental element.”1 We may legitimately ask what happens to death as a form and an understanding when it is wrenched out of its routine in this way. The French Revolution can be seen as a striving for a more refined justice and a widened assur¬ ance of the benefits of mundane life. But it also raised the risk of death as a commemorative or punitive symbol ratifying society’s moral judgements in a period of high crisis. That crisis cannot properly be understood by the metaphor of nature, or as an artifact of “natural history.” Where nature produces crises (as in famine or epidemic), our reasoning is not the same as when the blame is laid on a conscious agency of society that can inspire revenge for its political failure. Divine will had earlier seemed to link these two sorts of happenings. But once man had seized the responsibility from God (who was, as Voltaire implied in his Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon, either omnipotent and heartless or well-meaning but incompetent) for his catastrophes and redresses, a rupture between the two reasonings ensued. To the extent that mortal agents were now expected to control a wayward nature by science and prevention, and to the extent that more aggressive norms of human conduct were raised against old standards of obedient suffering, the ruling class, even finally-and reluctantly-up to its pinnacle, the former lieutenant of God, would be blamed for what 1. Edgar Morin, L’homme et la mort, 2d ed. (Paris, 1970), p. 67; cf. pp. 71, 73.

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had gone wrong, and put on warning. Nature was the century’s most fertile metaphor, but in stealth culture was staking claims against it. In other words, nature could no longer be an excuse. As Diderot wrote: “When the people die of hunger, it is never the fault of Providence, but always that of the administration.”2 Similarly, once society had been widely glimpsed as the “God of the new order”3 and received political legitimation as such, it could become the Dieu vengeur of the unpaid tribute owed by some to the wretchedness of the basic human condition. It could claim total responsibility (if not liability) for deaths suffered in its cause or for mortally punishing the corrupt, the privileged, or the recalcitrant standing in its way. Its will, as the “general will,” could approximate a “holy will.” As the “end of nature,” it could seize these prerogatives from an enfeebled source of nature. Strangely enough, this is why, as Hegel perceived, Kant’s ethics suited the French Revolution despite that philosopher’s denial of any complicity.4 At first glance it might seem that the French Revolution had unsettled the routine of death, at least as understood since the Wars of Religion (a thesis that Burke argued concerning the routine of revolution itself).5 But this may be only a matter of perspective. The “new history of death” has muted or even dismissed this viewpoint, at least en longue duree, in its vision of vast phases structured by a complicated coherence of signs and by a gradualism of change underscoring death’s conservatism. In Aries’s account of “la mort longue et proche,” the Revolution seems at most a peculiar irruption rather than a watershed of mentalities.6 Such a perspective favours the political hypothesis that the Revolution, no matter how distinc¬ tive in rhetoric and carnage, was a fragile imposition on collective attitudes rather than an event giving voice to them. This alters our common notion of the Revolution. Yet one is tempted to wonder what Aries might have reported if he had been an observer in one of Fouche’s revolutionary cemeteries, which, we learn, have unfortu¬ nately vanished without the trace of a headstone or inscription.7 2. Article “Faim,” Encyclope'die 6:373b. 3. See chapter 2, above, pp. 27-28. 4. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox (Oxford, 1962), para. 5a, pp. 21-22; Immanuel Kant, “An Old Ques¬ tion Raised Again,” in Lewis White Beck, ed., On History (Indianapolis, 1963), pp. 144-145; The Metaphysical Elements of Justice, trans. John Ladd (Indianapolis, 1965), pp. 85-86. 5. Edmund Burke, “Thoughts on French Affairs,” in Edmund Burke on Rex>olution (New York, 1968), p. 186. 6. Aries, L’homme devant la mort, pp. 293-399.

Robert A.

Smith, ed.,

7. Maurice Dommanget, La dechristianisation a Beauvais et dans I’Oise, 1790-1801, 2 vols. (Paris, 1922), 2:28.

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A history of death a la Lucien Febvre is evidently something other than a rapprochement of death and politics in late eighteenthcentury France. It is not just that our time-frame is considerably foreshortened by politics. The history of political thought as conven¬ tionally written can neither shun the Revolution as an aberrant episode nor fail to stress its originality in using death as a political instrument. Within the rationale of mortal politics, the French Revolution harvested and transmitted a legacy that is still vexingly opaque. This study has attempted to reconcile the history of dying to the history of modern politics by surveying a fabric of French history not totally rent but obviously broken-stranded. By confronting the Revolution in a context of interest where it must appear as a highly significant period that produces startling deviations from the “routine” of death, we may still expect that context to disclose stub¬ born encumbrances to the novelty of the political. The challenge is one of delicate balance. How did “la mort longue et proche” and “vivre libre ou mourir” manage to coexist? The cumulation of past chapters and the content of the next three will try to suggest an answer. Nothing in this book surreptitiously designates the Revolution as more than a chronological point of arrival. Revolutionary events have a distinct place throughout the work but do not dictate its cadencing. At the same time the Revolution is not simply perceived as a sequence of happenings written into in search of further thanatological data. It would be the height of folly in this wide, yet selective, account to reconstruct the meaning of the Revolution from all the vantage points of political mortality it contained. That task would be virtually endless, and totally disproportionate to any balanced result. What I propose instead is to concentrate on the crossing of three themes that seem to distinguish the Revolution en bloc from its pred¬ ecessor regime: the prominent social goal of equality, which, however obfuscated by prudential and prejudicial restrictions, burst forth unendingly in revolutionary rhetoric and may be profitably compared (Society as God) with the theological motif of equality before the creator of all things; the ways in which practices ensuing from revolutionary discourse about death either favoured or impeded the goal of equality, in the sense of worth; and a severely narrowed selection of discourses that seem to illuminate “revolutionary death” (i.e., death at high risk) with greatest clarity. Those discourses are funereal song and funereal speech, typically set within the public context of the republican festival. The practices

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Mortal Politics

deriving from the song, I shall conclude, designedly motivate-and perhaps achieve-an ambiance of equality and solidarity. That will be the central topic of the present chapter. In a following chapter, I shall argue that, on the contrary, funereal speech, which, as the more versatile of the two media, has a more self-conscious and commanding role in political intention and result, tends, for a variety of reasons, toward inequality and heroic distancing. Finally, to complete the discussion of equality in death, it will be necessary to return to what might be called “ordinary death practices,” where, partly under the impulse of the Revolution but also as a set of trends with much deeper roots, the axes of church vs. state and public vs. private cross. In thus crossing against the backdrop of a revolution (which is both vengeance and solidarity, spectacle and silence), the tensions of the death that has never ceased help us to recover some notions of responding to the question earlier raised: how did “la mort longue et proche” and “vivre libre ou mourir” manage to coexist?

Calling the Tune

Recent studies of the French Revolution have tended to concentrate on the rhetorical and lexical structures of political utterance (parole that suddenly seems to become massively situated in langue) or on the collective meanings of the official festivals (whether didactic or “carnavalesque”).8 If the Revolution was exultant or defiant, this is best seen in its songs and speeches; if it was ever “frozen,” we shall find traces of that congelation there as well. Festivals were multimedia events, immense and drawn-out occasions uniting manip¬ ulation and spontaneity, memory and desire, sight and sound.9 If, as distinct from many other themes, we could examine those elements that spoke directly about death, we might gain some access to the 8. Especially on the former, introduction to Frangois Furet, Penser la Revolution frangaise (Paris, 1978); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Die Funktionen parlamentarischer Rhetorik in der franzosischen Revolution: Vorstudien zur Entwicklung einer historischen Textpragmatik (Munich, 1978). On the latter, Ozouf, La fete revolutionnaire, and several later colloquies and anthologies in the same vein. 9. Cf. Jules Renouvier, Histoire de I’art pendant la Revolution, considere principalement dans les estampes... (Paris, 1863), p. 416: “The most vivid art of the Revolution is in its festivals.”

The Music of Mortality

239

relationship of death and equality. Here we shall take up the song or hymn. The transmission of lyrical impulse across the divide of Old Regime and Revolution is complex. One problem is an embarras de richesse. For the Revolutionary period there are literally thousands of public hymns, popular songs, and jingles: Constant Pierre’s massive, but scarcely exhaustive, inventory records 1,718 songs during the period 1789-1794.10 Even those restricted to funereal themes present an overwhelming task in appraising the motives, milieu, and “reception” of so many stanzas. This is especially true if we attempt any detailed study of their structural properties. As the German scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who has devoted a lengthy essay to three hymn specimens, comments: “No one is capable of analyzing at one time all the texts of a very extensive body of writing.”11 On the other hand, it is better to be glutted with material than blockaded by the silences of the past. We have here a thesaurus of ideological messages trans¬ mitted at a popular level and some grasp of a medium that had its claws into the public. A second problem is that of linking this huge production to prec¬ edent models in the Old Regime, where the spaces and decor of public and private were very different, and where the kind of litera¬ ture and melody we are seeking does not exactly cascade upon us. At first glance, it seems rather like a shark following a pilot fish. Still, we know that ex nihilo nihil fit; and there may be enough evidence to justify this pursuit. A third stumbling block involves assortment. It is not simply a matter of limiting our investigation to works about death, although that is obviously the first kind of control. We shall wish to know also about the manner of communication or presentation, and the effects of these on “reception.” Are we dealing with “high-brow” or “popular” texts? Do they have a ceremonial or an impromptu use, or both? Are they universal or exclusive in appeal? Are they seditious or inspirational or didactic in purpose? What are their musical and theatrical settings? The locus of the festival enjambs but does not solve these problems. We cannot solve them either, but we can use them to get at other, more manageable issues. Let us return to the Old Regime for some bearings. There are evidently a number of ways in which themes from the past made

10. Constant-Victor-Desire Pierre, Les hymnes et chansons de la Revolution: apergu general et catalogue... (Paris, 1904). 11. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,

“Chants revolutionnaires, maitrise de l’avenir et

niveau du sens collectif,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 30 (1983):238.

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Mortal Politics

contact with the Revolutionary mentality. One of these is the ideali¬ zation in popular song or fable of heroic victims of the royal regime, like Louis Mandrin. Not enough is known about this kind of source and its transmission, and it is possible that its importance has been ideologically overplayed.12 However, all societies have their bitter ballads of gallows humour and their Robin Hoods to revere. French society was no different. What, for example, accounts for Saint-Just’s amazing assertion in a serious report to the Convention that “they used to hang fifteen hundred smugglers a year”?13 Imaginative hyperbole, or something the “people” were saying? Claude Mazauric tells of a festival organized in Rouen on 3 Frimaire, an II, for two “martyrs of liberty” who had been hanged for ordinary crimes four years earlier.14 There are other connections. The most obvious of these is the notion of “antiquity” shared by the Revolution with the tastes of its predecessor generation. Jean Starobinski, brilliantly challenging that thesis of continuity, nevertheless concedes from the outset: “The ‘return to antiquity’ comes before the Revolution: neo-classical taste is affirmed and then widely diffused from 1750 on. The forms enlisted by the Revolution to its service were already invented by 1789.”15 Yet Starobinski is quite right to find a major flaw in this argument: the Cenotaph of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is not the Petit Trianon of Marie-Antoinette, nor is the sound of music quite the same as it was before. Another point of contact is the connection of Revolutionary lyrics and music with some of the hymns sung in Masonic rituals.16 As regards the theme of death, this is nowhere more strikingly demon¬ strated than in the Masonic funeral suite called “Le Deluge,” composed by Frangois Giroust, who was the Surintendant de la Musique du Roi and a member of the “Le Patriotisme” lodge at the court of Versailles. This extraordinary work uses lyrics by Felix Nogaret, librarian to the Comtesse d’Artois, “Venerable” of the same

12. Cf. chapter 7, n. 27. Soviet scholars of the French Revolution have been espe¬ cially interested in the phenomenon of the heroic bandit during the eighteenth century. 13. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, Discours et rapports, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris, 1957): “Sur les personnes incarcerees” (8 Ventose, an 11-26 February 1794), p. 137. 14. Claude Mazauric, “La fete revolutionnaire: manifestation de la politique jacobine, Rouen, 1793, an II,” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les fetes de la Revolution, p 187. F 15. Jean Starobinski, 1789: les emblemes de la raison (Paris, 1979), p. 5. 16. Roger Cotte, “De la musique des loges magonniques a celle des fetes revolutionnaires,” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les petes de la Revolution, pp. 565-574.

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241

lodge, and later a writer of Revolutionary stanzas.17 Moreover, a brief canvassing of Le Bihan’s list of Parisian Freemasons at the end of the eighteenth century provides names of numerous other Revolutionary musicians (among them Cherubini, Devienne, Gossec, Lemiere, and Mehul).18 A third source seems more palpable: the evolution of the chanson militaire. That is one reason why the clumsy lyrics of Colonel Zimmermann, cited earlier, are precious. When Zimmermann writes (in 1769) of the patrie: Le bonheur de mourir pour elle Est le sort le plus glorieux: Un coeur genereux ne voit qu’elle Au sein du carnage et des feux,19 we are not so far away from: On est digne d’un si grand bien [i.e., la liberte], Lorsque Ton sait a la patrie Immoler tout, jusqu’a sa vie, Lorsqu’au bonheur de tous on attache le sien.20 And when Zimmermann continues: Protege a jamais la Patrie, Dieu des combats qui nous entends, Tranche le cours de notre vie Si nous oublions nos serments,21

17. Giroust’s work remained undiscovered until 1970, when the Grande Loge de France resurrected it for a ceremony honouring deported Masons who had died in the Second World War. It is recorded by Arion 30-A-100 (1970), Musiques rituelles magonniques du XV111e. siecle. 18. Le Bihan, Francs-magons du Grand-Orient de France, passim. 19. “Happy are we to die for her: / That is the best way to expire. / Generous hearts see only her / Amid the bloodshed and the fire.” Zimmermann, cited in “L’education morale du soldat,” Revue de Cavalerie 31 (1900):735. 20. “We are worthy of that great prize [liberty] / When, for our country’s sake, / We’ve learned to lay down our lives, / When from the happiness of all our own we make.” “Hymne A la liberte,” by Louis-Antoine-Esprit Rallier, in Recueil des chants philosophiques, civiques et moraux (Paris, an VII—1797), p. 93. 21. “Forever protect our fatherland, / God of battles, Thou who hearest us; / Cut our lives short / If our oaths we should forget.” Zimmermann, in “Education morale du soldat,” p. 735.

242

Mortal Politics

the power assigned to the oath recalls the constant, almost Pavlovian “incurable manie des serments”22 that the revolutionary commit¬ ment imposed on all, as well as the “God of battles” posture that was not the least of the attributes of Robespierre’s Etre Supreme. We must not push this point too far. Pierre Corneille had long ago written (in Le Cid, IV, 5): “Mourir pour le pays n’est pas un triste sort: / C’est s’immortaliser par une belle mort.” There are also very distinct lexical and semantic shifts between Zimmermann’s productions and the repetitive “live free or die” hymnes guerriers of the Revolution, most conspicuously the traverse of roi from “pere” to “tyran.” Above all, the emotions that Zimmermann wanted to incul¬ cate in elite troops were made, by 1790, the common fare of a whole patriotic people. As a distinguished musicologist has written: “To tell the truth, aside from a few satirical couplets of very transient currency, there were no specially military songs belonging to the [Revolutionary] epoch; the repertoire of the soldiers of the Revolutionary armies was exactly the same as what the people were singing throughout France....”23 The populace was suddenly exalted and militarized. With its new device of “liberty, equality, fraternity” it called a tune which no longer needed to be written in the barracks or sung on bivouac. To use today’s fashionable language, the text was writing itself. That text also came to be described as a “hymn,” or even “popular hymn.” For Jaucourt, writing in the Encyclope'die, a “popular hymn,” according to Greek and Roman usage, was essentially a song praising the gods that had been brought down to earth by politics and flat¬ tery as an accompaniment to the deification of heroes and Caesars. In his own day, Jaucourt noted, “we have very few hymnographers of note.”24 Thirty years later, there would be a flood of them. It is still striking that a considerable continuity of genre is observed. In the hymns of massed patriots and marching guards, as well as in the more ambitious and less chantable poems, the French neo-classic ode continued to furnish the formal structure for the new emotions.25 There was a legitimacy of the familiar in this category of expression: For if the masses were to sing, there was not time to teach them a new music or a new versification. Operatic airs of the Old Regime were widely adapted, as was virtually everything else 22. Jean-Fran^ois de la Harpe, Du fanatisme dans la langue revolutionnaire, ou de la persecution suscitee par les barbares du dix-huitieme siecle... (Paris, 1797), p. 71. 23. Julien Tiersot, Histoire de la chanson populaire en France (Paris, 1889), p. 178. 24. Article “Hymne,” Encyclope'die 8:395b, 396b. 25. The “Horatian ode” (Voltaire’s style) was far more easily sung than the “Pindaric ode” in which, for example, Lebrun frequently indulged.

The Music of Mortality

243

from “Malbrough s’en va-t’en guerre” to the liturgical Dies Irae. Rouget de Lisle updated a Chant de Roland”: Thus some mystique of old French history (although very little) was included.26 “If,” as Nogaret wrote in 1794, “I had not composed this piece for a familiar melody, no one would have sung it.”27 Moreover, the outpouring of revolutionary verses was too enormous to be accommodated by the available composers. And we should finally note that the creative careers of the principals of Revolutionary music spanned the upheaval, adapting remarkably to its nuances-although Gossec and Lebrun were a generation older than Mehul and M.-J. Chenier. That transition was replicated in the more formal poetry of writers like Lebrun and Chenier. A text quoted previously in which Lebrun praised a few good kings but issued stern warnings to the others (1783)28 points quite straightforwardly to his poetic future as a passionate republican: “Le SOUVERAIN reprend ses droits; / Et leur couronne passagere / Expire sur le front des rois.”29 And in the late 1780s Marie-Joseph Chenier had composed an ode Sur la mart de Maximilien Leopold de Brunswick (an “enlightened duke”), whose funereal cadences seek the same register that he would employ so often and so resourcefully in the service of the Republic: Gemissez, temoins de sa gloire; Recueillez ses debris sacres! Vous, qu’il menait a la victoire, Gemissez maintenant, pleurez!30 A rhetorical problem of the Revolution was to bring the high style down within the compass of a dynamic and shared experience. Some words about popular style are now needed. While it is not, strictly speaking, correct to say that, at the onset of the Revolution, France burst into song, the effect may be compared to the uncen¬ soring of the printed word in 1789. Lungs filled, just as the ink flowed. It was easier for the common man to read than to become a songster, but eventually he became proficient at both. By May 1790 26. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 275. 27. Ibid., p. 49. 28. See chapter 6, pp. 139-140. 29. “The SOVEREIGN takes back its rights; / And, on the brow of kings, / Their transient crown evaporates.” P.-D.E. Lebrun, Odes republicaines au peuple frangais, Van He, par le Citoyen Le Brun, cited in Gumbrecht, “Chants revolutionnaires,” p. 247. 30. “Groan, you witnesses to his glory; / Recover his sacred remains! / You whom he once led to victory, / Now groan and weep for him!” Marie-Joseph Chenier, Oeuvres anciennes, 5 vols. (Paris, 1826), 3:292.

244

Mortal Politics

the Chronique de Paris could report: “There are songs being sung in the streets easy enough for the people and turned out in the spirit of the Revolution. Just by chance we have heard several that were made out of quite accomplished couplets....”31 At first the popular tunes reflected new hope, gaiety, and generosity. They praised the king and bathed in the glow of the nebulously remembered times of Henri IV.32 But the pace of events began to radicalize the songs. Moreover, it had been discerned that music and accompanying spec¬ tacle might provide an effective shortcut to that education in citizen¬ ship demanded by constitutional government and the doctrine of popular sovereignty. As Devienne put it in 1790: “People must have songs, festivals, and theatrics (spectacles). When you want to involve people whose liveliness of imagination exceeds the enlightenment of their minds, you must speak to their senses.”33 With the deepening of the Revolution and the threat of war, the songs of the streets began to merge thematically and linguistically with a more learned and edifying poetry, without in the least losing their cutting edge. By the beginning of 1792, political and patriotic songs were a part of the daily fare at the theatres, as the factions chanted antiphonally at each other.34 Already the singing and the songs were vengeful. As Jacques Necker, safely in exile, wrote in 1791: “We no longer recog¬ nize the [French] people, once gentle and sensitive: they have become eager to destroy and impatient to have revenge. What is most frightening, they combine verbal gaiety with the most barba¬ rous thoughts, and their songs-like those of savages-are cries of death.”35 This was the atmosphere of Qa ira. By the middle of 1793, the Chronique de Paris, in reproducing a new song from the Jacobins (not only the clubs but the Convention now had moments musicaux), added this note: “Here are once again songs that exhibit a kind of fury; but that is presently the fashion.”36 “Monstres, vous perirez; n’attendez point de grace, / ...Tremblez devant ce fer encore ensanglante,” sang a choir of children at the Festival of the Supreme Being in Angers on 20 Germinal, an II.37 Fury was still being 31. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 2. 32. See Cornwell B. Rogers, The Spirit of Revolution in 1789: A Study of Public Opinion as Revealed in Political Songs and Other Popular Literature at the Beginning of the French Revolution (Princeton, 1949), pp. 86, 98. 33. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 2. Cf. Franeois-Antoine, comte de Boissy d’Anglas, Essai sur les fetes (Paris, an VIII), p. 13. 34. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 9. 35. Jacques Necker, Sur Tadministration de Monsieur Necker (Amsterdam, 1791) 197.

p

36. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 3. 37. Benjamin Bois, Les fetes revolutionnaires a Angers de Van II a Van VIII, 1793-1798 (Paris, 1929), p. 50.

The Music of Mortality

245

practiced four years after that: Francois de ChateauneuPs instruc¬ tions for the funeral festival in honour of the ambassadors assassi¬ nated at Rastadt specify: parade through the public places effigies bloodied with stab wounds...so that after the lugubrious tones of music that rip you apart a vast silence will follow...and suddenly that silence will be broken by a cry of vengeance/”38 Mehul, the composer, quoted in Prairial of an II, was somewhat sceptical of the people’s musical talent, but he affirmed: “...with time they will sing, and sing well. 39 The curve of Revolutionary music, according to texts collected by Pierre, mounts from 116 examples in 1789, to 261 in 1790, 308 in 1791, 325 in 1792; and no less than 590 in 1793 and 701 in 1794 (the years when the Jacobins held sway). After Thermidor, and despite government encouragement, the figures fell to 137 in 1795 and 126 in 1796.40 The decrease is no doubt due both to an abatement of frenzy and a relative exhaus¬ tion of the vehicle. Still, the substance of the Revolutionary song/ hymn relating to death stays remarkably constant for the period 1792-1798, with of course the prudent substitution of certain words and references: There is no special style for the Jacobin supremacy or the Terror. Lyricists like Chenier and Coupigny ably negotiated their way through the storms of politics, as did Sarrette’s republican conservatoire of musicians.

The Hymn in the Festival

Revolutionary hymns eventually became an integral feature of public ceremonials and festivals. Official funeral events were invaded by choirs and orchestras, singing and playing the lugubrious music brought to a new pitch of frisson in the works of Gossec and Mehul. The transformation of the civic funeral and the civic dirge began neither with the war nor with the Republic, but early on in the Revolution. The colossal celebration of the Festival of the Federation (14 July 1790) had set the tone. But, as yet, Catholicism and patri-

38. Albert Mathiez, La theophilanthropie et le culte decadaire, 1796-1801: essai sur Uhistoire religieuse de la Revolution (Paris, 1904), p. 442. 39. Julien Tiersot, “Mehul, musicien des fetes nationales et civiles,” Revolution frangaise 72 (1919):419. 40. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 34.

246

Mortal Politics

otism remained uneasy partners in the undertaking: sacred music and military marches mingled. That effect was especially jarring at the commemorative funeral celebration for the dead soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Chateauvieux, who had revolted in Lorraine and been repressed by Marshal de Bouille. Revolutionary Paris sympa¬ thized with these victims, “freres d’armes morts pour le maintien des lois,” and it gave them a splendid festival on the Champ de Mars on 20 September 1790. The Altar of the Fatherland, surrounded by cypresses-the ancient arboreal symbol of grief and mortality-and by four urns sending up dense smoke, was draped in black. The prin¬ cipal chaplain of the Parisian army, with sixty assistants, celebrated the mass. An orchestra played Vogel’s overture to Demophon and a “sad and lugubrious” funeral march by Gossec that sounded “like a succession of groans, amplified by the heavy beat of the drums.” The tubas (a novelty) provided gravity; the tam-tams (equally novel) suggested terror.41 Thousands looked on. Next, there was Mirabeau’s funeral on 4 April 1791, also a mixed civil-religious ceremony. Michelet wrote that nothing like it had ever been seen before.42 Many tens of thousands witnessed the cortege, jamming the streets, gazing from their windows or from rooftops and trees, as Mirabeau’s coffin was taken from his house on the rue de la Chaussee d’Antin to the Church of Saint-Eustache, where the religious ceremony was conducted, and on to the Pantheon (former Church of Sainte-Genevieve), where he was enshrined by a “grateful nation.” Darkness had fallen, and the final ceremonies were not completed until after midnight: the city was lit by torches. Again, Gossec composed a memorable march which would later be used at the heroic funerals of Generals Hoche and Joubert during the Directory.43 The translation of the remains of Voltaire to the Pantheon on 11 July 1791 provided yet another fantastically embel¬ lished and massively witnessed public spectacle, this time with the collaboration of David, in a “pompe vraiment antique.” Lavish clas¬ sical scenery, including a chariot-hearse, painted with the images of Brutus and Wilhelm Tell and designed to suggest the car of Apollo and Phoebus, bore the Sage of Ferney to his apotheosis; four orches¬ tras and diverse other musicians accompanied it. Up to this point we have observed a high style, which was never¬ theless an uneasy blending of old and new. The outright paganism of

41. Julien Tiersot, Les fetes et les chants de la Revolution francaise (Paris, 1908), pp. 47-50. 42. Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution francaise, 5 vols. (Paris, 1889), 2:191. 43. Tiersot, Les fetes et les chants, pp. 51-53.

The Music of Mortality

247

the Voltaire event, while no doubt appeasing some of the fantasies of the Enlightenment he had represented, also marked the passage of Revolutionary spectacle into uncharted tension. It took place less than a month after the king had been brought back from Varennes. Voltaire s was a triumphal return, in its gaudy pagan symbolism, and it deliberately clashed with the humiliating and silent ride of Louis XVI with his jailors. Henceforward, the church would withdraw from the civic feast, although with conspicuous regional variations.44 There is, then, a rupture of style and form. In the Catalogue de Thistoire de la Revolution franqaise, Martin and Walter, in their rubrics, indicate very clearly that the old style of “oraison funebre” (associ¬ ated with Catholic burial) ebbed after the funeral of Mirabeau and was not again reinstated until the extravagant ceremonies memorial¬ izing the death of General Hoche in 17 9 7.45 It ceded, for the time being, to diverse practices described under the headings of “eloge funebre,” “fete funebre,” and “fete civique,” neo-pagan ceremonies performed in honour of the “martyrs of liberty” (especially Lepeletier, Marat, Chalier, Bara, and Viala), as well as to more restricted occasions (such as the “Fete des Vingt-Deux” and the “Fete de Feraud” conducted after 9 Thermidor within the precincts of the National Convention itself.)46 Most important for us is the new music and its leading role in political consciousness-raising. In the wake of Mona Ozouf s influen¬ tial study La fete re'volutionnaire and research by numerous others that it has inspired, attention has been centred on the “meaning” or “meanings” of the revolutionary festivals, in sharp disagreement with

44. While the constitutional clergy, and even the bishop of Maine-et-Loire, were conspicuously absent from the funeral celebration of Joseph Beaurepaire at Angers on 14 October 1792, they were present at a festival in honour of the republican martyr Lepeletier in January 1793 at Frevent and at Ardres. A funeral mass for dead soldiers from an artillery company was actually associated with a decadarian festival at Epinal on 20 Frimaire, an II. Here, the municipal officials, acting on the constitutional prin¬ ciple of the “liberte des cubes,” refused to participate in the religious ceremony “en corps,” while permitting individuals to attend: this in the middle of dechristianization! See Bois, Les fetes a Angers, p. 8; Louis Trenard, “Les fetes revolutionnaires dans une region frontiere: Nord-Pas-de-Calais,” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les fites de la Revolution, p. 209; Felix Bouvier, Les Vosges pendant la Revolution (Paris, 1885), p. 267. Cf. Charles-Alexandre de Moy's influential Accord de la religion et des cultes chez une nation libre (Paris, 1792), p. 23: “Magistrates should refrain from attending religious ceremonies of the different forms of worship as an official body.” 45. Andre (Paris, 46.

See Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, in bibliography, p. 162, nos. 184-187; Martin and Gerard Walter, eds., Catalogue de I’histoire de la Revolution frangaise 1955), vol. IV2, esp. pp. 584, 705. See below, p. 257.

248

the

Mortal Politics

“political

manipulation”

thesis

of Aulard47

and

in

nuanced

accord with the Durkheimian “religion as the core of social defini¬ tion” argument of Mathiez.48 Basically, for Ozouf, the pedagogical purposes of the fete are tributary to a “resurrection of an archetypal situation...[a] repetition serving to cushion upsetting shocks, to erase threatening novelties of events, and, by tearing them away from profane time, to give them all the prestige of a new beginning.”49 Thus the festivals are “explicitly assigned a conservative goal...their use of emblems and ritual are very often a staging of closure.” They are temporal events renouncing their temporality.50 This is obvi¬ ously most explicit with death. At the same time, the festivals are profoundly paradoxical; ever novel in conscious intent and significa¬ tion, they are also mired or mimed in well-worn formulas, an “antinomy between theatre and festival.”51 In an extended analysis of two versions of a single text by Chenier, the Hymne pour la fete de la federation, le 14 juillet 1790 (1790, 1797), H.U. Gumbrecht perceives, inter alia, in the language structure of the revolutionary hymn (which is, after all, together with the oath, the participatory crux of the festival), a “sens illusionnaire” which, although resem¬ bling its opposite pole, the “sens officiel,” by having roots in the daily experience of events, is unlike it utterly in “permitting an open future [a kind of horror vacui] to be pushed back while at the same time celebrating the Revolution as a rupture.”52 In other words, it exalts while it calms apprehensions. We need not worry here about the employment of revolutionary rhetoric in general.53 The literature is becoming bulky and conten¬ tious; and it is perhaps no more clarifying to think and work in post-Saussurian, post-Freudian, post-1968 times than in the wake of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. We shall merely observe the penetration of the funeral hymn into the funeral festival and draw conclusions about the transaction. To do this we must be aware of the two-faced nature of both death and the mise en scene of

47. F.-V.-Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la raison et le culte de I’Etre Supreme (Paris, 1892). 48. Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes revolutionnaires (1789-1792) (Paris, 1904). It appears that Mathiez’s interpretation influenced Durkheim’s theory. 49. Mona Ozouf, “La fete sous la Revolution francaise,” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de I’histoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1974), 3:268. 50. Ibid. 51. Ozouf, “La fete revolutionnaire: le renouvellement de l’imaginaire collectif,” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les fetes de la Revolution, p. 305. 52. Gumbrecht, “Chants revolutionnaires,” p. 251. 53. On revolutionary rhetoric, see the discussion by Hunt, “Rhetoric of Revolu¬ tion,” pp. 78-94.

The Music of Mortality

249

festivals. The counterpoint of death is this: At times, as when heroes or martyrs are being celebrated, death’s power is evoked in words and cadences of great solemnity; at other times, as when death is vowed against “the tyrants of Europe,” the tone will be strident and menacing. The festivals also include these checkpoints of gravity and menace, sometimes adding gaiety. For example, the so-called Festival of Chateauvieux (16 April 1792, and not to be confused with the celebration galeriens

mentioned

earlier),

commemorating

the

released

of the mutinous regiment but in many ways a death cere¬

monial, was muted and orderly, though not wanting in grandeur. On the other hand, could

even

be

death was festival in designated

a

“happy

Revolutionary France, and festival,”

like

the

so-called

“Festival of the Just Punishment of the Last King of the French,” inaugurated by Robespierre in Floreal, an II. This event, France’s negative way of celebrating its distant past by stigmatizing all its ‘tyrants” since time out of mind, was centred on a renewal of the republican

oath

and

an

invocation

to

the

Supreme

Being.

It

continued to unite the French throughout the Directory, though with diminishing levity and “carnavalesque.”54 But as late as 1797, at Angers, the dynasts of Europe could still be instructed: “Le monde a prononce...descendez au cercueil.”55 Patriotic odes and hymns joined the funereal celebrations substan¬ tially in the turbulence of 1792, with the widened polarization of feeling.

They now appeared side by side with the solemn death

marches. Their essential vocabulary (refined especially by Chenier) was keyed to that of the patriotic banners carried in the processions, e.g., those from the mass funeral for the republican victims of 10 August

1792:

“Aux manes des citoyens frangais / Morts pour la

defense de la liberte, / La patrie reconnaissante”; “Pleurez, epouses, meres & soeurs, / La perte des victimes immolees par les traitres; / Nous jurons, nous, de les venger.”56 Ozouf stresses the importance of the slogans, the interpretive dominion “entrusted to a thicket of placards and banners....”57

54. 1792), 1979), sous la

For the “Fete de Chateauvieux,” see Revolutions de Paris, no. 145 (14-21 April pp. 97-101, passim; and Marie-Louise Biver, Fetes revolutionnaires a Paris (Paris, pp. 47-49. For a discussion of the “Fete de la Juste Punition,” see Ozouf, “Fete Revolution,” pp. 269-275.

55. Bois, Les fetes a Angers, p. 21 On. 56. “To the departed spirits of French citizens, dead in defense of liberty, from a grateful nation.” “Weep, wives, mothers, and sisters, for the loss of these victims tram¬ pled down by the traitors; we swear, all of us, to avenge them.” Revolutions de Paris, no. 164 (25 August-1 September 1792), pp. 371-372. 57. Ozouf, “Fete sous la Revolution,” p. 260.

250

Mortal Politics

There was not much choral virtuosity beyond some spontaneous Qa ira at the Festival of Chateauvieux. Here, among other represen¬ tative emblems, were featured the Declaration of Rights chiselled on two heavy stone tablets; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Sidney, and Franklin;

two sarcophagi (“giving the festival a sombre tone”) in

memory of the Swiss dead; the forty galeriens marching amid troops of the

National Guard and preceded by young citoyennes bearing

their broken chains; and, finally, the famous chariot of David that had borne Voltaire to the Pantheon.58 But the moderates resolved to have their riposte, called the “Fete de la Loi,” on 3 June 1792, in honour of Simoneau, the mayor of Etampes, who had been assassi¬ nated by mobs three months earlier for trying to control a grain riot.

It,

too,

was

heavily

classical

and

allegorical,

designed

by

Quatremere de Quincy, republican and, one might say, “Girondin” in its message: “respect a la Loi...mourir pour la defendre.”59 At this festival, whose intent was to “freeze the Revolution,” the versatile Gossec composed the music to lyrics by Roucher. This text serves to illustrate a point about quite a few of these hymns: Salut et respect a la loi! Honneur au citoyen qui lui reste fidele! Triomphe au magistrat* Qui sait mourir pour elle! Salut et respect, et respect a la loi!... Nouveau peuple frangais,* Marche, marche sous son enseigne! La sainte liberte (& bis) Va marcher avec toi (8c bis). Salut et respect a la loi! Honneur au citoyen qui lui reste fidele! etc.60

58. Revolutions de Paris, no. 145 (14-21 April 1792), pp. 100-101. 59. See Biver, Fetes a Paris, pp. 50-51. 60. “Hail and respect for the law! / Honour to the citizen faithful to it! / Glory to the magistrate / Who knows how to die for it! / Hail and respect, respect for the lawl... “Newborn French people, / March, march beneath its banner! / Holy liberty (and repeat) / Will march along with you (and repeat). / Hail and respect for the law! / Honour to the citizen faithful to it!” etc. Text of hymns in Constant Pierre, ed., ...Musique des fetes et ceremonies de la Revolution franqaise... (Paris, 1889), pp. 357-365. Asterisks are explained in text below.

The Music of Mortality

251

The words, scarcely inspired, do unmistakably send out the signal of law and order. They do not say a great deal about the dead magis¬ trate, who appeared only as a pretext amid the tricoloured drapery, represented by a bust “with a small scar on the forehead and another on the chest.”61 The significant feature for us is that the lyrics could be recycled for later, republican purposes. Indeed, Pierre gives us two versions. Where I have placed asterisks, later usage substituted the phrases “a tout frangais” and “peuple republicain.” This is a delicate example of a wider phenomenon in French revo¬ lutionary musicology. We have also a “Hymne funebre en honneur de nos freres morts en combattant pour la liberte” (words by Joseph Lavallee, music by J.-F.-A. Lemiere). It included the phrase “manes sacres des vengeurs...” and was sung in a theatre on 25 August 1792 to commemorate “nos freres morts a la journee du 10....” Two years later, however, it was published and more widely sung, apparently with a more general application intended for the use of the new fetes decadaires.62 An even more interesting case is that of the powerful “Chant patriotique pour finauguration des bustes de Marat et Lepelletier” (1793), with lyrics by Coupigny and music by Gossec. Marat and Lepeletier, together with Chalier (executed at Lyons by the moder¬ ates),

framed the lore of Montagnard mythology and their busts

appeared everywhere during the brief reign of the Cult of Reason in the

late

autumn

and winter of

1793-1794.

For example,

at the

funeral of Lepeletier, the victim, half-naked on his deathbed, like a Pieta, “his head tilted and his body pale, but not disfigured, seem¬ ingly plunged into the calmest sleep,” made the secular stations-the pedestal of the former statue of Louis XIV, the Jacobins, the Church of Saint-Roch

(to

compensate

for

the

priests’

disdain),

and

the

Cordeliers Club—on his way to Pantheonization. There, surrounded by dense crowds, a choir sang the requisite hymn to liberty.63 I shall quote only the last of Coupigny’s four stanzas: Par le courage intrepide Qui vous fit braver la mort, Apprenez au coeur timide Tout l’eclat d’un pareil sort. Si la liberte de Rome

61. Biver, Fetes a Paris, p. 52. See the unfavourable comment in Revolutions de Paris, no. 152 (2-9 June 1792), p. 450. 62. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 364. 63. Revolutions de Paris, no. 185 (19-26 January 1793), pp. 226-228.

252

Mortal Politics

Trouva tant de defenseurs, C’est que l’ombre d’un grand homme Appelle encore des vengeurs.64 The vogue for these martyrs passed with the fission and shrinkage of the

Montagnard

faction

after

Thermidor,

when

the

government

attempted to refurbish the republican civil religion in an atmosphere of greater pluralism. Thus it is piquant to find that this hymn, word for word in all its stanzas, was published in a patriotic songbook under the more general title “Aux manes des citoyens morts a la defense de la liberte” some five years later (1798).65 Whatever emotional role the typical Revolutionary death hymn served in specific festivals, many of these specimens survived their particular

uses.

The

“republican”

language

of

these

verses

had

already been prominent under the 1789 monarchy. And since the most active musicians and lyricists became adroit in reaching the republican emotions of the people while not tipping their hand too much to factionalism, they and their work survived some dramatic volte-faces.

We

may

assume

that

the

republican

language

and

melodic effects achieved by these composers more or less reflected a common vision and vocabulary that united most of the Revolution, even

while

it

was

“devouring

its

children.”

In

this

respect,

the

Thermidorians were no less “republican” than their more radical predecessors. Moreover, they, too, were tarred with the brush of regicide. In the French Revolution, artists learned how to become practical politicians. They were more agile in lethal politics than many who mounted the tribune only to mount the scaffold shortly after.

The Linguistic Cohesion of the Republican Hymn

There

were

aspects

of Jacobinism

that

the

lyric

talents

of the

Republic could not stomach despite their other complicities: notably

64. “By the dauntless courage / With which you faced your death, / Teach timid hearts / All the brilliance of your deed. / If the liberty of Rome / Could find such stout defenders, / It’s because a great man’s ghost / Keeps calling for avengers.” Pierre, ed. Musique des jetes de la Revolution, p. 366. 65. In Recueil des chants, pp. 121-122.

The Music of Mortality atheism

and

Terror.

253

This may very well have been a reflex of

Freemasonry (persecuted by the Jacobins as a “particular interest” in 1793).

Although

(pace

David)

they

generally

feared

and

hated

Robespierre and wept no tears at the fall of his faction, they, as opportunistic

or

sympathetic

deists,

endorsed

a

worship

of

the

Supreme Being. Indeed, writing hymns to that Being and ignoring the Terror through the adoption of more uplifting subjects contrib¬ uted to their livelihood. They had an ironic revenge on the executed Robespierre in contributing to the elaborate festival for the transfer of Rousseau’s remains from Ermenonville to the Pantheon, accompa¬ nied by splendid pomp and music, including some of the hero’s own, on 20 Vendemiaire, an III. Gossec and Chenier once more collabo¬ rated:

Choirs of children, citizens, mothers, Genevans, and other

corporate groups sang their hymn at the ceremony.66 The event is lovingly described by Rousseau’s friend and disciple Mercier, who had shortly before been released from prison.67 But now heroic laurels were granted less frequently. The discon¬ certing

Montagnard

trio

of Lepeletier,

Marat,

and

Chalier were

pushed into the background. And Thermidor would have no truck with Robespierre’s last candidates for immortality: the youths Joseph Bara and Agricola Viala, scheduled for Pantheonization in an elabo¬ rate festival masterminded by David, after one delay, on, of all ironic dates-10 Thermidor, an II!68 Bara and Viala were by this time cele¬ brated everywhere for their exploits. The former, according to a “legend transmitted in popular lore,” was a little drummer-boy killed at the age of fourteen in the Vendee;69 the second, it was said, died at the age of thirteen

on

8 July

1793

while heroically resisting

“federalists” from Marseilles on the bank of the Durance River.70 Immersed

in

the

war

against

the

despots,

the Jacobin

regime

66. See, in Pierre, ed., Musique des fetes de la Revolution, “Hymne a Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” pp. 394ff. 67. Mercier, Nouveau Paris 3:227-230. For a good analysis of this event, see Jean Roussel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France apres la Revolution, le'gende (Paris, 1972), pp. 11-20.

1795-1830,

lectures et

68. See Biver, Fetes a Paris, pp. 199-201, for details. 69. Raymonde Monnier, “Le culte de Bara en fan II,” Annales historiques de la Revolution Jranfaise 52 (1980):321. 70. Michel Vovelle, “Agricol Viala ou le heros malheureux,” in ibid., p. 346.

254

Mortal Politics

appealed heavily to the age and gender groups of ordinary France, especially the youths, the mothers, and the aged.71 Bara and Viala-whatever the true circumstances of their deaths-were capital symbols in the propaganda. David painted Bara imaginatively; Robespierre proposed to Pantheonize him in a speech to the Convention of 8 Nivose, an II, and added Viala on 18 Floreal. Already multiple local festivals had been organized in their honour: Owing to the suddenness of the fall of the Robespierrists in Paris, many more were conducted in ignorance of the political upheaval.72 An astonishing total of at least fifty popular songs or hymns dedi¬ cated to one or both of the young heroes have survived.73 Their gist is conveyed in the following lines: Honneur, honneur a la memoire De Bara, de Viala, morts pour la liberte! Chantons, chantons, que nos hymnes de gloire Montent jusqu’au sejour de l’immortalite (8c bis).74 Console-toi, mere cherie, Et seche des pleurs superflus, Au lieu d’un heros qui n’est plus, Adopte pour enfants les fils de la Patrie! Le tien dans les coeurs vertueux A laisse de son nom la memoire immortelle; Les meres, les enfants, vous prendront pour modele, En vous admirant tous les deux.75 71. See, for example, “Chant fun£bre d’une mere sur le tombeau de son fils, mort pour la liberte," in France, Convention nationale, 1792-1795, comite d’instruction publique, Recueil des actions heroiques et civiques des republicans frangais (Paris, 1794), p. 59. In his L’education morale et civique, avant et pendant le Revolution, 1700-1808 (Paris, 1884), p. 249, Augustin Sicard describes a piece of popular literature, La vie et la mort re'publicaines du petit Emilien. This revolutionary child learned the hatred of kings from his mother at the age of two. He called Louis XVI “Monsieur Capet.” About to die himself, the toddler was consoled by the just punishment of the “traitor” Bailly. 72. For example, in Alen^on and Laigle (Orne). See Louis Duval, Quelques mots sur les fetes nationales de la Revolution (Alencon, 1882), pp. 7-8.

73. Pierre, Les hymnes et les chansons, p. 41. 74. “Honour, honour to the memory / Of Bara and Viala, who died for libertyl / Sing, sing, so that our hymns of glory / May mount to the place of immortality! (and repeat).” “Hymne chante par le peuple k la fete de Bara et Viala, le 10 Thermidor 1794" (words: Davrigny; music: Mehul), in Pierre, Musique des fetes de la Revolution, p. 388. 75. “Console yourself, dear mother, / And dry your flood of tears; / Instead of a hero who is gone, / Make the nation’s sons your wardsl / In every virtuous heart

The Music of Mortality

255

Human beings accustomed to the mawkish lyrics that arise out of modern democratic wars will indeed the

family link

instinctively recognize the traits.

If

of Old Regime France had been symbolically

severed by the deeds of the new order, it was imperative to rebuild it on a patriotism of parentage and soil, with antiquity supplying the model. Yet, for the Thermidorian succession, Bara and Viala were too

much

cancelled.

for

an

unwieldy

Mirabeau,

Pantheon—and

enshrined

by

their

the

privileges

earlier

wave

were

of

the

Revolution, had been ejected when Marat entered (on 13 September 1793). In February 1795 there was a mass housecleaning: out went Marat,

Lepeletier,

and

Chalier,

in

execration.

All

in

all,

the

Pantheon was a precarious domicile for these manes. Soon only the gens de lettres—Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau—remained. Of all the heroes who had been “Pantheonized” besides the great writers,

one,

martyrs, civil

war.

Mirabeau,

died

of

natural

causes.

Five

died

as

struck down by their fellow French in the vengeance of Only

“untrustworthy

one,

General

generals”

Dampierre,

of Marat and

clearly

Robespierre,

one died

of

the

at

the

hands of the foreign enemy, in a losing battle on 9 May 1793 (he was cleared out with Marat).76 France was carniverous on its new apostolate, both in death and after. Oddly, three had been nobles (Mirabeau, Lepeletier, and Dampierre). The patronage of Bara and Viala denied them their canonization. But, as we have noted, there is a clear continuity of the revolu¬ tionary hymn from

1792 to 1798, without regard to regime, that

reinforces the major motto of republican solidarity: “vivre libre ou mourir.” Lebrun sounds it in 1792: Non, non, rien n’est inaccessible A qui pretend vaincre ou perir: Ce cri, vivre libre ou mourir! Est le serment d’etre invincible.77 your son / Left his undying memory; / Mothers and children take you as models, / Admiring both the old and young.” “Chant republicain sur la mort d’Agricola Viala, soldat de XI pic] ans, mort en combattant pour la patrie, 1794” (words: Coupigny; music: F. Devienne), in ibid., p. 393. 76. There were, of course, non-Pantheonized exceptions, like Major Beaurepaire, who is supposed to have committed “heroic suicide,” rather than surrender Verdun to the Prussians in 1792. On Beaurepaire, see Edmond Pionnier, Essai sur Vhistoire de la Revolution

a

Verdun,

1789-1795

(Nancy,

1905),

pp.

191-232.

Beaurepaire,

who

commanded a Maine-et-Loire regiment, had a splendid festival at Angers on October 1792. See Bois, Les fetes a Angers, pp. 6-7.

14

77. “No, no, there is nothing beyond reach / Of those who claim to conquer or to perish: / That mighty shout, live free or die! / Is the oath of the unconquerable.” P.-D. E. Lebrun, “Ode patriotique sur les evenemens de 1792,” in Poesies nationales de la

256

Mortal Politics

In 1793, an anonymous hymn (to the tune of the Marseillaise) runs: Souvent on a jure sans gloire Ou la mort ou la liberte; Ne jurons plus que la victoire; C’est jurer l’immortalite. ...nous partons Pour le triomphe et la vengeance.78 At this same time, young volunteer soldiers are enjoined: Que les infames scelerats Plonges dans les sombres abimes, Trouvent dans la nuit du trepas La juste peine de leurs crimes. De vaincre uniquement jaloux Ne craignant ni mort, ni blessure, Jeunes guerriers, promettez tous D’oublier meme la Nature....79 And four years later we can still read: J’ai jure de mourir libre, Et je tiendrai mon serment. Que le pape, au bord du Tibre, Lance son foudre impuissant; J’ai jure de mourir libre, Et je tiendrai mon serment.80 These hymns were glue for republicanism. Proclaiming sacrifice and indivisibility, they penetrated all corners of the organized commu¬ nity, filling its public space not only at festivals but in the constant Revolution, p. 134.

78. “Cool of heart, we oftimes swore / Death or liberty; / Let’s now swear to win the war, / Swearing immortality... / ...we set out / For triumph and for vengeance.” “Hymne aux republicans” (1793), in ibid., pp. 119-120. 79. “May the wicked scoundrels / Down to depths of darkness sent / Find in that night of death / Their crimes’ just punishment. / To conquer proudly like no others, / Fearing neither wounds nor death, / That we ask of you, young warriors, / Nature herself you must forget.” “Couplets pour le depart des jeunes volontaires,” France, Arch, nat., C 285, 832/17. 80. I swore that I would die free, / And I will keep my oath. / Let the Pope on Tiber’s shore / Hurl his mock thunderbolt; / 1 swore that I would die free, / And I will keep my oath.” “Ronde patriotique,” in Recueil des chants, p. 127.

The Music of Mortality

257

meetings of the patriotic clubs. They even invaded the legislature. When the Convention, at its session of 26 Nivose, an II, received a musical deputation and ordered the printing of its lyrics in the offi¬ cial minutes, Danton rather testily objected that “the Bulletin of the Convention is certainly not intended to spread poems throughout the republic, but good laws drawn up in good prose.”81 He was chal¬ lenged on this by another deputy. While not backing down, he had to concede that “we have not founded a republic of Visigoths....” Lyric art had its place in official politics. The continuity of the “hymns of death” is striking. Only slight erasures

and

changes

suggest

the demands

of factional

struggle:

Some instances have been given. After all, the generality of words like

scelerats,

“monstres,” and “esclaves,” imbedded in a structure

of classical formalism, could accuse different persons at different times. The republican language of the Gironde, the Montagne, and the

Thermidorians was indeed a shared language in which each

hostile faction interpreted what has been called the “transparency” of politics. Paradoxically, just as politics tore newborn France apart for several years, political expression in song, centering on the slogan “live free or die,” tended to promote unity beneath the deadly quar¬ rels. This homogeneity of expression is further illustrated by lyrics of post-Thermidor celebrating two distinctly hostile positions. When on 1

Prairial,

an

III,

some

sans-culottes

invaded

the

Convention,

murdering the deputy Feraud, who had risen to resist them, and depositing his head on the desk of the astonished Boissy d’Anglas, the president of the session, that martyred lawmaker was honoured as follows: Avec les Decius au temple de memoire, Apotre de l’humanite, II recueille le prix que reserve la gloire Aux martyrs de la liberte. Sur le senat Frangais jette un regard propice, O toi que nous avons perdu! Et que ton ombre encor plane sur l’edifice Et des lois et de la vertu.82 81. Reimpression de Vancien Moniteur, XIX, no. 117, 27 Nivose, an II, p. 217. 82. “In memory’s shrine he joins the Decii, / Apostle of humanity; / He gains the prize that glory grants / To martyrs for our liberty. / O thou whom we have lost, / Favour the French lawgivers with thy gaze! / May thy brave spirit still inform / This place of laws and virtue we have raised.” “Chant funebre £ la memoire du representant du peuple Feraud, assassine a son poste le ler prairial an 3e de la Republique,” 1795 (words: Baour Lormian; music: Mehul), in Pierre, Musique des fetes de la Revolu¬ tion, pp. 314-316.

258

Mortal Politics

And when, at about the same time, Romme and Soubrany, the last of the true-blue Montagnards, committed suicide in Catonic despair, these words were placed in their mouths by a grieving poet: Liberte... Decouvre aux siecles a venir Tout l’eclat de notre innocence: Dis-leur que nous dumes mourir Pour te conserver a la France.83 The talisman word “liberty,” the penchant for Roman heroic echoes, a paganly decorated deism, and a burgeoning nationalist feeling are the chief ingredients of these mortuary stanzas. We might wish to bring the statistical methods and further refine¬ ments of “lexicometry”

to bear on these materials to clinch our

point.84 Unfortunately, although there is now a splendid data bank for much French literary material, it does not extend to texts of this kind. My conviction is, however, that a practiced eye can draw useful inferences from a sufficient quantity of reading, notation, and reflec¬ tion. I have carefully scrutinized about fifty specimens of what may be called Revolutionary “death hymns” from a variety of sources, and I am certain that their principal or root vocabulary of evocative words very much resembles the following:85 Abattre, abime, amour, autel, avenir, avilir. Bonheur. Cercueil, cher (cheri), ciel, citoyen, coeur, combattre, confondre, consoler, coup, courage, crime, cruel. Danger, defenseur, despote, destin, deuil, digne, droit. Enfant, ennemi, esclave, esperance. Fete, feu, fils, flambeau, flamme. Glaive, gloire, guerre. Heros, heureux, honneur.

83. “Liberty!... / Reveal for the centuries to come / The bright blaze of our inno¬ cence: / Tell them it was our lot to die / To keep France free in permanence." “Hymne des derniers Montagnards,” in Annates revolutionnaires 10 (1918):413. Baudot describes the scene as

Cassius and Brutus in their last moments.” Marc-Antoine

Baudot, Notes historiques sur la Convention nationale, le directoire, I’empire et I’exil des volants (Geneva, 1974), p. 79. 84. See Regine Robin, Histoire et linguistique (Paris, 1973), pp. 124-157. 85. Of course there would be an altered lexicon for other styles of revolutionary hymns, e.g., in praise of agriculture.

The Music of Mortality

259

Immoler, immortalite, infame. Joug, jour, jurer. Liberte (libre), loi. Manes, marcher, martyr, memoire, mere, monde, monstre, mort (mourir). Nature, nuit. Ombres, oublier. Patrie, pere, peril, perir, peuple, pleurs. Raison, rayon, republique, reveiller. Sacre, sacrifier, sang, serment, souverain, sublime, supplice.

soleil,

sombre,

sort,

soutien,

Temple, tombeau, trembler, trepas, triomphe, tyran. Univers, urne. Vengeance (vengeur), vertu, victime, victoire (vaincre), vie, voix. This is very much a lexicon of moral absolutes (e.g., vertu-crime), of intensely active and emotional verbs (abattre, jurer, marcher, trem¬ bler),

of

qualitative

esclave-libre;

dichotomies

peril-victoire),

and

(abime—ciel;

trepas—immortalite;

of

decorum

classical

(flamme,

glaive, joug, manes, serment, supplice, temple, urne). In action, the words produce a suspensefulness between the basic threat of a tele¬ scoped past (joug, tyran, and the fear of “oublier”) and a scarcely palpable future (bonheur, esperance, triomphe), mediated by words belonging to no particular time. Death is worth its price in these songs, both to the “victimes” and to their survivors (“meres,” “peres,” “freres”), for it promises “liberte.” But survival is also stressed, if not in “victoire,” then in “gloire” and “immortalite,” ad astra.

“Mourir

pour sauver la patrie,” runs a hymn of 1794 by Philippon, “C’est naitre a l’immortalite.”86 These

are of course

the

deposits of a literary culture which,

nevertheless, managed to touch a large population quite effectively through the collective lyric practice of the festival (much as obscure words in church hymns are sung lustily by Christian congregations). “Tout finit par des chansons,” said Beaumarchais’s Figaro, propheti¬ cally. The chants revolutionnaires, both by their restorative power of incantation

and

the

habitus

they

created

among

often

fractious

climates of opinion, were a vehicle of republican unity. Yet, however powerful a tool for a political-crisis setting, the Revolutionary hymn of death was flawed in three ways: by its unavoidable sous-entendu of fratricide, by the fretful tensions it engendered for ordinary life, and by its insouciance toward ordinary death. The Revolutionaries may 86. “L’eternel,” in Poesies nationales de la Revolution, p. 214.

260

Mortal Politics

have been enjoined to “oublier meme la Nature.”87 But how could a whole nation sustain that command? Moreover, there were other elements built into the celebration of republican death that more pointedly challenged the ideal of equality. 87. See above, p. 256.

The Republic of Death: One and Divisible Chapter 11

Rome and Athens

The deputies of the three estates, gathered at Versailles in 1789 in concert and in competition, launched the rhetoric of a new France. In part this was a harvest of hopes and grievances; in part it was the sowing of a new crop of ideals. Uninterpreted, the resonant series of “il n’y a plus...” that served as preamble to the Constitution of 1791 could be taken as a manifesto of the most austere equality.1 But the moribund Old Regime was still, in many ways, an existing society of functional

as

well

as

frivolous

inequalities.

To

level

it

with

the

language of revolutionary law was to create a vacuum that could only tempt

new

species of hierarchy.

As

Rousseau

so well

knew,

the

French were not Swiss mountaineers. Moreover, the new France would not be born in peace, but in strife. Strife not only dissolves fraternity; it creates a need for heroic leaders,

saints of the vita activa,

against

the

best-intentioned

and it brings them to the fore

will

for

egalitarian

indivisibility.

Distinction pursues its elect into and beyond the grave: for there are no heroes without hero-worship. More ordinary persons are either willing

or prudent

enough

to

become

the

votaries.

The

French

republic faced the problem of creating the moeurs of popular equality under

the

umbrella of a

heroism

rendered virtually traditionless

except for some souvenirs of antiquity that had escaped from the closet of the colleges.

The result was not the rebirth of the self-

sufficient Roman farmer-soldier, but the encouragement of a Roman vulgus or plebs. Here we shall pursue one line of argument why this was so, and had to be the case.

1. See Pierre Goubert, L'Ancien Regime, 2 vols., 4th ed. (Paris, 1969), 1:13-14.

262

Mortal Politics

Though equality was much declaimed, few French thought of having a republic in 1789. In 1791, after the “flight to Varennes,” thousands demanded it; and it became fait accompli on 21 September 1792. Created both by fate and by design, this republic desperately required moral and spiritual underpinnings, which it neither wished to nor could obtain from the traditional Catholic religion. Existing republics (Switzerland’s cantons, Venice, and the United States) were anomalous models. The classically bred French searched in antiquity for guidance, not so much for political institutions as for the language and ritual of civic cohesion. Republican leaders would deco¬ rate the pallid eighteenth-century deism that most of them shared2 with pagan emblems of authority. As M.-J. Chenier declared on 5 November 1793: “Release the sons of the Republic from the yoke of theocracy that still burdens them....If you are free of prejudice and worthy to represent the French nation, you can found the single universal religion on the debris of dethroned superstition.”3 That religion, deist in character, appealing to “nature” as a norm, but instantiated by antique spectacle, concerns us here only as it bears on dying for the fatherland under the new order of equality. We must first ask the question: what models had the French republican regime at hand, and what might its rulers have tried to create from them for the celebration of republican death? Such a question, we must grant, is artificially separated from certain stub¬ born features of the social landscape. In the first place, there were the impedimenta of submerged Catholicism, familiar and close to daily experience: as the Abbe Pluche had put it in a much-read text, these repeated religious feasts “bring with them from one week to the next, from one century to another, proof of the Church’s saving mission....Ever the same altars, the same vessels, the same liturgy, the same authority, a mission and significance which cannot change.”4 The revolutionaries would attempt to conquer Catholicism, first by neutralizing it in the “liberte des cultes,” then by stuffing its temples with profane objects and by carrying public worship out of doors. Secondly, there were implacable features of philosophical modernity (see chapter 2), admittedly of little meaning to the average person, that could accommodate pagan ritual only as an allegorical aesthetic 2. Baudot, Notes sur la Convention nationale, p. 159. 3. Quoted in F.-V. Alphonse Aulard, Le culte de la raison et de I’Etre supreme, 2d ed. (Paris, 1904), p. 35. 4. Abbe Antoine Pluche, Le spectacle de la nature, quoted in Bernard Groethuysen, The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France, trans. Mary Ilford

(New York, 1968), p. 5. The English title misleadingly translates Origines de l'esprit bourgeois en France, vol. 1, L’Eglise et la bourgeoisie (Paris, 1927).

The Republic of Death

263

and for critical use. Finally, not all the French radicals were disposed to play at antique charades: Had they not managed to go beyond their ancestors in design and deeds? As Mirabeau had written for a speech that death prevented him from delivering: “Perhaps it is time for Frenchmen not to go to school to ancient Rome any more than to modern Rome.”5 And as the Revolutions de Paris wrote in 1792: Let us not be copycats....We should not borrow from the ancients, because in the eyes of other peoples, our contemporaries, we have become their equals. Since the French Revolution there hasn’t been so much talk about Greeks and Romans.”6 These circumstances might render the question moot. However, strenuous efforts were made (and not with complete failure) in the last decade of the eighteenth century to shape French beliefs and practices with the eclectic tools of antiquity. If the republicans were determined to endow their regime’s passion for equality with an ancient patina, even while living in a Newtonian universe still heavily Christianized, they could scarcely have done better than to respect the Athenian model—one that had, over at least a century of glory, suited the democratic impulse within a burgeoning cultural commu¬ nity. Despite some motions in this direction, the French basically opted for Rome. No doubt they were misled about the incomparable stature of the Roman republic by their training and literature. Brutuses and Gracchi influenced their mental horizon too much, and their political conduct too slavishly mimed the Roman examples of faction and strife. The greatest need of the French was for a creation of patriotic solidarity in life and in death. Roman prec¬ edents were not equal to providing it. Rome touched French culture far more deeply than did the Greeks. The French spoke an allied and descended language, and studied far more Latin in their schools. For pupils of the colleges, Greek grammar began in the sixth and fifth classes, but there was no literature until the fourth. In the Greek curriculum of both the Jesuit and Oratorian schools, a mixture of classical Greek orators and poets as well as parts of the Bible and the Church Fathers was studied. The range did include such lively and patriotic texts as Xenophon, Isocrates, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and Plutarch. But the students were far more competent in Latin, and Greek often came by translation.7 5. Gabriel-Honore de Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, Ouvrages de Mirabeau, 9 vols. (Paris, 1825-1827), “Discours sur l’egalite des partages,” 9:164. The speech was deliv¬ ered to the National Assembly by Talleyrand. 6. Revolutions de Paris, no. 140 (10-17 March 1792), p. 537; cf. no. 159, p. 18. 7. Sicard, Les etudes avant la Revolution, pp. 558-560.

264

Mortal Politics

Athens was by no means always seen to advantage in eighteenthcentury France, especially among the clergy who taught these lessons to philosophe pupils. It had the reputation of being a riotous and unsteady democracy. Moreover, Greece was bifurcated. Spartan demeanour and refusal of luxury were often found more appealing as foils against the extravagance and softness of the moeurs du siecle. As Mably put it ardently: “In reading [Lacedemonian] history, we feel ourselves aglow...our soul rises and seems to want to cross the narrow boundaries within which the corruption of our century holds us.”8 Despite Mably’s few good words for Pericles and Phocion, Athens, being politically vagrant and licentious, was not his preferred state.9 The pro-Spartan Rousseau went so far as to write that “Athens was never in effect a democracy, but a very tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned men and orators.”10 Athens became a code word for the worldly France of Voltaire and the econo¬ mists.11 Rousseau’s antagonist Bordes defended Athens in this sense: It was no less warlike than Sparta, “but more learned, ingenious, and magnificent, giving birth to all the arts and talents.”12 To leap ahead, Athens was not exactly Jacobin in its cluster of associations: that fact fixed some of the ideological borders of the Revolutionary map. Too late, the ill-fated Camille Desmoulins hailed the Athenians as “the true republicans, the permanent democrats, by principle and by instinct,” because they had maintained free speech and writing and had allowed great figures to be lampooned in the theatre.13 However, Athens had not just fostered a free culture; she had also furnished the most serviceable ideology for patriotic death. Athens had in fact invented the democratic and public celebration of those who had died nobly for the fatherland. Most of this back¬ ground is given in Thucydides’s preliminaries to the funeral oration of Pericles, and was well known to literate French.14 In the winter of each year of warfare, the city, having recovered the remains of its slain soldiers, honoured them collectively and anonymously as citi¬ zens (although their tribal affiliations were recognized). They were 8. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Observations sur I’histoire des Grecs, in Oeuvres completes 4:218. 9. Ibid., pp. 79, 138. 10. Rousseau, “Economic politique,” in Oeuvres completes 3:246. 11. All this is especially well canvassed in Luciano Guerci, Liberta degli antichi e liberta dei moderni: Sparta, Atene, e i philosophes nella Francia del Settecento (Naples, 1979). 12. Charles Bordes, Second discours sur les avantages des sciences et des arts (Lyons 1753), p. 273. 13. Camille Desmoulins, in Henri Calvet, ed., Le vieux Cordelier (Paris, 1936), no 7, p. 230. 14. Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. 2, chap. 34, pp. 1-7.

The Republic of Death

265

dignified as heroes through the formulaic and yet mobile discourse of a citizen orator chosen by the city. That orator could call upon the deeds of the past, more or less compacted within the democratic present, concentrating rapidly on these, praising the political excel¬ lence of the city, and then commending the slain to an immortality of glory and their sons to the protection and care of the common¬ wealth. Unique in Hellas, the Athenian funeral oration and public ceremony are believed to have been a product and symptom of democratic government, apparently dating back no further than the battle of Plataea and, according to the best evidence, probably estab¬ lished in 464 B.C.15 Athens was the only polis to recover the ashes of its dead, in preference to burying them on the field of battle (which, however, as a particular honour, had been granted to the fallen heroes of Marathon).16 Moreover, other Greek cities, having different political regimes, bestowed funeral honours more selec¬ tively: public lamentations of this sort in Sparta were reserved to kings.17 Athenian families were not forbidden to mourn their dead in an associated private ceremony or to erect monuments (indeed the account of these steles, lining the Ceramic, fired the French necropolitan imagination); but it is the immortality granted by the city that truly made dying worthwhile. Only six examples of the Athenian epitaphios survive; all are, on some count, suspect, except the latest, written by Hyperides, which is of no bearing here because it was reconstructed only in the nine¬ teenth century. The oration of Pericles is a report; the fragment of Gorgias, also an attribution, was by a foreign sophist not eligible to deliver the oration; the same eligibility defect is true of the fine speech of Lysias, who was a metic; controversies have long been waged over the authenticity of Demosthenes’s contribution; and Plato’s dialogue Menexenus might be a kind of satire, given the polit¬ ical leanings of the author and the concealments he employs.18 Nevertheless, as Nicole Loraux has brilliantly demonstrated, a consolidated view of these texts gives special insight into the ideology of Athenian democracy, not least its detemporalization of history as a teleological vindication of the current regime and its paideia. The honoured dead are subtly blended with Pindaric heroes and placed in a world apart, the eternal treasury of the fatherland, in which no worldly honour is useful as currency. Their orphans will be favoured

15. Loraux, L’invention d’Athenes, p. 30. 16. Ibid., p. 19. 17. Ibid., p. 46. 18. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

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by the state and will be expected, the chance arising, to prove worthy of the deeds of their fathers. Their widows will be consoled by glory, and enjoined to make their lamentations decorously. It is also important that the Athenians believed themselves autochtho¬ nous, earliest dwellers in their own land, unlike the rest of the Greeks.19 Since, according to legend, Attica had the poorest of soils, it was not tempting to conquerors. By this myth the Athenians were able to imagine and exploit the notion of self-creation and eternality, an unsullied progression toward their proud democracy. The eighteenth-century French were curious enough about these practices. An extended description, based on Thucydides, is provided in the article “Funerailles” of the Encyclopedic by Jaucourt.20 Almost certainly the Athenian burial practices were taken to be normative, since the great bulk of evidence about Greek funerals (except for the curiosities of Pausanius) came from Athenian sources. However, Chenier rather muddled the Greeks, and so did Robespierre: for when they thought of Greeks, they tended to focus on great men like Aristides, Lycurgus, Timoleon, and Epaminondas, who of course did not share the same civic origin. Plutarch’s “parallel lives” are perhaps partly responsible for this, but there is another, more imme¬ diate influence. In February 1789, Jean-Jacques Barthelemy, a distinguished numismatist and member of the Academie des inscriptions et belleslettres and, belatedly, the Academie frangaise, brought out a work of some thirty years’ labour, in four ample volumes, called Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece. This account, scholarly and somewhat Fenelonian at the same time, appears to have seized the contempo¬ rary imagination. As the author writes for a later edition: “Its success surpassed all my hope; the public greeted it with extraordinary kind¬ ness; French and foreign newspapers sang its praise.”21 More than half a century later, an encyclopedist, while granting that some of the scholarship was hoary, could comment: “Few works have been so often reprinted.”22 Barthelemy’s Greek study just happened to coin¬ cide with the Revolution: He was by then an old man, in no way radical or politically involved (imprisoned under the Terror, he died 19. Cf. Demosthenens, Epitaphios (LX), 4; Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, bk. 2, chap. 34, p. 1. 20. Article “Funerailles,” Encyclope'die 7:368a-374a. The article covers the burial practices of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Lurks, Chinese, American savages, Ethiopians, and Christian Europeans. 21. Jean-Jacques Barthelemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grece, vers le milieu du quatrieme siecle avant l’ere vulgaire..., 7 vols. (Paris, 1824), l:civ.

22. Nouvelle biographie generate... (Paris, 1859), 4:623.

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in 1795), a former protege of the Due de Choiseul, whom he had met on a trip in Italy, and an enemy of d’Alembert. Cast within a convention pleasing to the French esprit (“A Scythian named Anacharsis visits Greece a few years before the birth of Alexander the Great...”),23 these volumes were also by far the fullest account available in the French language of all that could be gleaned of ancient Greek culture—from what might be legitimately called an anthropological point of view. Barthelemy’s method was topical and geographical, rather than historical: he compacted all his literary erudition within an impressive range of subjects and then, as it were, rewrote a synthetic account of Greek life from these sources (which he footnoted). He most certainly did not fail to distinguish between Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes: But the impact on his avid readers was probably more like an undifferentiated cascade. Nobody remotely interested in antiquity could have missed this work: no doubt the French of the 1790s saw Greece through Barthelemy. Barthelemy did not have a vast amount to say about Greek funerals, though of course he mentioned them. As an Old Regime scholar, he gave them no special illumination as patriotic events. His description of Athenian death is ample and faithful to existing sources (a composite based on Euripides, Sophocles, Lucian, Aristophanes, Theophrastus, Aristotle, Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes, and a few others).24 He also makes mention of the customs surrounding death in battle (notably following Thucydides and Lysias).25 What would strike certain revolutionary critics was his lack of patriotic imagination, or, rather, his repression of it in his wider curiosity. Writing in 1801, an inferior successor Chaussard, whose rather frothy work professed to disclose the “histoire interieure des peuples, ”26 directly adverted to “the cowardly reserve and political silence kept by this agent (courtisan) of Choiseul regarding practices of antiquity...tending to nurture the republican spirit and spread ideas of liberty.”27 That reference is to “fetes heroi'ques.” Poor Barthelemy: he simply did not anticipate what the new order would require of him. The fact is that his pilot research may have made Athens less exemplary to revolutionary readers. However, as we shall see, there are other reasons why the French might have found the Athenian funeral model uncongenial. 23. J.-J. Barthelemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis, l:cxiii. 24. Ibid., pp. 149-155. 25. Ibid., pp. 239-241. 26. Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, Fetes et courtisanes de la Grece, 4 vols., 4th ed. (Paris, 1821), l:vii. 27. Ibid., 3:44n.

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Speaking for the Republican Dead

Here I shall try to trace a more genuine but halting Athenian infu¬ sion, this time from a philologist, not a numismatist. During the last decade of the Old Regime, the main champion of Greek studies in France was an impeccable cleric, the Abbe Athanase Auger, who taught in a college in Rouen. “The Greeks,” he wrote, “have always been and should always be our models of what is truly beautiful in literature as well as in art. Our finest authors have copied their style from the Greeks.”28 Auger is described as a learned, saintly, and peaceful man whose life was singlemindedly given over to the clas¬ sics. He, too, was a member of the Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres as well as a “brother” of the intellectually inclined Loge des neuf soeurs in Auteuil.29 He published extensive translations of Lycias and Isocrates,30 as well as two volumes of Harangues tire'es des historiens grecs, which included the funeral oration of Pericles as reported by Thucydides. Thus, just before the Revolution, he had put into French three of the six epitaphioi. With his tasteful and sinewy prose, Auger was at the centre of the modest Greek revival of his time. Auger’s classical enthusiasm inclined him very much to support of the Revolution. Among his last writings are a Catechisme du citoyen franqais and a pamphlet called Moyens d’assurer la Revolution: both are more Roman than Greek in political tone. However, Auger, “pretre a Rouen,” was above all a Christian who concluded his “catechism” with a “citizen’s prayer”: “Make us love the pure and holy religion of which Thou art the author....”31 Auger shows us how a man of his time could remain a devout Catholic, a classical scholar, and a propo¬ nent of the Revolution-not to mention an admirer of Rousseau (“qui avoit l’esprit des anciens”). He had the discretion to die in early 1792 before having to commit himself to agonizing choices.

28. Athanase Auger, “Discours preliminaire,” in Harangues tire'es d’He'rodote, de Thucydide, des historiens grecs, de Xenophon..., 2 vols. (Paris, 1788), l:vii.

29. Michaud, ed., Biographie universelle 2:422. 30. Demosthenes is included in Oeuvres completes d’Isocrate, auxquelles on a joint quelques discours analogues d ceux de cet orateur, tires de Platon, de Thucydide, de Xenophon, de Demosthene, d Antiphon, de Gorgias, d Antisthene et d’Alcidamas, trans. Athanase Auger,

3 vols. (Paris, 1781); for Lysias, Oeuvres completes de Lysias, trans. Athanase Auger (Paris, 1783). 31. Athanase Auger, Catechisme du citoyen frangais compose de Vesprit et de la lettre de la nouvelle constitution (Paris, 1791), in fine.

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To honour Auger a eulogy was read at the Loge des neuf soeurs on 25 March 1792. Its author was that budding litterateur and statesman Herault de Sechelles, a deputy of the Legislative Assembly, and later (until his arrest) a member of the Convention and of the Committee of Public Safety, and principal author of the Constitution of 1793. Herault had been Auger’s pupil in Greek. His interesting eulogy shows us how the academic form of the genre (see chapter 3) and the patriotic encomium could combine. “Homme simple et utile! Vertueux ecrivain!” he begins. He laments that public business prevented him from following his mentor’s coffin and then quickly switches the blame of neglect to Auger’s academic colleagues, who were also absent.32 Herault stresses Auger’s revival of Demosthenes, “a sublime genius who, by the strength of his arguments alone, protected a fatherland and other republics that a king wanted to subject.”33 Thanks to Auger, the French had this and other Greek models to call on. When the Revolution came, Auger had “pleaded the cause of humanity and suspended his studies” in order to enlighten his fellow citizens.34 “In dying,” Herault tells Auger, “you have seen a free country that is resolved never to lose its freedom.” He concludes with the wish, familiar to us from the dialogues of the dead, that his mentor’s shade may find happiness in the Elysian Fields, conversing freely with the likes of Lysias, Aeschinus, and Isocrates.35 Through Herault de Sechelles, Auger’s teaching and the epideictic prose of his Greek translations made some mark on the rhetorical resources of the Revolution. The pupil, it must be added, was inclined to bend his lessons in an effusive and Romantic direc¬ tion, as can be observed in his later command performance at the “Fete de l’unite” of August 17 9 3.36 Here, however, we need to gain some grasp of Auger’s own prose. I have chosen the opening passage of his rendering of Pericles’s funeral oration, because it will be immediately familiar to most readers, who can then measure their 32. Marie-Jean Herault de Sechelles, “Eloge d’Athanase Auger,” in Oeuvres litteraires, ed. Emile Dard (Paris, 1907), p. 227.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., p. 228. Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., p. 241. As president of the Convention and chief author of the ill-starred Constitution

of 1793, Herault presided over this festival. Its most prominent symbol was an allegor¬ ical statue of Nature with water spouting from its breasts. “O Nature,” Herault declared, “receive the expression of the eternal attachment of the French to thy laws, and may these fertile waters gushing from thy breasts consecrate...the oaths France swears to thee today.” Whereupon he took a cup, intercepted some of that pure liquid, and drank deeply. See Biver, Fetes a Paris, p. 71.

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recognition against the words in which the French revolutionaries received their Thucydides: Les orateurs qui parlent en ce lieu & dans les memes circon stances, ne manquent pas de vanter comme sage, la coutume d’ajouter aux honneurs d’une sepulture publique, l’eloge des guerriers morts les armes a la main. Pour moi, j’ai toujours pense qu’il etoit superflu de louer par des paroles les heros assez loues par leurs actions; qu’il suffisoit de celebrer leur memoire, ainsi que nous faisons ici, par d’honorables funerailles, sans compromettre la gloire d’un grand nombre d’hommes, en la faisant dependre de l’eloquence d’un seul, qui, de quelque maniere qu’il parle, n’est jamais sur de trouver des auditeurs favorables....Mais puisque nos ancetres ont fait une loi d’une coutume qu’ils ont regardee comme sage, je vais m’y conformer moi-meme, & tacher de justifier votre confiance en me rapprochant le plus qu’il me sera possible des dispositions de chacun de vous. Je parlerai d’abord de nos ancetres, c’est une justice & un honneur qui leur sont dus. De tout temps possesseurs du pays que nous habitons, ils font defendu par leur courage, & font transmis a leurs descendans libre comme ils l’avoient possede. Sans doute, ils meritent de grands eloges, mais leurs enfans, qui sont nos peres, en meritent de plus grands encore....Ils...ont porte la ville d’Athenes a ce point de grandeur ou nous la voyons aujourd’hui....37

37. The orators who have spoken in this place, under these same circumstances, have never failed to commend as wise the custom of adding to public burial honours a speech in praise of the warriors who died fighting. My own constant feeling has been that it was excessive to praise with words heroes whose own deeds praise them enough; that it sufficed to celebrate their memory, just as we are doing here, with funeral rites that do them honour, so that we would not diminish the glory of a great many men by making it depend on the eloquence of a single one, who, no matter how well he spoke, could never be sure of finding an approving audience....But since our ancestors turned a custom they thought wise into law, I shall follow their prescription and make my best effort to earn your confidence by coming as close as I can to the feelings that each of you is experiencing. First I will speak of our ancestors; for that justice and that honour are owing to them. From the beginning of time settled on the land where we now dwell, they defended it by their courage, and handed it down free to their descendants just as they had possessed it. No doubt they are worthy of high praise, but their children, our fathers, deserve even higher praise....They...have borne the city of Athens to that pinnacle of greatness where we see it today....” Auger, Harangues tire'es des historiens 1:305-307.

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I have quoted at this length to show the hardy simplicity of Auger’s language, a tough and gristy French little practiced in his time. It is certainly faithful to the spirit of Thucydides-if not to the complete letter38 —and it will be useful to compare this prose to following examples. In the first glow of revolution (whose symbol was the 1790 Festival of the Federation), a classicism bathed in the magic of “liberty” captured much of the emotional ground from Talleyrand’s manipulative civil Catholicism. Athens had some part here. For example, Mirabeau, in a speech on the subject of fetes publiques, evoked the image of respect paid to their dead warriors by the Greeks after Marathon, although he explicitly warned against “copying.”39 The first plausibly Athenian oratorical performance was a part of the massive funeral celebration for the citizens who had died storming the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, when the monarchy fell. This spectacular event was to have taken place on 25 August, the former feast of Saint-Louis, but tardiness in the construction of a vast Egyptian pyramid by the architect Palloi delayed it for two days. The pyramid filled the entire span of the “grand bassin” directly in front of the palace from which the lethal fire had come; at its summit were the words: “Silence, they are sleeping.” These touches, of course, suggest something more eclectic, or even Masonic, than Athenian. The ceremony began at dusk and lasted about five hours. “Almost all of Paris was there.”40 The versa¬ tile M.-J. Chenier played two roles, those of lyricist and orator.41 Let the Revolutions de Paris take up the account: “A rostrum for a public address (aux harangues), styled after the tragedy of Gracchus at the theatre in the rue de Richelieu, was set up between the amphi¬ theatre, where the deputies, administrators, judges, and magistrates sat, and the orchestra....After the funeral march [by Gossec], Chenier took his place here and delivered a speech which received applause and which the people themselves ordered to be printed.”42 The opening of Chenier’s harangue, while surely meant to recall Pericles, made a more or less disjointed pastiche of the Greek 38. The standard contemporary French translation of the Histoire de la guerre du Peloponnese is edited by Jacqueline de Romilly (Paris, 1962).

39. Cabanis was evidently Mirabeau’s ghost-writer. See, on this, Jean Debrun, “Cabanis et son discours sur les fetes nationales (1791),” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les fetes de la Revolution, pp. 462ff. 40. Revolutions de Paris, no. 164 (25 August-1 September 1792), pp. 369-373. 41. On this period of Chenier’s career, see Alfred Jepson Bingham, Marie-Joseph Chenier: Early Political Life and Ideas, 1789-1794 (New York, 1939), pp. 92-97. 42. Revolutions de Paris, no. 164, p. 373.

272

Mortal Politics

funeral in a style far beyond the modest gravity of Auger’s French. It seems unnecessary to render Chenier in the original; my English will be sufficiently explicit. “Citizens,” the orator declaimed, in the fine days of ancient Greece, when the death of liberty’s defenders was announced, the fatherland covered itself with a funeral veil, the people’s tears mingled with the cries of orphans and the groans of mothers and wives; but quickly the honours bestowed in memory of these cherished warriors brought public consolation: Their names were engraved on mausoleums with the tales of their victories;43 eloquence and poetry conveyed their deeds to future generations; the fatherland adopted their families; their likenesses were raised in the public places instead of those of the tyrants cast down. When travellers passed through this holy land, they would encounter the remains of the victors of Marathon and Plataea; they would wander about the tombs of Epaminondas the Theban and the Athenian Thrasybulus, who brought down the thirty tyrants; nearby the same monument enclosed the remains of Harmodius and Aristogiton, those young and inseparable friends who cracked the yoke of the Pisistratids; at some distance Timoleon was sleeping, he who restored liberty in Corinth and Syracuse: foreigners visiting Greece, everywhere surrounded by the ashes of heroes and monuments to their glory, would weep tears of admiration and, keeping a respectful distance, they would gaze solemnly upon the majesty of a free people. Now we see a renewal of that majestic spectacle: Frenchmen have died for liberty here in this famous city, and their ashes are honoured in the same setting where the tyrants whom they brought low used to conspire; the children and wives of our brothers who have died become the wards of the nation (I’he'ritage de la patrie)....Everything around me exudes an atmosphere of liberty inspiring generous actions and great thoughts!...What need of eloquence? The events and the surroundings tell us enough....44 Chenier s speech does not lack Greek touches. The most obvious parallel is that he is addressing the same categories of persons as did Pericles and his fellow orators: the fallen warriors, their spouses and 43. This was not the custom of democratic Athens; see Loraux, L’invention d’Athenes, pp. 22-23. 44. Marie-Joseph Chenier, “Eloge funebre des citoyens morts pour la defense de la liberte et de l’egalite le 10 aout 1792...” in Guillaume-N. Lallement, ed„ Choix des rapports, opinions et discours..., 21 vols. (Paris, 1818-1825), 10:349-350.

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children, the city and its citizens, and posterity. Moreover, the slain are collective and, for this purpose, anonymous. But he collapses all Greece into a single panoramic snapshot of the traveller’s emotion, a kind of revisitation by another “jeune Anacharsis.” And his rhetoric is more hyperbolic than dignified. It is partly so because his learned harangue is second-hand. Athenian epitaphioi evoked the glory of Athens; but Chenier absolutely lacks any French referent except the immediate occasion. The Athenian playwrights like Aeschylus democratized their kings and could portray a mythically unbroken ascent of the city to present glory; but for the French revolutionaries their action was a sudden rupture in time’s millenial travesty of tyrants—a seemingly unbounded space of treason and superstition with its roots in the “nuit des temps.” To “die for liberty” was to kill one’s own past, together with some of its personnel, and to make a new beginning, partly under the instruction of ancient books and reveries. According to Loraux, the Athenian epitaphios made the city the ultimate repository of all memory and glory in the limitless energy of its eternal life. Was this a maitrise illusoire du temps? Possibly. But it brilliantly served the ideological needs of the democratic polls by freezing its history in a form that could be fully appropriated and savoured by the regime of the Many. By contrast, the French Revolution had deliberately burned all bridges back to Clovis-even Henri IV-with, as we shall see, the consequence that it had an urgent need for new heroes, eponymous and not anonymous. Or, to turn the proposition around, could one imagine an Athenian Bara or Viala? It is true that the French of these times believed themselves repre¬ sentatively universal, which the Athenians did not. But this was a poor and abstract claim, for Athenian solidarity depended on the autochthonous myth. The patriotic French knew they were not auto¬ chthonous: their nation, according to their own mythology, had seen an unending strife between Franks and Gauls, usurping aristocrats and previous tenants of the Roman Empire. The imaginative memory of that combat produced not only Sieyes’s Tiers Etat, but also coloured Chenier’s striking sentence: “The poor man’s pike has conquered the patrician’s dagger.”45 Here mythical France merges into eternal Rome, and the author denies the indivisibility of the nation except as it can be had by excision. We are led then to the most striking anomaly between the situ¬ ations of the patriotic dead of Athens and of Paris. The French had 45. Ibid., p. 351.

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Mortal Politics

scarcely been to a foreign war. If Frenchmen were dead, it was mostly because they had killed one another (or their Swiss mercenary proxies had, on two significant occasions). Internal strife had been an unquestionable feature of Greek civic existence. But the great exploits were always against the external foe. Pericles and Demosthenes, from whom Chenier borrows, were not concerned in their epitaphioi with the overthrow of tyrants but with the defense of the city. Celebrations such as the French undertook in August 1792-to immortalize fraternity by fratricide-would have been incon¬ ceivable to the Athenians. But we have already seen that French patriots who died at the hands of their own race were conspicuously singled out as “martyrs of liberty.” This tactic is incorrigibly Roman or Christian in design, or both. The “guerre...revolutionnaire jusqu’a la paix” of October 1793 was, above all, a war declared on unsa¬ voury Frenchmen. And it has its sounding here, in Chenier’s “Greek” speech. For who is to say how much even a learned address like this acted as a precipitant to the September Massacres? It would probably have broken Auger’s heart.

Larger Than Life

The limits of “Athenianism” in Revolutionary fetes funebres were imposed by both tradition and pragmatic necessity. In recommending the inauguration of four “fetes civiles” where a funeral eulogy for “bons serviteurs de la patrie” would be pronounced, Cabanis (ghost¬ writing for Mirabeau) argued that “our festivals should definitely not resemble those of Athens.”46 Over three years later, when power was clearly in the hands of the Jacobins, decadarian festivals were invented to suit the rhythm of the new republican calendar. One specific celebration (out of more than thirty) was given over to death: the “Fete des martyrs de la liberte.” Generally, this festival was assigned to Brumaire, although local instances of it can be found scattered throughout the cold months of 1793-1794 (when dechristianization’ was at its peak). As Sicard puts it: “The organ¬ izers of the festivals...placed the funeral ceremony in the month of Brumaire, a period when the earth begins to throw off its garments and gets ready to enter the slumber of death.”47 The aura of All 46. See note 39, above. 47. Sicard, L’education morale et civique, p. 395.

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Souls’ Day seems still to have pervaded the Revolutionary mentality: Fabre d’Eglantine conceded “the artfulness of the priests” in distrib¬ uting the church’s holidays.48 By now, French soldiers had had time to show great deeds and to be fairly bloodied in the fortunes of war. In fact the situation on the major fronts was precarious. But, in a period that had just witnessed the execution of the twenty-two “Girondins,” Marie-Antoinette, and a host of other notable French “traitres” and “ennemis,” and where internal foes had struck back in several parts of France-especially Lyons, Toulon, and the Vendee—taking the lives of patriots, the tenor of this festival was confused. Though there were many public funeral ceremonies throughout the country, mention of them does not exactly leap to the forefront of secondary literature or even of official printed documents. An ambiguity hangs over the “fetes des martyrs morts pour la liberte” that only patient and thorough work in departmental archives can resolve. According to Dommanget’s valuable monograph on dechristianization in the Oise, “a de'cadi was consecrated...to paying funeral honours to the defenders of the fatherland who ‘died for the cause of liberty.’”49 And from the same source we learn of a similar festival in Frejus, where the patriots, on concluding their memorial service, “conceived the idea of eating a modest common meal...in the manner of the Spartans.”50 At Pau, on 12 Ventose, an II, all citizens were summoned to gather with gifts and offerings to the munici¬ pality “for soldiers wounded on the field of honour and for the fami¬ lies of the brave men who, beneath the tricolour, have sealed the Declaration of the Rights of Man with their blood....”51 In Puy-de-Dome, on the other hand, there is evidence that ceremonies in honour of the martyrs of liberty, curiously described by the researcher as “akin to Greek theatre,” were focused not on the ordi¬ nary dead, but on the Montagnard heroes.52 Several years ago, while working in archives, I found the following speech of the mayor of Brive, delivered on the second de'cadi of Brumaire, an II, in tones not unlike those of Thucydides:

48. Reimpression de I’ancien Moniteur, 18 December 1793. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Dommanget, La de'christianisation a Beauvais et dans I’Oise 2:45. Ibid., p. 97. Aulard, Le culte de la raison et de I’Etre supreme (Paris, 1904), p. 162. Annie Larmadon, “Les fetes civiques dans le departement du Puy-de-Dome

sous la Revolution,” in La Revolution dans le Puy-de-Dome, ed. Gerard Gerbaud, et al., introduction by Albert Soboul (Paris, 1972), p. 291.

276

Mortal Politics

Republicans, in former times you gathered to express your regrets to heroes whose courage could not save them from the daggers of tyrants; in former times you assembled around their tomb for the purpose of appeasing their ghosts (manes) with a religious cere¬ mony; but it is not until today that you could pay honours truly worthy of them and of the cause they defended; today, for the first time, their shades (ombres) have been able to take pleasure in a festival that presents before our eyes the interesting and useful sight of a citizen-people of both sexes and every age crowded around the Altar of the Fatherland, not to weep useless tears for the children it has lost, but to offer [to our country] new support, and to our dead vengeance. That, citizens, is the only offering that could move the shades of those illustrious dead whose ashes you have come here to celebrate....53 These movingly classical lines (despite “tyrans” and “vengeance”) seem to unite the Athenian and French spirits. But they are, so far as I know, a rare exception to the standard. The simultaneous confu¬ sions of dechristianization (its fanatic intervention in a regime prom¬ ising toleration or, at least, competition of creeds) and of the specific cult of Revolutionary martyrs (instant heroes of a desperately divided and non-autochthonous society) led to results where the anonymous and collective dead of the democracy played second fiddle to celebra¬ tions of the designated great men. Unlike the Athens of Periclean and Demostheanean times, France did not have “every interest in attributing to the demos the legendary actions of the hero.”54 It chose the hero so as to transfigure the unsorted passions of the demos. I have called that instinct “Roman,” although this is an oversimpli¬ fication.55 It is Roman in the sense that “the collective funeral oration is Greek and that “the Athenian epitaphios logos and the Roman laudatio funebris...have little in common besides their name, and their difference perfectly represents the unbridgeable gulf dividing the polls from the civitas.”56 For, following Polybius (Histones, 6:52-54), the Roman funeral oration is devoted to exalting 53. “Fete en l’honneur des Heros martyrs de la liberte a Brive,” France nat., C 285, 833/7.

Arch

54. Loraux, L’invention d’Athenes, p. 66. 55. A balanced treatment of the “classical” influences on the Revolution can be found in Harold T. Parker’s still useful The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolution¬ aries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago, 1937) It is mostlv about Rome. ’ 56. Loraux, L’invention d’Athenes, p. 42.

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a man or a family, not a political regime. It is an aristocratic, not democratic, discourse: The people are not celebrated; they are at most the celebrants.57 The most spectacular “fetes des martyrs” enabled the public to venerate themselves only in the shape of Lepeletier, Marat, Chalier, and a few others. It was not that the Jacobins were hypocritical elitists. Even if some of the metteurs en scene (like David) required subjects worthy of their art, it was the preoccupation of the politicians that the people should learn to abandon the Christian practice traditionally associated with death. Christian language had been ambivalent toward secular glory. Twenty-five years later, a scholar writing on behalf of the Greek War of Independence would suggest: “It might have been possible, with severe discipline and a great deal of prudence and caution...to create funeral orations for modern nations where glory could have been celebrated without forgetting religion, and where civic virtues and talents could have been praised while preserving all the pre¬ eminence of the Christian virtues.”58 But the tension between the two sorts of encomia had always stymied the ideal “oraison funebre.” We already saw the problem sprouting in our analysis of eloges academiques (chapter 3). In the grip of foreign-cum-civil war, the Jacobins needed to exalt the hero who was capable of leaving a legend and, so to speak, his counter-relics. The funeral of Mirabeau, in still monarchical times, had set the pattern. This does not mean that the French revolutionaries were slavishly Roman. They believed themselves to be the consummation of a new universalism. And that meant, in their grasping for a new pantheon, that they were deliberately polyglot. As the Enlightenment had gath¬ ered in human knowledge, “the best that has been thought,” the Revolution gathered in diverse heroes, reserving a special place for its own. As David, in his speech of 16 July 1793 on the death of Marat, put it: “Cato, Aristides, Socrates, Timoleon, Fabricius, and Phocion, I admire your worthy lives; I did not live in your time, but I knew Marat....Posterity will give him justice.”59 Their syncretic religion was broad in idols: Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Cato, the Gracchi, Cincinnatus, Aristides, Fabricius, Demosthenes, Socrates, Hercules, Prometheus, Apollo, Barneveldt, Rousseau, Voltaire,

57. Ibid., p. 43. 58. Jacques-Frangois Roget, Eloges funebres des Athe'niens morts pour la patrie... (Paris, 1825), p. 68. Roget’s introductory essay is of great interest retrospectively to some of the questions raised here and in chapter 3, but unfortunately it does not treat Athenianizing influences in the Revolution. 59. Quoted in Biver, Fetes a Paris, p. 63.

278

Mortal Politics

Franklin, according to another list.60 Sometimes Wilhelm Tell, Jesus Christ (the “first sans-culotte”), and even Anckerstroem, the assassin of Gustav III of Sweden, were included.61 It is tempting to see this as an inversion of Catholicism, especially since, during the onset of the “cult of reason,” churches were appropriated for these bizarre ceremonies and the architects of the new worship seemed to be trying to build on the old one to fortify political stability. But basi¬ cally this hero-worship was an attack on revealed religion. With its statues and busts it was closer to a participatory form of dialogues of the dead. The Timoleons, Catos, and Barneveldts reinforced the veneration of the immediate heroes. Whether or not there was actually a devo¬ tion to the “sacred heart” of Marat,62 his “immortality,” together with that of Lepeletier, stirred patriotic emotions. It is no accident that the inauguration of the Festival of the Martyrs of Liberty (understood collectively) coincided with the great funeral ceremony of 6 Brumaire, dedicating the busts of these two “martyrs of despotic fury,” a massive theatrical spectacle.63 This was duplicated by local events, e.g., the “Fete de l’ami du peuple par la section de l’unite”: here “a trophy of portraits of Louis XV, Louis XVI, their ministers, cardinals, prelates, and others of their kind was set ablaze in the presence of the busts of J.-J. Rousseau, Lepelletier, and Marat.”64 In Chalier’s eloge funebre at the Jacobins on 7 Brumaire, the speaker declared: “The entire public has cried vengeance. Chalier, we owe this to you: martyr of liberty, the blood of the scoundrels is the lustral water suited to the appeasement of your spirit (manes).”65 Some ardent Jacobins, like Jean-Charles Laveaux, the editor of the Journal de la Montagne, thought that even the Pantheon was too petty a place for the souls of these heroes. “I would wish,” he wrote, “that the monuments raised to their memory could be seen by everyone in locations consecrated to the whole nation_” These massive mauso¬ leums would, among other things, provide historical instruction for schoolchildren. “O French Pantheon,” the journalist rhapsodized, “how small you would seem [as measured against my proposed] Place de la federation!...”66 60. See Frank Paul Bowman, “Le ‘Sacre-Coeur’ de Marat (1793),” in Ehrard and Viallaneix, eds., Les fetes de la Revolution, pp. 159-160. 61. Pierre de La 1917-1923), 3:321.

Gorce,

Histoire

religieuse

de

la

Revolution,

5

vols

(Paris

62. Bowman, “‘Sacre-Coeur’ de Marat,” pp. 155-159. 63. See Tiersot, Les fetes et les chants, pp. 119-120. 64. Revolutions de Paris, no. 213 (7 Brumaire-14 Brumaire, an II), p. 15. 65. Eloge of Dorfeuille at the Jacobins, 7 Brumaire, an II, reported in the Reim¬ pression de I’ancien Moniteur 18:294. 66. Jean-Charles Laveaux, Journal de la Montagne, no. 48, 19 July 1793.

The Republic of Death

279

Thus the more generalized celebrations for the “martyrs of liberty” were outshone by the cult of heroes. However civic and selfsacrificing, Frenchmen were not equal at the last republican trumpet. Assuming the mentality of the revolutionists, Taine wrote: “We, too, have our anniversaries, our saints, our martyrs, our relics, and a huge decorative apparatus appealing to the senses through which a dogma can be presented and propagated. But instead of causing men to stray toward an imaginary heaven, ours brings him back to his living fatherland....”67 Taine was both right and wrong. He sensed acutely how Revolutionary practice was mimetic and required order and discipline, things that could not be created de novo. But he failed to pay enough attention to the necessary gap between Christian death and republican death or to the demands that the need for novel heroes made against traditional practice. After the fall of Robespierre, public death underwent yet another transformation by being “senatorialized.” The so-called “Girondins,” who would hereafter gain status as martyrs, were ritually rehabili¬ tated by the Convention, in its waning days, on 3 October 1795. Here, the festival of death was domesticated, brought indoors, not to a church (still inappropriate), but within the very precincts of the assembly itself. All the deputies wore black mourning bands on their arms. Orators proclaimed the panegyric of the victims. Beneath the tribune were placed a symbolic urn draped in black and funereal crowns and garlands of oak and cypress. Orchestras and choirs performed intermittently, even while public business was being conducted (for these were troubled times: “jamais la patrie ne fut dans un plus grand danger,” according to Legendre). Interspersed with the agenda, the Academy of Music and its choirs performed “L’hymne des Vingt-Deux,” with words by Chenier and music by Mehul, and “Aux manes de la Gironde,” a composition of Coupigny and Gossec.68 By the end of the session, all those Conventional who had died worthily in the civil war of France (including some Indulgents), to the number of forty-seven, had been granted posthu¬ mous laurels for “services rendered to liberty by the representatives of the people, who had been its martyrs.” This “festival” ended with marches and military songs.69 By the legislative widening of a closed

67. Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, (Paris, 1892), 3:118-119.

12th ed.

68. See Pierre, ed., Musique des fetes de la Revolution, pp. 322-331, for music and lyrics. 69. Reimpression de I’ancien Moniteur 26:113-115.

280

Mortal Politics

cult of martyrs to a congress of almost fifty “shades” (canonized not on the Champ de Mars but in the midst of their colleagues), the outgoing French lawmakers, with a kind of private satisfaction, returned somewhat to the practices of the academy or at least groped toward a modern representative democracy of the dead elected in due form by a sovereign body of living peers.

Dying as Usual

The hymn gave elasticity to republican death, even amid factional savagery, while the cult of martyrs, dramatically inscribed in Montagnard rhetoric, tilted the model of sacrifice from the collective citizenry toward an enshrined few, chosen for their political exem¬ plariness. In both cases posterity was supplicated through the tran¬ scending experience of the public festival. In both cases also, Christian belief and practice were gradually erased until, in 1793, they faced a situation that excluded them or consigned them to secrecy. As a letter to Robespierre from Lyons testifies: “The dying man calls for his minister (pasteur: evidently Protestant) to hear from his mouth a word of consolation and hope, but the minister is threat¬ ened with the guillotine if he answers his brother’s call.”70 What, then, is to be said about the average death in this time of political upheaval? The problem has never been as carefully worked out as the ecclesiological turmoil that surrounded it.71 We are better informed about baptisms and marriages and name-changes than about mortuary rites. Mainly we have clues in search of an interpretation. They involve the meeting and crossing of five great issues: (1) a general reform of burial practices, begun in the Old Regime; (2) the crisis caused by the criminal” executions accompanying civil war and the Terror, (3) the revolutionary problem of drawing new bound¬ aries or new complicities between religion and the state; (4) the savagery of “dechristianization”; and (5) a contest between ‘individuality” and “solidarity,” between “liberty of conscience” and civil religion.” None of these categories is totally exclusive of the 70. Gillet to Robespierre, quoted in Lamartine, Histone des girondins 5:207. 71. See especially Plongeron, Theologie et politique, and Michel Vovelle, Religion et Revolution: la dechristianisation de Van II (Paris, 1976).

The Republic of Death

281

others; but to consider them as distinct has the advantage of clari¬ fying what was novel and what was not in the Revolution’s treatment of death. While the Revolution “apotheosized” or “pantheonized” a few heroes, creating what might seem a new sainthood with mass appeal, it also undertook a sustained process of levelling death. In a quieter setting it continued the democratization achieved by the guillotine in cases of capital punishment. Excepting a few great festivals from Mirabeau to Hoche and Joubert, the magnificence of “baroque death was suspended. Funerals could no longer be particularized by private pomp in the midst of a public, but only by the modest genius of privacy itself. Here though, as elsewhere, there are continuities crossing the watershed of 1789. For one thing, despite routine dignities and the offices of the church, many burials in the Old Regime had been perfunctory and often squalid. Until prohibited by a royal edict of 1776, the destina¬ tion of the majority was the fulsome, bulging crypt of parish churches or their adjacent graveyard, where densely layered mortal remains mouldered in common ditches treated with quicklime, infecting the surrounding atmosphere, until, years later, the dessiccated bones were removed to the charniere (charnel house) incorpo¬ rated in both the outworks of the old cemeteries and the vaulting of the churches.72 There were no personalized tombs for these dead: perhaps a simple coffin, perhaps only a shroud. Their inhumation literally returned them, as metaphysical materialism would have it, to the “bosom of nature.” By the reign of Louis XVI all progressive opinion deplored the pestilential effects of the concentrated urban necropolis-urgent in Paris, bad in other dense areas with their constraining parish boundaries. But the removal of cemeteries to vacant lots outside the cities did not really commence until 1804.73 In Paris, the cemetery of the Innocents, several hundred years old (its walls displayed the fifteenth-century drawings of the Danse des marts), was deconsecrated, plowed up, and voided of its mass of skel¬ etal remains, following a scientific inquiry and an arret du conseil of 9 November 1785. Pourtrain, foreman of the gravediggers, had supervised an estimated 90,000 burials there during his thirty years 72. For “the unfortunate and the poor,” “inhumation was made in the common ditch, dug to five to ten meters, where about 1,000 to 1,500 corpses, in shrouds or on biers, were crammed together....They were left uncovered in the ditch until its length had been occupied; when that was done, the rank of bodies was covered with fifteen to twenty centimeters of earth, and a new layer was started.” Jacques Hillairet, Les 200 cimetieres du vieux Paris (Paris, 1958), p. 12.

73. Ibid., p. 16.

282

Mortal Politics

of service.74 In the reign of Louis XV, Paris had as many burial places as there were religious establishments: in 1747, 59 parish churches, 13 chapters, 10 abbeys, 124 convents, and 90 chapels. As in other respects, Louis XVI opened an age of reform in burial prac¬ tices. But this had not yet had much effect when the Revolution struck. The Constituent Assembly introduced legislation in 1791 closing all cemeteries intramuros and transferring their property to the communal authorities. But it was only gradually that Paris would be restricted to four principal plots for inhumation: Sainte-Catherine and Vaugirard for the left bank; Montmartre and Sainte-Marguerite for the right.75 The Revolution levelled death in two ways: first of all, by providing that citizens would be buried modestly and (by 1793) civilly, without religious services or priestly attendance; secondly, by making the burials of political enemies as perfunctory and distasteful as possible. On 21 January 1793, the body of Louis XVI, accompa¬ nied by two vicars, the constitutional cure of the parish, and several gendarmes, proceeded to the cemetery of Sainte-Madeleine, where, resting on an open bier, he was committed to the common ditch with a minimum of fuss.76 Within the year his ancestors, enshrined in pomp at Saint-Denis, would be dealt with even more vengefully. And shortly he would be joined in his burial ground by his wife, his cousin Philippe-Egalite, Charlotte Corday, the Girondin deputies, Madame Roland, the Hebertists, and other persons of note.77 After the closing of Sainte-Madeleine on 25 March 1794, most of the remaining victims of the Terror were consigned to the cemeteries of Picpus and Monceaux, themselves closed, respectively, in 1795 and 17 9 7.78 Thus the enemies of the Revolution received the quicklime of the anonymous poor. Swallowed by the soil without much ado, their bones became mingled with the common remains of eternal Paris. That was ordinary death for the not-so-ordinary. For others the alteration in funerary practices was less glaring. But it was character¬ ized by an air of desanctification, with the variation and diminishment of ceremonial that a regime of toleration encouraged or, alter¬ natively, a regime of virtue demanded. With the advent of the constitutional clergy, services rendered at death, including fees, 74. Ibid., p. 35. 75. Ibid., p. 15. 76. Marquis de Beaucourt, Captivite et derniers moments de Louis XVI, “proces-verbal municipal,” 2:313-314. 77. Hillairet, Les 200 cimetieres, pp. 291-292. 78. Ibid., pp. 293-298.

The Republic of Death

283

plots, and mortuary details, were drawn completely within the func¬ tions of the state, while the traditional preparation a la mort tended to disappear from the clergy’s moral repertoire. By 1793-and in antici¬ pation of the stillborn constitution—Catholicism ceased effectively to be the state religion in France, and a so-called liberte des cultes took its place. What showed its visage now, at least among the “enlightened,” might be described as a public religion tinctured by a motley of deisms. That manifestation had been a long time building; as Necker wrote of religious ideas in 1788: “so weakened they are day by day that it seems public substitutes for them are already being prepared.”79 If morality could do without religion, could death afford to refuse its offices? Perhaps it might, if it discovered deco¬ rous and less superstitious substitutions. Thus there arose imagina¬ tive variations as to how and where persons could be buried-a fertility of sentiment that would later have much freer play in the cults of the post-Thermidorian republic, encompassing a melancholy of nature inspired both by classicism and by Rousseau’s acolytes, prefiguring Philippe Aries’s mort de toi.80 Yet it is clear that the suffocation of the “baroque” did not, for all that, destroy a rooted Catholic preference for last rites and the traditional requiescat in pace. For, after all, had not even Sebastien Mercier been touched by those constant scurryings of priests with the viaticum that were so much a feature of ordinary dying in the congested city? “Who,” he wrote, “will not share my feeling that the abandoned pauper looks upon these religious visitations as a precious favour?...”81 With headlong haste all the major issues that displayed the crossing of “revolutionary death” and “evolutionary death” came to a head with the birth of the Republic: Catholicism vs. Enlightenment, toleration vs. constraint, public vs. private, civil vs. religious. But at this point the surge called “dechristianization,” with its accompanying “cult of reason,” intervened. The experience was brief and tempo¬ rarily shattering. It has often been misinterpreted because history has dealt too exclusively with its bizarre fanaticism. On the one hand, the attenuation of the “cult of reason”-an unstable inspirationinto a “cult of the Supreme Being” which would persist after Thermidor, stressing “virtue” and “immortality” and forming the spiritual sinew of the fetes decadaires, somewhat falsifies its own power of propagation. Most certainly it was enforced from above, by the likes of Fouche, Chaumette, Momoro, and others; but it won consid79. Jacques Necker, De Vimportance des opinions religieuses (Paris, 1788), p. 465. 80. See Aries, L’homme devant la mort, pp. 604-605. 81. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, “Le viatique,” 11:121.

284

Mortal Politics

erable approval, conceivably because, in its contempt for the ignoble past, it seemed to be the vanguard ritual of patriotism. To attribute it simply to the brain-fever of a few “atheists” (in whose number Danton has sometimes been included) is to confuse its muchrecorded lunacies with its more calculated attempt to crush all “superstition.” On the other hand, it was betrayed by its grotesque posturing. Its main impact was to prepare the way for a civic cult of the state which had been jeopardized by the wild effusion of relig¬ ious particularism that toleration had allowed. The right to die and be buried as one chose was part of the problem. These new ordinances were first propagated by Fouche, then a repre'sentant en mission in Nevers, on 10 October 1793. His provisions were (1) that citizens of all sects would be conveyed soon after their decease to a common burial ground wrapped in a simple shroud with the word Sommeil painted on it; (2) that they would be accompanied by a public official, friends dressed in mourning, and soldiers of their units; (3) that the burial ground would be in an uninhabited place, planted with shade trees, and decorated by a statue repre¬ senting Sleep; (4) that the gate to the burial ground would bear the following sign: Death is an eternal sleep.82 Several things are remark¬ able about Fouche’s edict. The first is that it was apparently adopted without debate by the rulers of the Jacobin republic. Chaumette, who was procurator-general of the Paris Commune, had similar ideas about death, God, materialism, and burial that he felt were appro¬ priate to the virtuous republic. It was probably the initiative of Paris, whose revised ordinances on funerals date from 21 November 1793, that spread similar regulations and doctrine to much of the rest of France.83 The pith of these regulations has usually been discovered in the startling death=sleep motto. As Lequinio, a lyrical materialist, told the people of Rochefort in their former Catholic cathedral on 20 Brumaire: “there is no future life, no....Of us nothing will remain but the separated molecules that formed us and the memory of our past existence.”84 No doubt Lequinio had taken things too far: Ordinary French did not want to think of their tre'pas as one of recy¬ cled molecules. Lequinio had gotten that idea from Diderot.86 But did the French want to think of death as something like sleep and the memory of the living? Here we cannot be too sure. The early Catholic doctrine of death had been “dormition,” albeit followed by 82. Aulard, Le culte de la raison et de I’Etre supreme (Paris, 1904), p. 28. 83. Reimpression de Vancien Moniteur 18:137. 84. Quoted in Aulard, Le culte de la raison et de I’Etre supreme (Paris, 1904), p. 115. 85. Cf. Denis Diderot, Le reve de d’Alembert, in Oeuvres completes 2:124-125. The work was known to subscribers of Grimm’s Correspondance litteraire in 1785.

The Republic of Death

285

an awakening and a judgement.86 De Moy, author of an important pamphlet in 1792, who believed fervently that “dying is opening the door to another [version of] ourselves,” still could ask: “how shall we portray death?” Surely not with skulls and bones. “Let us portray [it]...as going to sleep for the last time.”87 And for the heroes of 10 August 1792 it had been enjoined: “Silence, for they are sleeping.” What is at least clear is that the molecular theory joined with the sleep theory, in eliminating any kind of immortality in which mortals could have an interest, was offensive: the cult of the Supreme Being would rectify this error. But two other matters stand out in Fouche’s prescription. The first of these, mentioned above, is the seemly and decorous location of the burial ground, a reform already envisaged by the Old Regime. The second, and most important of all, is the secularization of the burial. No longer were the French dead to be serviced by “the cult of their choice,” but by designated municipal officials. This seem¬ ingly formal change in death practices deserves close attention, for it fights back the Catholic and the private all at once. And if one reads at all extensively in municipal records of the Revolution, one is struck, not by quarrels over the metaphysics of death, but by the problems that France’s communes recurrently faced in appointing and regulating functionaries to supervise burials in the absence of a discredited and persecuted clergy. This would still be a major preoc¬ cupation of Amaury Duval’s essay of 1800, where he recommends a special magistracy for funerals-the bureaucrats having obviously not managed to replace the priests-whose chief should be a wealthy man of advanced age, who had “lived a life exempt from reproach.”88 Our most substantial description of the new materialist funeral practices is found in Dommanget’s study of dechristianization in the Oise. In the town of Noyon, on 20 Frimaire (10 December 1793), new prescriptions for civic funerals were published, and on 5 Pluviose (24 January 1794) the Societe populaire of Beauvais pronounced against all religious symbolism and inequalities of the burial formula. What is more-and Dommanget believes this demand to have had a far wider reach than the Oise-it was proposed that a tribunal funeraire (naturally composed of seasoned patriots) should be established to judge which citizens were worthy of receiving funeral honours from the municipality.89 Flere we seem to find the urge to 86. See Ari£s, L’homme devant la mort, pp. 154-155; also, Chaunu, La mart a Paris, p. 94. 87. De Moy, Accord de la religion et des cultes, pp. 106-113. 88. Amaury Duval, Des sepultures (Paris, an IX), p. 23. 89. Dommanget, La de'christianisation a Beauvais et dans I’Oise 2:22-23.

286

Mortal Politics

conform ordinary dying to the “extraordinary” dying decreed by the Tribunal criminel extraordinaire, an “equality of death” modified by populist purity. In any case, when the municipal council of Beauvais decreed on the subject on 8 Pluviose, it made no provision for this tribunal, restricting itself to ordering the equality and complete laicization of funerals, with all coffins to be covered with a national flag for conveyance to the cemetery, accompanied by two officials and a military detachment.90 Another article of the decree permitted nextof-kin to place an inscription on the grave: We can surmise that it was not to be of religious inspiration.91 After Thermidor, an IV, the Catholics of Beauvais fought back; but they could not fully regain rights for religious funerals for another five years.92 We are now prepared to see the burial practices of the Republic of Virtue in a somewhat new light. The state was determined to remain the monitor of funerals and, while suppressing “perfidious and superstitious” Catholicism, to guard itself against that other danger: sentimental individualism and the rise of “private death” which could bode no good for a patrie struggling for its existence. As Robespierre and others perceived, the materialist theory overstepped the boundaries of political prudence as well as seeming to attack “virtue.” If the “aristocratic” stigma of atheism were taken away, “dying as usual,” republican-style, might take root. They discerned that an age of individualism and heightened sensibility had somehow to be transformed, through religion, into a self-repressing civic juggernaut. Much of the problem, as the Thermidorians inherited it from Robespierre, had been broadly traced in de Moy’s Accord de la religion et des cultes of 1792. Writing in the year that the tension between monolithic solidarity and civil toleration and between religion and state became particularly acute, de Moy made a number of points in his interesting pamphlet. One of these is his use of medical imagery (see chapters 1 and 2) with regard to religion: “religious opinions are to the body politic what the humours are in our own body.”93 Thus a regime of religious toleration is a natural system for a nation. However, while the nation reserves to itself the right to oversee all civil aspects of religious practice, it should remain neutral toward each form of worship, be it Christian, Jewish,

90. Ibid., p. 24. 91. Ibid., p. 28. 92. Ibid., pp. 33-34. 93. De Moy, Accord de la religion et des cultes, p. 2; and cf. esp. p. 114, where machine imagery, molecular imagery, and spiritualism are all involved.

The Republic of Death

287

or Mohammedan.94 Individuals, on the other hand, are absolute owners, by nature, of the right to their bodies, alive or dead: Each can therefore choose his place of burial and the disposition of his corpse, unless his testament shculd offend society “by injustice, madness, or immorality.”95 For example, a body could not, by these rules, be exposed naked, hung on a gibbet, or buried in another’s property.96 If the individual made no disposition for his burial, the state, with due regard for kinsmen and friends, inherited this right.97 Above all, priests or clergy should not be allowed to intervene in mortuary matters, for they bore the spirit of particularism, which was ruinous to the integrity of society. It was of little concern to the dead, but of great consequence to their survivors, that burials should be civic and uniform. However, persons might be interred in places consecrated to their own sects.98 But indeed, according to de Moy (here echoing Diderot), “we are born as men [not as members of a religion] and we die because we have been born....”99 Thus society should not abandon its dead to the priests. Like virtually all writers on the subject, de Moy pays particular attention to the care and appointment of the cemeteries: they should be placed at a (non-infectious) distance from the living and show (a non-medieval) respect for the dead; they should (a la grecque) be surrounded by evergreens-particularly cypresses-which will add dignity and beauty and perhaps “purify the air.”100 Finally, all Catholic pictography should be shunned in the interest of equality, fraternity, and heavenly peace: “Why the crepe and those black veils...those candles and smoking torches?...”101 Essentially these are the principles from which post-Thermidorian mortuary doctrine proceeds. There is some regression toward tradi¬ tional religion: At least Fouche’s statue of Sleep has been replaced by a statue of Immortality, and his own laconic motto has been changed to read: “For the good man death is the beginning of felicity.”102 Yet the rigours of Christianity are still parried by the 94. 95. 96. 97.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

pp. 2, 20, 23, 60. pp. 77-78. p. 78. p. 80.

98. Ibid., pp. 82-88. 99. Ibid., p. 95. 100. Ibid., p. 105. 101. Ibid., p. 115. 102. Reimpression de I’ancien Moniteur, 28 Messidor, an IV. Quoted by Albert Mathiez, La theophilanthropie et le culte de'cadaire, 1796-1801; essai sur I’histoire religieuse de la Revolution (Paris, 1904), p. 49.

288

Mortal Politics

state’s political hostility, and classicism continues to do service as the major surrogate. We could even say that there are two strains of classicism merging uncomfortably (for they represent the polarity of “public” and “private”): the classicism of Brutus and the classicism of the lyric elegy; the France of the hero and the France of the herbalist. Their differences could sometimes only be resolved on a plane of emotion where dying figured prominently, and where oak and cypress, moss and melancholy ruin united the two sectors of the • • • 10S imagination. The rupture of the Revolution allowed both for a more aggressive individuality and for imperative efforts to reinvent unity. No act of will or constraint by the Jacobins could make the first factor disap¬ pear. Dying shows this. Despite continued support by the Directory for the civic culte de'cadaire, mortuary pluralism had its day. No doubt these new and transient faiths involved a minority of the French, but they took in a wide sweep of the population from intellectual aesth¬ etes to revolutionary marginals and sans-culottes. Basically, this may be described as a struggle between civic cohesion and fertile sectari¬ anism, in the absence of a traditional church and with the politicians trying to drag both parties toward the centre. On 21 Brumaire, an V, L.-S. Mercier made one of his few public speeches in the Conseil des Cinq-cents, on the subject of “sepultures.” This self-proclaimed Rousseauist passionately accused the “atheism” of Chaumette for begetting solitary and bizarre burial practices fit only for “the vilest animal.”104 According to Mercier, both materialism and prurient curiosity for “ridiculous usages of all the peoples of the earth...dredged from dictionaries” had produced a hodge-podge of indecency.105 It is true that Chaumette had a rather wild imagination, but he does not seem to have been trying to pluralize funerary practice. The real target for Mercier’s spite was a fellow legislator Daubermesnil, his colleague in both the Convention and the cinq-cents. Daubermesnil was a fervent prophet of a sect called the Culte des adorateurs, devoted, according to Mathiez, to “love of liberty” and to the reanimation of the festivals of “citoyens morts pour la patrie.”106 By 1796 this movement would be absorbed into Theophilanthropy. It is very curious that Mercier accused Daubermesnil of materialistic sacrilege in favouring the cremation of bodies, while himself using the very Diderotian argument that this

103. See especially on this Sicard, L’education morale et civique, pp. 395-398. 104. Mercier, Nouveau Paris 6:33. 105. Ibid., p. 36. 106. Mathiez, La theophilanthropie et le culte decadaire, pp. 47-48.

The Republic of Death

289

would prevent their decomposing back into nutritive organic matter (however, he follows the spiritualist de Moy in this).107 Daubermesnil seems also to have been guilty of wanting to leave the choice of the manner of burial “to the power of individuals and their fantasies, condemning the [dead] bodies to profanation, even on account of marital or filial tenderness.”108 (We think of Jacques and Suzanne Necker, pickled together in brine, in their sealed vault at Coppet.)109 Moreover, private inhumations (say, in the bottom of one s garden) would entail the right of private exhumations, as often as it suited the fancy.110 It is around the tombs that human imagi¬ nation creates and collects phantoms,” Mercier declared. “And then the imagination becomes just as much to be feared as the deep mystery it is contemplating.”111 If Mercier’s condemnation of Daubermesnil s cult is just (it is elsewhere represented as a charming and fragile deism),112 it would appear that the state needed to fight not only for its patriotic regulation of funerals, but for common standards of decency as well.113 That the state might even sponsor a public conformity with Roman-style private virtues had been conceived by Laveaux in 1793. In commending private burials, he had written: “I wish each family could have its burial plot on the fringe of its field....What son would be so barbarian as to sell the bones of his forefathers together with his land?”114 The state does not appear to have replaced the church very well in burying the dead. For, toward the end of the first Republic, the problem of burials inspired an outburst of literature. A common charge was that of indignity: “In the saddest of times [i.e., an II] nothing in France was left sacred. To regenerate the Nation one left it without laws and without institutions. In that brief, yet too long, period of time, the dead were denied the duties owed to them.”115 There was still a great confusion over the nature of these dignities. All writers seemed to agree that the place of burial should be peaceful, remote, and decorous.116 Some stressed the importance of civic conformity: “Funeral rites...should be in strict accord with the 107. Mercier, Nouveau Paris 6:40. 108. Ibid., p. 41. 109. See Ari£s, L’homme devant la mort, p. 379. 110. Mercier, Nouveau Paris 6:50. 111. Ibid., pp. 38-39. 112. Mathiez, Theophilanthropie et le culte decadaire, pp. 50-52. 113. “Private tombs are an attack on the calm and peace of society.” Mercier, Nouveau Paris 6:55. 114. Laveaux, Journal de la Montague, no. 148, 19 July 1793. 115. A. Duval, Des sepultures, p. 60. 116. Ibid., p. 39.

290

Mortal Politics

fundamentals of the state.”117 But others opted for privacy: “Beside the delicate grass lightly covering your corpse I will plant the myste¬ rious rose, sow the purple violet, and join them with the fragrant lily.”118 Cremation vied with inhumation.119 Gauthier-Lachapelle commended the Catholic atmosphere of All Saints’ Day;120 Dolivier preferred something more Thucydidean, pointing out that the patrie could not demand devotion from its citizens if it did not, in return, pledge them worthily to the souverain etre.121 All seemed to want some kind of religious faith to accompany the dead to their final rest and bond both the living and the dead to the nation. By now we are on the verge of the Concordat. Let us try to conclude what we can about two sets of problems. In the first place, dying, mortuary rites, and burials have given us more than a vagrant clue to political tensions in the period. The results are: (1) a new conception and design of burial sites; (2) an acknowl¬ edgment that the nation needs to be spiritualized by some doctrine of immortality, although it is not clear whether this will be a civil or private doctrine; (3) a rebalancing of church and state within a miti¬ gated regime of toleration; (4) an impending reinscription of Catholicism, much weakened, as the vehicle of ordinary dying. A second set of problems was proposed at the beginning of the previous chapter, and it is also a question for historiography: how did “la mort longue et proche” and “vivre libre ou mourir” manage to coexist? The answer should now be relatively clear. For the next wave of revolutionaries the idea of civic death would become faith itself, a challenge cleanly separating immortality in the heavens from lodging in the pantheon of social struggle. Yet “death as usual” outrode the serious storms of republican civil religion-even its bril¬ liant burst of hymns and festivals-leaving another legacy, “modern liberty,” which, though no less political, was, above all, private. As McManners writes: “For death, real death, the death of someone

117. Ibid., p. 62. 118. Fran^ois-Valentin Mulot, Discours...sur cette question: Quelles sont les ceremonies a faire pour les funerailles et le reglement a adopter pour le lieu de la sepulture? (Paris an IX), p. 42. 119. Ibid., p. 39; and Pierre Dolivier, Essai sur les funerailles (Versailles, an IX), p. 120. A. Gauthier-Lachapelle, Des sepultures (Paris, 1801), p. 78. 121. Dolivier, Essai sur les funerailles, pp. 31-34.

°r inai7„12fnd

near

at

hand,

there

The Republic of Death

291

was

but

no

consolation

religion. So, after much experimentation, the older religion, now challenged and chastened, returned to ordinary bedsides and graveyards.

122. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment, p. 357.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror Chapter 12

Terror as Political Category

The French Revolution was such a striking happening that the word “terror” can never again be simple in the Western vocabulary or in the language of peoples engrafted to the Western political tradition. However, the present chapter will attempt to explore antecedents of the Terror and not its special historical afterglow. Still, in this vein, a preliminary observation is in order because many today, condi¬ tioned by historicist ways of thought and by the multiple “terrors” of a revolutionary world, tend to visualize terror as an inevitable vehicle of political and social development. In a celebrated livre de circonstance, Merleau-Ponty wrote, “The Terror of History culminates in Revolution and History is Terror because there is contingency.”1 But such a notion was quite alien to the eighteenth century. The closest we come to it is Saint-Just’s sibylline remark: “That which produces the general good is always terrible, or it seems utterly strange (bizarre) when it is begun too early. ”2 This suggests an apology for the timing of the Terror and a step in the direction of Hegel’s and Marx’s developed interpretations of the Terror as an abstract mismatch with history that was bound to abort. But in fact, for the men of 1793, the Terror was neither historical triumph nor histor¬ ical contingency. It was a grim detergent process designed to return France as far as possible to “nature,” on whose foundations the just city could be built. As Saint-Just also wrote: “Terror can rid us of monarchy and aristocracy; but what will deliver us from corrup¬ tion?...Institutions....”3 The idea was to purge and save; but to save 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror; Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston, 1969), p. 91.

An

Essay on

2. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, Oeuvres choisies, p. 330. Italics in original. 3. Ibid., p. 319.

the

Communist

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

293

man for the politics of the city, not from the metapolitics of history. Subsequently we have gained a notion of the Terror that was not handed down to us by the Siecle des Lumieres. Throughout the eighteenth century, terror meant a kind of intense and composite fear. After the Revolution, it became a kind of political psychosis or even a Sorelian myth. What we shall try to ascertain is how this term, yoked to republican “virtue,” fell into the “dirty hands” of poli¬ tics. When I speak of the Terror’s “conceptual sources” it should be understood that I do not intend a complete canvassing of legal and ecclesiastic cruelty or political injustice-things that struck fear into the hearts of many—in Old Regime France. Quite obviously the persecutions of Jansenists and Protestants, the atrocities of criminal torture and execution,4 the psychology of crowds, the habits of royal absolutism, and many other phenomena are part of the essential background of the Revolutionary Terror of 1793-1794. They have also been widely, if not definitively, studied. However, I shall be more narrowly concerned here with the linguistic evolution of the term “terror” itself, not with all the acts and events to which it could conceivably be applied. It is also my intention to explore continuities: thus it is not within the purposes of my present treatment to attempt an explanation of the clearly unprecedented and unique nature of the Jacobin experiment, the specific things that render it novel. As is well known, Montesquieu in his Esprit des lois (1748) had established fear (crainte) as the ruling principle of despotic govern¬ ments like the Ottoman Empire, and had observed that “under fear...the people has no protector” and that “fear beats down bravery and the slightest feeling of ambition.”5 Montesquieu contrasts fear with honour, which is the mainspring of moderate monarchy. The principle of virtue is for him mainly a lost cause, a standard for judging, that effectively perished with the republics of antiquity; although he may have perceived a surrogate stimulus in Holland and England, it was clearly attached to private (civil) liberty and to what would shortly be called “the spirit of commerce.” Montesquieu might have used, but does not use, the term “terror.” However, in a passage from the much earlier Lettres persanes, where the politics of the harem is seen as a microcosm of the politics of the despotic 4. It is not, however, without interest that Edmund Burke, in the second edition of his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York, 1844), part 1, sect. 7, p. 51, refers to the spectacle of the execution of Damiens as an illustration of his theory connecting terror with the sublime. See below, note 43. 5. Montesquieu, De I’esprit des lois, vol. 3, bk. 9.

294

Mortal Politics

world, he does have Usbek instruct his eunuchs thus: “Receive with this letter unlimited power over the entire seraglio. May fear and terror walk with you.”6 For Montesquieu, terreur was no doubt the effect of a high inten¬ sity of crainte. In the article “Peur” in the Encyclopedic there is a revealing comment. Peur (fear) is described as “various conditions of the soul more or less perturbed by crainte. ” Crainte is the agency (like vertu or honneur); peur the reaction. This brief rubric goes on to say that if peur “breaks our spirit (abat notre esprit)...then it is terror.”7 Terreur is thus a manifestation of peur. The example of terreur given by the author is instructive, because it is political: the fright caused in Rome when Caesar led his troops across the Rubicon.8 Montesquieu further suggested that the fear which despotism imposes can be mitigated by observances of religion. It may be that Robespierre, with his cult of the Supreme Being, was taking this lesson to heart. The Festival of the Supreme Being took place in glacial magnificence just two days before the “terrible” Law of 22 Prairial. Yet, under the supremacy of the Committee of Public Safety, it is quite clear that, transcendent or not, the French civil religion was not designed as a check on despotism but was inaugu¬ rated as a controlled agency of government, an organizer of the elusive vertu whose deficiency stocked the scaffolds and crammed the prisons. Lexicons of the Old Regime, such as the Dictionnaire de TAcade'mie frangaise and the Dictionnaire de Tre'voux, give ordinary definitions of terror that are unconnected with politics. One might therefore conclude that Terror, as part of our political vocabulary, sprang full¬ blown from the deeds of the Revolution. However, this is not the case. Instead it seems likely that politics borrowed the term quite naturally from certain specific and adjacent usages.

6. Montesquieu, Lettres persanes..., ed. Gonzague True (Paris, 1946), letter 148. Socrates brushes aside the distinction between fear and terror despite the caution of the Sophist grammarian Prodicus in Plato’s Protagoras (358d-e, pp. 95-96): “Now you recognize the emotion of fear (56og) or terror (((>6(3oa). I wonder if you conceive it as I do? (I say this to you, Prodicus.) Whether you call it fear or terror, I define it as an expectation of evil....Protagoras and Hippias thought this covered both fear and terror, but Prodicus said it applied to fear but not to terror.” Plato, Protagoras and Meno, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie (Harmondsworth, 1956). 7. Article “Peur,” Encyclopedie 12:480ab. 8. I he source of this illustration is Montesquieu’s Considerations, ed. D. Lowenthal. He first cites the results of the battle of Cannae as stirring up “terror” in Rome (chap. 4, p. 51), and later on (chap. Rubicon event.

11, p.

106) compares that “same fright” with the

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

295

The erudite historian of the French language, Ferdinand Brunot, treats “terror” simply as an aspect or attribute of the Revolutionary situation: On 5 September, a deputation made up of the commissioners of the forty-eight sections and of the Jacobin Society came to inform the Convention: “Legislators, place terror on your agenda,” (cit. Buchez and Roux, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution frangaise 24:41)9 [He reports that] Barere had used the same word in the course of the same session. Of course the idea was not new [it came also from royalist sources]: “It was also through ‘terror’ that they [legislators] sought constantly to rouse the people.” (Speech of Lally-Tollendal, 31 August 1789, Archives parlementaires, 1st ser., 8:521n.)10 Brunot further asserts that the royalists may have spoken of “terror” before it crossed the lips of the patriots: “The former minister Montmorin, with his confidence of the Queen, wrote to the Comte de la Marche on 13 July 1792: ‘I think we will have to strike the Parisians with Terror.’ (Quoted from Albert Mathiez, Revolution frangaise 3:90).” Brunot’s scholarly investigation then carries him into the legitimation of a government of Terror as argued by Robespierre, Saint-Just, and others in the autumn of 1793. But his history and etymology remain incomplete. Though Terror assuredly became what Brunot documents, its earlier genesis is also of great interest. There is, as we shall see, a political cadence to the term terror as it appropriates new meanings in the eighteenth century. But before people were terrorized by their sovereign rulers or magistrates, they were terrorized from within or from on high or by deputies of the Almighty. Terror abased belief to conformity; like Montesquieu’s education under despotism it was “reduced to striking fear into the heart.”11 Yet the more enlightened minds of both church and state aimed to persuade by reasonable faith. Pascal, whose Jansenist coreli¬ gionists are most frequently accused of preaching faith through fright, is a good example: “To wish to place [religion] in the mind and in the heart through coercion and threats is not religion at all,

9. The reference is apparently also to an intervention by Royer at the Jacobin Club on 30 August 1793: “Let us place terror on the agendal It is the only way to rouse the people and force them to save themselves.” Aulard, ed., La societe des Jaco¬ bins 5:383-384. Note that the people have to be roused and forced to save themselves. 10. Brunot, Histoire de la langue franQaise, vol. 9, pt. 2, p. 870. 11. Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois, vol. 4, bk. 3.

296

Mortal Politics

but terror.”12 That is certainly a main aspect of Terror: the necessity, when in jeopardy of one’s life or security, to feign conduct without believing in it. Yet, as we shall see, certain indirect uses of terror were also held to inculcate moral feelings.

The Roots of Terror

In the following analysis I shall treat the concept of terror under four major headings: the terror of helplessness, the terror of eter¬ nity, the terror of arbitrary government, and the terror of aesthetic witness. Of these, the second and third are absolutely critical in approaching the mentality of the Revolutionary Terror, but the other two also have their importance. There is an aura of death or “defunctness” associated with each. The “terror of helplessness” begotten in the presumably cheerful eighteenth century is directly related to several paradoxical convic¬ tions: the new anthropocentrism of the Copernican universe, the genetic awareness of man’s development as a creature of reason (or as Jonathan Swift and others put it in darker moods, animal capax rationis), and the speculative arguments over human nature or, better, the human condition in the “state of nature,” whose fertile legal and political mythology became overladen with the quasiempirical accounts of transatlantic peoples living in anarchy or barbarism. Of course Hobbesian man, without his clever abilities to form societies and to abolish the state of war, is essentially fearful and terrorized. Fortunately, the “laws of nature” rush to his rescue before he can be extinguished. But there is another hypothetical primitive scenario in which man’s comparative lack of belligerency is no compensation for his fear and trembling. He is fearful not of his own kind, but of nature itself. The Age of Reason’s fountainhead for this version of man was undoubtedly Buffon, whose eminence as a naturalist appeared to lend scientific support to some of the hypoth¬ eses that political theorists were trying to manipulate. Indeed, it was surmised, even earlier, by Fontenelle and other writers, that religious

12. Pascal, Pense'es, no. 185, p. 122. Of course, the Jansenists occupy an important and paradoxical position: they tended to terrorize the faithful with their doctrines and they were, in turn, terrorized by political authority.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

297

fear was an extrapolation of this inbred natural ignorance.13 Let us follow the argument of Buffon: The earliest men were witnesses of the convulsive movements of the earth, still recent and very frequent; having only the moun¬ tains to shelter them against floods, they were often driven from these same refuges by the fire of volcanoes. Trembling on an earth that trembled beneath their feet, naked in mind and body, they were exposed to the ravages of all the elements, victims of the fury of wild animals to which they repeatedly fell prey; and all were equally filled with the common feeling of a fatal terror (terreur funeste).14 Boulanger s view of nature in the context of his highly original thesis about the origin of religion and political power was no less fraught with terror: “Earth offered nothing but a wilderness full of horror and misery, and the human race barely survived on the debris of the world.”15 Terror could arise from timorousness. And the timorous¬ ness of early man had a flourishing history. Montesquieu (apparently borrowing from Pufendorf) had used it at the beginning of his great work: “Man in the state of nature...would at first be aware only of his weakness; he would be extremely timid; and if one needs to argue from experience on this point, proof has been found of wild men in the forests; everything causes them to tremble and take flight.”16 And this, in turn, is of course Rousseau’s authority for the conviction “that there is nothing more timid than man in the state of nature...he is always trembling, and ready to flee at the least sound or the slightest motion.”17 For the materialist La Mettrie, natural law itself was “a kind of fear or fright, as salutary to the species as to the individual....”18 It could be argued that the alchemy of civilization had either dispelled the ignorant fear of the savages by giving reason its empire over superstition or by at least turning the quiverer into a calcu¬ lating Hobbesian; but there was the supposition that crainte and terreur remained deeply imbedded in the human condition and would 13. Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, ...De I’origine des fables, ed. J.-R. Carre (1724; Paris, 1932), pp. 16-19. 14. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, “Septieme et derniere epoque," Les epoques de la nature, in Buffon, Oeuvres philosophiques, p. 187. 15. Article “Oeconomie politique,” Encyclopedic 11:368a. 16. Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois, bk. 1, chap. 2. 17. Rousseau, Discours sur Vinegalite, in Vaughan, ed., Political Writings 1:144. 18. La Mettrie, L’homme machine, pp. 95-96.

298

Mortal Politics

re-emerge once the conventional layers of society were peeled away. Rousseau, “close to nature,” who had extremely complicated feelings to match his complicated theory, sometimes used the adjectives “craintiP and “faible” to describe himself.19 No doubt society-except in its despotic form-was a boon against “terror,” and, as such, a precious acquisition leading to the goals of enlightenment and autonomy. But was it not equally possible that man carried primitive fear within his “constitution” or even that this capacity for terror could be activated by a resolute reform seeking to extirpate acquired habits of vanity, dominance, or obsequiousness-in brief, aristocracy? The “terror of eternity” is of course the Christian terror, which had scarcely receded from the mass of men in the eighteenth century.20 Despite Diderot’s aphorism “take away the fear of hell from a Christian, and you will take away his belief,” that fear lingered on.21 The conviction that d’Holbach described as “pusillanimous” could not easily be jettisoned, or even moderated much by the “reasonable and judicious fear” of a Fenelon.22 With an intensity that may by now suggest the repeated play of trumps by a religion that was gradually losing its hold over the everyday morality of the educated, ecclesiastical thunderers like Pere Bridaine applied the therapy of terror: Follow me yet into those frightful tombs....Scarcely has the body of [a] young person who was formerly the joy and treasure [of all his living friends] been sealed up when there is born in that stinking corpse a prodigious number of worms and other insects: some consume the eyes, others gnaw at the face; still others swarm in the mouth and in the breast. His chest, already beginning to gape open, is filled with them. They teem in his bowels....All flesh dissolves into mud; nothing remains but a dung-heap, a sewer, a pile of rot and corruption. Finally, after all is devoured, the famished worms consume one another, and nothing is left of that mass of flesh but a heap of noisome bones and a ghastly skeleton that gradually falls apart like an old ruined building, until at last everything is turned into ashes and dust.23

19. Especially in Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 1. 20. A study of special interest, besides the works of Vovelle, McManners, and Favre, is Groethuysen, The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism. 21. Diderot, “Addition aux pens6es philosophiques,” no. 17 in Oeuvres philosophiques, p. 60. 22. Fenelon, Oeuvres de Fenelon 4:312-313; 5:402. 23. Jacques Bridaine, Sermons, 7 vols., 2d edition (Avignon, 1827), 6:93f.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

299

The body is ravaged in the tomb by the foulest elements of nature; the representation of that same body is perpetually tortured in hell by demons: such is the double jeopardy of Catholic pictography. The Marquis de Caraccioli, a median, even sophisticated, Christian moralist of mid-century, was balanced enough in taste to follow up a chapter on “the terrors of death” with one on “the consolations.” But his terrors are no less vivid for all that: The idea of a tomb that will swallow up [the body], worms that will devour it, a rot that will consume it, creates a scene we do not dare imagine. Is it not a thoroughly terrifying thing to think that these arms I am touching and my fingers that are presently moving across this paper will soon be dry bones cast here and there, and the object of men’s fright?...It is absolutely necessary that death be frightening because it is the consequence of sin, that is to say, a terrible punishment for our vainglory (orgueil).24 Such examples are legion. It was d’Holbach’s well-known thesis that religion had played on terror since time out of mind in order to bend human conduct to its designs.25 If these spectres were not as lurid in the eighteenth century as in the Grand Siecle, they remained premonitory and frightening. No doubt both Enlightenment and Revolution depictorialized the rich Christian “tableau” of death; but there is surely an important and effective continuity between the “terreurs salutaires” of the afterlife and the civic fright stirred up by the Jacobins. In their ascending circle of ferocity (supplemented moreover by gropings toward a religion which would be at the same time populist, national, and transcendental in scope), the Jacobins punished the consequences of civic sin with death, although their putative attempt to return the body politic to “nature” and, in so doing, to benefit “the happiness of the people” bespoke a more restricted drama than the Christian promise of eternal bliss or threat of eternal torment. However, it was a Terror enacted with both commitment and bravado, if not for the sake of souls, at least for the sake of public virtue, by a breed of men who were not themselves indifferent to redemptive sacrifice. Saint-Just put it remarkably: “Those who cause revolutions in the world, those who wish to accomplish good, should not sleep until they are placed in the tomb.”26 His “happiness,” that “new idea in Europe,” was most 24. Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, Le tableau de la mort (Paris, 1767), pp. 154-156. 25. See d’Holbach, Systeme social, vol. 2, chap. 2, p. 22. 26. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, “Rapport sur la necessite de declarer le gouvernement

300

Mortal Politics

surely not Bentham’s happiness, but the ecstasy of a celebrant.27 And Robespierre’s next to last words, when he stampeded the Convention into reprisal by threatening to name names of the wicked, were “I bequeath them the terrible truth, and I bequeath them death.”28 The most noteworthy thing is perhaps not the legacy of religious terror handed down to political terror, but the sense in which it seemed to be filtered through the concept of “nature” and hence with complexity through the theme of the “terror of helplessness” described earlier. Nature now collected the wages of sin; and social guilt transfigured the veiled depravity of the person. Terror took nourishment from these sources and overthrew them-in the name of an epoch of clarity: the Year One. But Terror was not totally dependent upon either the mediation of religion’s “craintes salutaires” or the image of the primordial “man of nature,” trembling as the earth trembled beneath him, to inhabit the political vocabulary. For, by the mid-eighteenth century, it had entered political usage by another route. There was also a terror of arbitrary government, closely linked to the imagery of the Spirit of the Laws. The major issues were the oppressive tax policies of Louis XV (especially the inequities of the taille and the arbitrariness of the vingtiemes, originally levied for the conduct of war), the independent aspirations of the parlements and other sovereign courts within a hypothesized “ancient constitution,” and also the “political Gallicanism”-interbred with older currents from a persecuted Jansenism-that challenged the church and the royal government.29 By the late 1760s Louis XV, deprived of seasoned counsel and assured by his new favourites that he could alter the fundamental laws of France by chastising, abolishing, and reconstituting the sover¬ eign courts, asserted his supreme authority over all French political life (especially at the famous seance de la flagellation of 3 March 1766) in a manner entirely worthy of his great-grandfather. This doctrine was made operational in the 1771 coup d’etat of Chancellor Maupeou, which had the effect of dissolving and exiling the Parlement of Paris (a sovereign court with jurisdiction over one-third revolutionnaire jusqu’4 la paix,” 19 Vendemiaire, an II (10 October 1793),” in Oeuvres choisies, p. 177. 27. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, “Rapport sur les factions de l’etranger,” 23 Ventose, an II (13 March 1794), ibid., pp. 219-220. 28. Robespierre, speech to the Convention, 8 Thermidor, an II (26 July 1794), Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1967), 10:567. 29. See esp. Egret, Louis XV et Vopposition parlementaire, passim.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

301

of the country) and the Paris Cour des Aides (led by the doughty Lamoignon de Malesherbes), and of interfering with the composition and jurisdiction of other courts. It would be digressive here to argue the case either for the parlements or for the Maupeou “reforms” (which were approved by Voltaire);30 at very least it can be said that the latter were arbi¬ trarily and maliciously implemented. The parlementary slogan for the occasion was “terror”; and no one had done more to cultivate the term during the preceding fifteen years than Malesherbes, the liberal royalist and “friend of the philosophes.” In this context, terror implied (1) the suspension of the law; (2) attacks by royal authority againt the fundamental security of the person; (3) arbitrary assaults on property, including hereditary offices; and (4) the psycho¬ logical state of being subject to these uses of power. The current of despotism that Montesquieu had sensed in the Sun King’s reign seemed more and more a bitter reality to the magistrates of the noblesse de robe. In remonstrances of the Cour des Aides as early as 1756 Malesherbes, referring to the arbitrary behaviour of the commissions on contraband, spoke of “the terror that these irregular tribunals impose on the people.”31 Fourteen years later, in a similar indict¬ ment of an agency of royal government, the Tax Farm, he would refer to an “apparatus of terror,” and would further specify to the king: “No citizen in your kingdom is assured that he will not see his freedom sacrificed to personal vengeance; for no one is great enough to be sheltered from the hatred of a minister, nor small enough to escape that of a clerk of the Tax Farm.”32 In the meantime, refer¬ ring to an increase in the taille, Malesherbes had declared: “We can vouch to Your Majesty that the unique effect produced by the new operation has been to spread terror in the places where it was carried out....”33 By 1770 this language had been adopted by the Parlement of Paris in connection with a long sequence of oppressive measures taken against the Parlement of Rennes by the royal governor of Brittany, the Due d’Aiguillon. That court declared: “A most absolute act of authority, substituting caprice for justice, has violated our most precious procedures, broken the most sacred laws, and planted in everyone’s mind disquiet, terror, and desolation.”34 30. Voltaire, “Reponse aux remontrances de la Cour des Aides par un membre des nouveaux Conseils souverains” (1771), in Oeuvres completes 28:385-388. 31. Register of the Cour des Aides, 14 September 1756, France, Arch, nat., Z1 A 185. 32. Ibid., 14 August 1770 (“cas Monnerat”), Arch, nat., Z1 A 188. 33. Ibid., 9 July 1768, Arch, nat., Z1 A 188. 34. Flammermont, ed., Remontrances du Parlement de Paris 3:128.

302

Mortal Politics

Now Malesherbes himself returned to the attack: “Follow the motions of your heart, Sire, and you will reign by justice and your people will fall to their knees; then you will recognize that it is useless to reign by terror.”35 The great blow was about to fall. On the night of 21-22 January 1771, 138 parlementarians of Paris were sent into exile by individual lettres de cachet. Turgot, certainly no enthusiast for the courts or the these nobiliaire, sensed the atmosphere a few weeks in advance. On 1 January 1771 he wrote to Caillard: “The gloomy vizir [d’Aiguillon] has replaced the cheerful one [Choiseul-as Minister of War and Foreign Affairs], and it seems that the [royal] wish is to rule by terror and in silence.”36 Silence-that haunting image of Montesquieu, who, under the rubric of despotism, had described fear as “the silence of towns that the enemy is about to occupy.”37 Turgot’s turn of phrase is interesting for another reason. For although he and Malesherbes were good friends and would become close collaborators in the first ministry of Louis XVI, Turgot had actually accused the courts, and not the royal administration, of “terror” in 1768, a “terror that the unity of the whole magistracy must inspire in anyone opposed to its pretensions.”38 In other words, political adversaries accused one another of “terror” as far back as the end of the reign of Louis XV, just as they would do once again in the frenzy of revolution. But it was Malesherbes who continued to thunder about terror, notably in a remonstrance that caused his own sovereign court to be dissolved and banished on 18 February 1771: “Sire, the terror with which one wishes to strike all the orders of the state has not caused your Cour des Aides to shudder....What I ask you, Sire, is the nature of this terrible administration prepared for us, if all sovereign power is arranged in advance to block the intercessions resulting from the desperation of the entire country?”39 And almost four years later, with his court restored, he warned the Comte d’Artois, who had come before the Cour des Aides to register an edict, against “those

35. Cour des Aides, 31 August 1770, Arch, nat., Z1 A 188. 36. Cited by Pierre Jacomet, Vicissitudes et chutes du Parlement de Paris (Paris, 1954), p. 99. 37. Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois, bk. 5, chap. 14; cf. Lettres persanes, ed. True, letter 64. 38. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, “Fragments sur les Parlements,” 15 November 1768, in Oeuvres de Turgot et les documents le concernant, ed. Gustave Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1913-1923), 3:30. 39. France, Arch, nat., O1 353.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

303

evil maxims [one of which claims]...that power is never enough respected unless terror marches before it.”40 This plane of discourse was a kind of Lockeanism tempered by the aristocrat’s self-esteem in the possession of his hereditary office. Terror, as in 1793, was directed against a kind of privilege in the name of the levelling impulse of the state. Yet “terror,” in this instance, was royal, not Jacobin, not republican; and it assuredly received no energy from virtue, although, like “virtue,” it was directed against “honour.” But this is oversimple. For, in the last decade or so of the reign of Louis XV, the legal aristocracy was almost all that was left of the vox populi: Behind its pretensions it had a certain valid claim to speak for liberty-the “liberal” liberty of eighteenth-century proprietary rights. If the “few” bore the burden of that liberty, it was partly because the “many” were diffuse and inarticulate. If Terror was a political caprice indifferent to the rights of the person and his property, liberty was understood as a preserve of security and independence centered around the power to deter¬ mine one’s will and to act in protection of one’s life, one’s kin, one’s property, one’s offices, one’s fortune, and the chances of one’s post¬ erity. Albeit with increasing discomfort, the noble and the bourgeois could share these values: the noble, because the ancient laws of the realm appeared to protect him against certain forfeitures to an over¬ bearing sovereign; the bourgeois, because, even if he did not aspire to the nobility, his train of life depended on the equitable guarantees of the rule of law. This may seem far removed from the grim fact of death, and so it was. But in the system of “honour” described by Montesquieu there were living penalties analogous to death, the chief one being “disgrace.” And in eighteenth-century conditions, disgrace could be connected with outcasting, a kind of “living death,” occurring, in the words of a recent writer, “each time that a person ceases to belong to a given group...by virtue of limit of age or loss of function.”41 What the parlementarians and their allies understood by freedom was, concretely speaking, their network of connubial connections, their offices of justice, and their arrogated privilege to “speak for the nation” (in the absence of organized Estates). What they under¬ stood by Terror was the arbitrary interference with their functions by court, ministry, and monarch-functions they held to be constitu¬ tional and in the interest of the nation. When the king (usually in

40. “Proc£s-verbal de ce qui s’est passe...en presence de Monseigneur le Comte d’Artois,” 12 November 1774, Cour des Aides, Arch, nat., Z1 A 189. 41. L.-V. Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort, p. 45.

304

Mortal Politics

the tersest language imaginable) expressed his displeasure at the remonstrances and recalcitrance of “his” courts, when he exiled these comfortable men of standing to distant estates or provincial backwa¬ ters, he was striking at their physical freedom (Blackstone’s “power of locomotion”) and at their political substance. He did not kill his nobles and magistrates; he “disgraced” them or occasionally impris¬ oned them. He undermined their security and place in the realm. He impugned their “honour”-including that of the royal princes who played at fronde-and he entrapped them in disfavour or boredom. This was what was originally understood as the Terror: the lettre de cachet, not the glaive de la loi. The worldly values of Locke and Montesquieu, not the cosmic anguish of Pascal, shine through this conception. Body, motion, property, prestige, tranquillity in a world at midstays between tradi¬ tion and new material acquisitiveness are wedded in a social concep¬ tion whose violation is Terror. But the interests of the nation are also involved; no man is too insignificant, as Malesherbes put it, to escape the assault of the royal bully. And this horror of sinking in privilege is itself intricately connected with the deprivation of life and breath in the historical animal-life, liberty, property, and “honour.” The “one” has attempted to terrorize the “few”; soon, as we shall see, the “many” will do it better. “Honour,” as Montesquieu recorded, would be dangerous in any despotic state. Before following the march of political terror to its climax, there is an aesthetic theme that deserves mentioning. As we saw, the Terror confirmed the age-old dispositions of “baroque” crowds at executions and other public displays. The theatre was another sort of spectacle, catering to a more cultivated audience and ever ready, like its connoisseurs, to admit new fashions. The tragic art of French theatre had experienced a steady natural decline from the days of Corneille and Racine, through Crebillon and the early dramas of Voltaire, and into what the philosophes, Voltaire foremost among them, knew to be an “age of prose,” the age well described in d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia as a “philosophical” century. For all that, there remained a theatre, consigned to lesser hands and increasingly prone to substitute agita¬ tion, sentimentality, and even horror for the stately cadences and refined passions of the great masters. Drama grew gothic, freakish, and a little out of hand, when it was not frankly stale and derivative. As Louis-Sebastien Mercier commented: “Any philosophe, that is, anyone who takes his cue from nature and mankind rather than from scribblers and academicians, has to smile with pity as he sepa-

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

tragedy^42 thC falSe’

305

^ bizarrC’ and the deceitful tone of our

This is not the place to digress on changes in aesthetic sensibility in eighteenth-century France. However, it will be instructive to pick up a few benchmarks. Terror (of course an Aristotelian concept) had been firmly attached by Edmund Burke to his notion of the sublime Burke had written: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of reeling. Further: “And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison greater....Indeed, terror is, in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”45 The sublime is a kind of response to terror, a horrified tranquillity. If it seems odd that this powerful intellectual antagonist of the Revolution may have helped to supply a portion of its aesthetic, this is merely one of a catalogue of ironies accumulated by that explo¬ sion. It is equally ironic that Burke’s aesthetic enlisted such an odd partner as Helvetius: “Of all the passions fear is the strongest. Thus the sublime is always the effect of a terror in progress....One feels captured by a certain respect which supposes always in us the feeling of a fear and a terror in progress.”46 6 With somewhat of a lag, French taste in the several arts was being deflected from its native classicism by foreign influences: Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Burke, and Karnes; Winckelmann and Lessing, especially the latter’s haunting image of the Laocoon. The French were themselves exploring the dimensions of a moralizing, and eventually patriotic, art; as Voltaire wrote, “true tragedy is the school of virtue.”47 Diderot was the great and inspired clearing¬ house through which most of these impulses passed. And despite his 42. Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 4, chap. 333. 43. It was Burke who first insisted upon the centrality of terror in the sublime moment.” Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore, 1976), p. 85. 44. Burke, The Sublime and the Beautiful, part 1, sect. 7, p. 51. 45. Ibid., part 2, sect. 2, p. 77. 46. Helvetius, De I’homme, sect. 8, chap. 14, p. 412. For a recent discussion and disparagement of Burke’s polemic against the French Revolution in the context of the sublime, see Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven 1983), pp. 59-73. 47. Voltaire to Cardinal Quirini, regarding his Semiramis, cited by T.M. Mustoxidi, Histoire de Testhetique frangaise, 1700-1900... (Paris, 1920), p. 61.

306

Mortal Politics

reverence for Lessing, Diderot had a more affirmative appreciation of the terrible. His hatred of Christianity did not diminish his admira¬ tion for the terrors of Christian art; its “bloody scenes of fanaticism” could “teach sovereigns and peoples what they might expect from those sacred preachers of deceit.”48 “Crime,” he declared, “is a beau¬ tiful thing, whether in history or poetry, on canvas or in marble.”49 “Witness,” he challenged, “in our churches, that troop of men, flagel¬ lated, torn, well suited to walk behind a God crowned with thorns, his side pierced by a lance, his hands and feet nailed to wood. All of that is terrible, but sublime. ”50 This was a Burkean sense of the power of terror, although Diderot would surely have been astonished by the all-too-literal calvaries of the Revolution. In the last years of the Old Regime, one of the most gifted eclec¬ tics of the literary scene was Chamfort, a poet and dramatic critic. Fertile but slightly unbalanced, this stormy petrel of the world of letters, a member of the Academie frangaise, published a violent diatribe against that corporation and asked Mirabeau to read it to the Constituent Assembly in 1789.51 He also sought a place in the vanguard of politics well into the heyday of the Jacobins, when he finally revolted against the government’s stern censorship of his epigrams. Upon the arrival of the police to arrest him, he attempted suicide twice, wanting to open his veins to the honour of Seneca. He died in 1794.52 Chamfort was well aware that terror, together with pity, was a component of the Aristotelian katharsis. To his way of thinking, the French theatre of his time was overburdened with “horror,” but defi¬ cient in “terror.” His analysis of this subject, which I quote here at length, is worth our attention, for it helps to establish a certain connection between high and low culture, dramatic fiction and theat¬ rical reality, and the moralities of taste and politics. In Chamfort’s view, theatrical terror is both a “salutary” deterrent and a moralizing passion: Although it appears quite difficult to define terror, it seems to consist in the sum of incidents each of which, producing its effect and leading the action to its end in tiny steps (insensiblement), causes us to experience that salutary anxiety which, from the sad 48. Diderot, “Salons,” in Oeuvres completes 10:502-503. 49. Ibid., 10:185. 50. Diderot, “Sur la peinture, po£me en trois chants par M. Le Mierre” (1769), ibid., 10:91. 51. See Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, Des academies (Paris, 1791). 52. Julien Teppe, Chamfort, sa vie, son oeuvre, sa pensee (Paris, 1950), esp. pp. 56-57.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

307

example of others, brakes our passions and thus prevents us from falling into the distresses seen on the stage that brought tears to our eyes. No longer does any inevitable order of fate bring crime and distress to our theatre; rather, it is the will of man exceeded and cast adrift by passion. Contemplative (refle'chie) terror is joined to direct terror in a way more moral and fruitful for the spectator. Terror is, so to speak, the height of pity; we must proceed from the one to the other. Though frightful misfortunes may befall a man, they will scarcely touch me unless he has first been shown worthy of compassion and pity.... The scenery can contribute to the impression of terror (au terrible): a dark prison, a bonfire, a scaffold, a coffin, etc. All these

objects are well suited to increase terror: the only thing left is the actual shedding of blood, which we would not want to see in the theatre.53 To be sure, the French continued to recoil at the bloodbaths of Shakespeare and other “gothic” artists. But Chamfort, writing shortly before the Revolution, was willing to soothe the moralizing imagina¬ tion with necrophilic symbols, to transmit the theme of apprehension salutaire, and to revel in a terreur refle'chie that would augment pure and simple terror. In Chamfort there is a heavy touch of the lugu¬ brious which the Revolutionary Terror never contemplated, as well as the hint of a spectator sport depending on delicate psychological anticipation and a suspension of disbelief quite alien to the repetitive strokes of the guillotine. Moreover, the moralizing aim is pity, not virtue; or, put more problematically, a hesitation, like Rousseau’s, between natural and artificial morality. But the re-theorization of terror for the theatre has subtle-perhaps apologetic—connections with forthcoming scenes in the agoras of the republic. In a politics that had become theatre, the theatre had something to furnish to politics.

The Legacy of Terror

Yet the Jacobin Terror rose above all other frayeurs. If natural fear induced flight, religious fear a disquieted obedience, and aesthetic

53. Sebastien-Roch-Nicolas Chamfort, Ebauches d’une poetique dramatique, “Terreur,” in Oeuvres completes de Chamfort, 5 vols. (Paris, 1824-1825), 4:190-194.

308

Mortal Politics

fear a purging of the passions, the Terror was fundamentally a polit¬ ical fear that transformed the loss of honour into the loss of life. It usurped the field of meanings. A whole vocabulary of neologisms commenced to be constructed around it-“terribilite,” “terroriser,” “terroriste,” “terrifieur”-as the scholarship of Brunot shows us.54 “Honour,” and its aristocratic practice, was the real enemy, the excluded middle. For the real struggle of the French Revolution was not between the One and the Many, the despot and the people; rather, it was an Aristotelian struggle between the Few and the Many. Although the king’s demise, on 21 January 1793, was vital to the destruction of feodalite, it was not the main issue. The drama of the populace against the tyrant is only the symbol of the real social and political awakening: the well-known “cycle” of Roman history is to be compressed into a few years and then, according to the vision of Robespierre, transcended by an instant burst of centuries.55 The moderate monarchy, theorized by Montesquieu, could “sustain itself by its laws and by its strength alone;”56 but it could not summon “virtue” and did not require it. It never crossed Montesquieu’s mind that France had an aptitude for virtue. Yet in 1792 the most powerful state in Europe, with few of the habits of antique virtue, became republican. How was one to obtain virtue? By “institutions” (meaning inbred agencies of public moral censorship as opposed to “laws”), as Saint-Just recommended. But in the meantime, what? The program was necessarily to destroy the “honour” of the Few. This meant a total inversion of Montesquieu’s project (and the sage of Bordeaux, with his sardonic appreciation of honour’s foibles, had certainly given the Jacobin ideologues some ambiguous encourage¬ ment). Even if the “privileged” (e.g., the Parlements, the academies) had, in one way or another, helped to stymie the march of France toward despotism in the eighteenth century, their pretension of being the melior pars could not be tolerated in a republic. The republic of the Girondins, theorized in Condorcet’s constitutional project was, aside from personal passions, abstractly hateful to the

54. Brunot, Histone de la langue franqaise, vol. 9, pt. 2, p. 871. 55. Robespierre, “Rapport sur les idees religieuses et morales avec les principes republicans et sur les f£tes nationales,” in Discours et rapports a la convention par Robes¬ pierre (Paris, 1965), p. 248. 56. Montesquieu, De Vesprit des lois, bk. 3, chap. 9.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

309

Montagne precisely because it seemed to preserve emoluments of honour (notabilities) and to shortchange virtue—to give advantages to a new aristocracy. Thus the Jacobin ideology pivoted theoretically around the elimination of honour as a political category, and practi¬ cally around the elimination of its proponents. It has been alleged that the factions dominated by Robespierre were misguided by thinking themselves Romans, but it is more likely that Romanism was their code for an idea of modernity greatly at odds with that of the liberal proponents of the Revolution. They did not merely-or chiefly—strike a tactical alliance with the sectarian plebs when the chips were down (although this may have been true in cases like Herault de Sechelles and Barere); they were fervently resolved to crush those forces that they designated as “aristocracies.” Thus the republicans faced that difficult conjugation between terror (clearly understood as a species of Montesquieu’s “fear”) and virtue. As Saint-Just put it, “a republican government has virtue for its principle; if not, it has terror. What could anyone possibly want who wanted neither virtue nor terror?”57 And Robespierre empha¬ sized: “there are no citizens in the republic except the repub¬ licans. 58 Honour—the residue of the early revolutionaries, Malesherbes, Lafayette, Barnave, even Condorcet-is to be crushed between the millstones of terror and virtue, the one provisional (“until the peace”-but a peace primarily concerned with liquidating internal enemies), the other everlasting. The Few, vulnerable whether as spokesmen for a monarchy with which they had historical attachments or for the plebs for whom they spoke only in a certain accent, were the designated victims. The famous speech of Robespierre, from which I have just quoted, begins in a moderate manner. It is Robespierre’s most succinct statement on behalf of democratic institutions. After declaring that “we wish to substitute in our country morality for egoism,” he goes on to say that “we will not model the French Republic after that of Sparta.”59 But then there is a sudden shift in tone, when Robespierre presents his instructive dialectic of virtue and terror: ...virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice that is prompt, severe, and inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct 57. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, “Ecrits posthumes,” in Oeuvres choisies, p. 327. 58. Robespierre, speech translated in Beik, ed., French Revolution, p. 284. 59. Ibid., p. 281.

310

Mortal Politics

principle than a consequence of the general principle of democ¬ racy applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie. Robespierre is obviously wrestling with Montesquieu, the quixotic champion of honneur and the free buffering zone of the Few: “It has been said that terror is the spring of despotic governments.” But the principle has changed with the situation (for now honneur is the adversary). “Let the despot govern his debased subjects by terror; he is right as a despot: conquer by terror the enemies of liberty and you will be right as founders of the republic. The government of the revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”61 This chal¬ lenge is sometimes interpreted as a response to France’s peril from the arrayed dynastic forces of Europe-a fist cocked at London, Vienna, and Berlin. But it is also a theoretical unravelling of the French historical dilemma, a denunciation of the doctrine that the Few could ever protect the Many from the One, and a demand that these Few pay their just price on the scaffold. Although an internationale of corruption besieges them, the French still have only a republic of form: “the aristocracy and the moderates still govern us by the murderous maxims to which they have accustomed us!”62 For, “democracy perishes from two kinds of excess.” One of these is “the aristocracy of those who govern,” but the other is “contempt on the part of the people for the authorities that they themselves have established...which leads the people, through an excess of disorder, either to annihilation or to the despotism of one man.”63 It was by this type of argument that Robespierre achieved the death of both the “aristocrats” and the populists like Hebert, betraying a trace of his own supposition that virtue needed to be taught, despite its source in the natural constitution of man; taught moreover, by a whiff of death. Terror was, indeed, “justice that is prompt...thus an emanation of virtue.” Yet, according to another spokesman of the Jacobin Left, this justice spared one’s own kind: “Jacobins have all the virtues; they are compassionate, humane, generous; but all these sentiments they reserve for the patriots who are their brothers, and the aristocrats will never act that way!”64 Robespierre seems to have suspected even these kinsmen, at least so long as “tyranny lives in people’s hearts, and Rome survives only in the person of Brutus.”65 60. 61. 62. 63.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p.

283. 284. 285. 286.

64. Collot d’Herbois at the Jacobin Club, ler Nivose, an II (21 December 1793), cited in Buchez and Roux, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Revolution franqaise 30:437. 65. Quoted in Beik, ed., French Revolution, p. 282.

Conceptual Sources of the Terror

311

If the Jacobins modelled themselves on Rome, they had a great misunderstanding of history. But although the Jacobin political science was in many ways retrograde, the leaders of the revolu¬ tionary government were perfectly aware of dealing with a French problem, bequeathed by Montesquieu. It is simply that their analysis was not the preferred solution of the Western world. In their death-dealing grip on power that lasted for over a year, the Jacobins exalted the Terror to a political principle, but they were not convinced that the principle was solely theirs. Just as Turgot, in 1768, accused the parlements, with their doctrine of unity and indivisibility, of perpetrating “terror” while these same bodies were hurling the term against the ministers of Louis XV, so Robespierre accused the “agents of London and Berlin” of practicing “the art of scaring the people...of introducing in its midst defiance, terror, and consternation.”66 And so he also, in his last speech, blamed his enemies for “acts of aggression...spreading the system of terror and slander.”67 Obviously the word was to be shunned, unless linked with “virtue.” Obviously, too, it had the resonance of a fight to the finish, a struggle resulting, as it is said today, in the death of the “other.” Finally, it appears that the Terror was a vast episode of revenge, both personal and abstract. As Saint-Just declaimed in his “happiness” speech: “Give the people revenge on twelve hundred years of transgressions against their ancestors (forfaits contre ses peres). ”68 And, as Robespierre confirmed, “Between the people and its enemies, there has been a constant reaction in which a progres¬ sive violence has, in a few years, made up for the work of several centuries.”69 For the man of the Age of Reason, Terror was not part of a “history fraught with contingencies,” nor was it commen¬ dable as such. It was, however, the politics leading to the dark sanc¬ tuary from which Hobbes had striven to rescue it: the politics of death. It was not so sudden or cataclysmic as the 1720 Marseilles plague or the 1755 Lisbon earthquake; but it proved that man had become his own Dieu vengeur. This is an incredible leap for a

66. Robespierre, to the Jacobins, 11 August 1793, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1967), 10:64. 67. Robespierre, to the Convention, 8 Thermidor, an II (26 July 1794), ibid., p. 549. 68. A.-L.-L. de Saint-Just, “Rapport du 13 Ventose, an II (3 March 1794),” Oeuvres choisies, p. 206. 69. Robespierre, to the Convention, 27 Brumaire, an II (17 November 1793), Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1967), 10:168.

312

Mortal Politics

century. We circle back to Bossuet, where we began. It will soon become possible to say about man in authority what Bossuet had said about God: “He lives eternally; his wrath is implacable and always lively; his power is invincible; he never forgets; he never grows weary; nothing escapes him.”70 70. Bossuet, La politique tire'e, p. 113.

Conclusion

In eighteenth-century France, persons were being born and surviving at a somewhat more rapid rate than they died, allowing the popula¬ tion to rise about 20 percent during the period. These French spent far more time with the concerns of the empirical world than with those of the life to follow, unless they were deeply pious or vowed to a severe religious order. Only a small proportion of deaths can be directly attributed to politics-even during wars and the Revolution. And, for their victims, death often came more quickly and unexpect¬ edly than it did for the incurably ill or the malnourished. Their prep¬ aration a la mort was apt to be cursory. What then is the significance of “mortal politics”? A first answer is that politics subscribes us to the notion of order: calling to mind all the levels of order we experience, from the cosmos to the laws of the land, the rules of our communities and institutions, the peace of the hearth, and the harmony of the self. The threat of chaos, a fear so abiding that we challenge it only when the existing order seems intolerable or a better one seems likely to be gained without high cost, is most radically presented by the idea of death, in the form of extinction or irreparable loss. Political rela¬ tionships and political faith are, as the early chapters of this book tried to show, designed as almost immortal, willed as such, but ulti¬ mately discovered not to be. The “end” of politics-as assurance, security, preservation-also involves a literal and unavoidable end for the association and its members-an order that “wears out” or “dies.” In the second place, the conditions of that order entail voluntary sacrifice and involuntary punishment (tortuously rationalized as voluntary in some political theories). Members of a state know that politics can take away their lives, can be said to have the right as well as the force to do this, and does so by violent or unnatural means—in shame or in glory. Dying from politics can be resisted by flight, rebellion, recantation, or resourcefulness: But the resister is targeted as others are not. He may try to rally enough power to stymie or conquer the power that seeks his ruin, but to do so he must assemble a cohort very much like that of his adversary. Most persons, however, feel a protective satisfaction in knowing that the state is authorized to pursue criminals, predators, zealots, or foreign enemies who endanger the common way of life. Incentives from

314

Mortal Politics

many sources-call them our “intimations of mortality”-cause us apprehensions about dying. The experience of politics gives even more reason to think about its presence and its function. The preceding studies of war, punishment, and revolution confirm this. Thirdly, in organized societies there will be institutional and professional sectors that not only occupy themselves with “mortal politics” more than the population at large, but also broadcast its activity. Voices in religion, in the law, in forensic medicine, in the military, in certain branches of literature and journalism, in areas of the fine arts, and in resolute sedition tended to fill this description in the eighteenth century (not much of this, except for technological refinement, has changed). I have tried to capture most of that range (except for iconography) in my account of the various mentalities, manners, and corporate activities that defined the public features of death in the Enlightenment. Such a focus brings out the distance between dying for or from politics and “ordinary dying”; it concretizes the immortal/mortal ambivalence of politics; and it shows how poli¬ tics bestows special tensions on the meaning of death. Finally, there is the matter of dying for politics or for its symbols. A majority of human beings would probably prefer not to face the problem of altruistic sacrifice, much less fanatic attachment to a cause. Others do have objects of loyalty for which they are prepared to give their lives if the need is imperative. Most of the time these are not direct political loyalties: They involve the nuclear family, kinsmen, friends, some dedicated pursuit, or a value of the highest worth. Yet politics can conceivably enter any of these situations instrumentally: It might be said, for example, that giving one’s life for science or letters could, under certain conditions, be thought a political act, as dying for a religious faith could also be. However, the impact of politics is much clearer in cases where one goes to war as a volunteer, or when one defies the state, or when one represents or incarnates some authority that has been deposed. Inevitably, this book has focused on such situations as they were clarified by eighteenth-century social beliefs-about loyalty and disloyalty, honour and turpitude, conviction and doubt. Political personalities dying from violence could be of as different a stripe as Louis XVI and Louis Mandrin, Damiens and du Barry, General Montcalm and Madame Roland: But their deaths proceeded from some form of state power and their corpses harboured a certain defunct attitude toward human government. Seen from an important perspective, death is sovereign and poli¬ tics is one of its messenger angels. The reverse view is that politics is

Conclusion

315

a sovereign that keeps death at bay: Hobbes argued this, and he was fundamentally right. We need not, I think, go as far as Hobbes did to make the point, but we should be clear about what Hobbes was teaching us. In fact, one way of seeing the French eighteenth century might be as the withdrawal and return of the Hobbesian preoccupation. Hobbes had some very great antagonists in the Age of Reason, of whom the most important was undoubtedly Montesquieu. The French monarchy collapsed not only because it could not be both opulent and bankrupt, both philosophical and reverential, both ancient and modern, but also because it could not be half-Hobbes, half-Montesquieu. When it fell, the instinct was to bring back Hobbes in Rousseau’s clothing of virtue, turning Hobbes’s proposition of sovereign protection toward that of sover¬ eign death, and producing Saint-Just, the most morbid and theoret¬ ical of the Jacobins. As we know, this is not the end of the story. Montesquieu’s time would come after both pomp and hatred had been exhausted, and would last a certain while. As I pointed out at the beginning, this study has been cast in terms of contexts and particularities. The most general and impor¬ tant context was the shifting of the ground of normative political sovereignty from a hidden God to a mythical Society, with an accom¬ panying transfer of the claim to wield the power of life and death from the monarch to the popular state as embodied in its representa¬ tives of the “general will.” As we have seen, this solution was not achieved without transaction, resistances, intermediary experiments, and relentless argument, boiling over Finally in a fratricide of frater¬ nity. Metaphorically, politics passed through a variety of explanations of how the universal will of society could be personated; but, perhaps still more significantly, the images of the machine, of vegetable growth and decay, and of medical therapy and cure were introduced to tie that abstraction to the processes of human life. The attempt was made first to desacralize, then to delegitimize the monarch’s presumably immortal representative and executive capacity. That result was quite adequately achieved. Resacralization was not so easy. For Society was not coherent enough to replace God. God was not “killed,” nor his religion extinguished. Yet the divine was resolutely put in its place, and the collective powers of designated individuals were substituted for an order that men had long sworn oaths to and obeyed. Those powers would hereafter authorize the “execution of the law of nature,” submitting to terrible new temptations and exchanging old burdens of conscience and responsibility for even broader ones. The Revolution was an extravagant part of this conti-

316

Mortal Politics

nuity. Because it exceeded its just boundaries by usurping Society much in the same way that the monarchy had usurped God, it had to be corrected. At the same time, as we discover constantly in the documentary evidence of human practice, society itself-or, as it was said then, its police-was in gradual upheaval, at least from the time of the Regency on. Transected by the multitude of jurisdictions, privileges, corpora¬ tions, folkways, and strata that characterized the Old Regime, it was, nevertheless, becoming more “homogenized,” if we take that word in a specific, limited sense. Social jealousies were more flagrant, social definitions of “merit” and “honour” were in flux and competition, and the fundamental morale of political life and death was disturbed. “Philosophical” caveats against the idiocy of the duel and the barbari¬ ties of torture and capital punishment collided with the ancestral grip of these practices and their imbeddedness in the ideology of church, king, and nobility. Personal vengeance and public retaliation alike sustained their fertility in the Revolution. But, all the while, conditions of belief affecting the qualities of bravery, fealty, and energy were growing shakier. Of the old rallying symbols of king, religion, and nation, only the last (joined sometimes by “the law”) kept its vitality, even though fervent nostalgic references to the majesty and personality of Henri IV throughout the century suggested a hunger for leadership that no amount of constitution¬ making could quench. In the perspective of political mortality, the trends and illustrations pertinent to the cleft morale of society (as opposed to the integral ideology of Society) point more to an accu¬ mulation of standpoints than to a supersession of some by others. And that is indeed what made subsequent French history so compli¬ cated and the “modernization” of France so trying. Beyond the contexts I have summarized, it should be noted that the particular “perspectives” fall into a number of categories: genres, such as the academic eulogies, the dialogues of the dead, military treatises, hymns, and funeral orations; attitudes, such as “posterity” or judgement of the dead by the living, retribution, the military code of honour, humanitarianism, hero-worship, and Revolutionary purifica¬ tion; modes, such as the “new heroism” of the scientist, gallantry in battle, hanging, the guillotine, and death by effigy; and justifications, such as the will of the state, deterrence, tyrannicide, liberty, and the health of society. No mechanical conjugation of these numerous elements can do justice to the intricate texture of French eighteenthcentury history, and I shall not attempt it here. However, the reader may find it clarifying to apply these categories selectively to the

Conclusion

317

account as I have presented it. I believe the account to be a coherent explanation of how contextual and perspectival elements affected one another over this hundred-year span as well as a just apprecia¬ tion of the consequences of “the dark side of politics” in both theory and practice. Since political thought, while discursive, is specific and not bound¬ less, it needs its own history which didactic, aesthetic, or other reasons cannot exempt from rigorous inquiry. I hope I have managed to explore this major episode in the struggle for the defini¬ tion of authority without straying too far into a thicket of remote mentalites. I hope also to have organized a viewpoint and a wealth of materials hospitable to philosophical reflection.

A Bibliographical Note

To conclude this study with a rich bibliographical component might seem de rigueur until it is realized that this would run to an additional thirty or forty pages and increase the cost of the book considerably. Fortunately, there is an adequate and economical way of dealing with the problem. Probably at least half of the works I consulted are given to the reader in the footnotes, while many of those missing are peripheral to the main issues or chiefly useful for historical background. For further aid in the Revolutionary period the reader may wish to look at the bibliography I provided for my Victims, Authority, and Terror (Chapel Hill, 1982), which includes pamphlets and periodicals. The topic index of Andre Cioranescu, ed., Bibliographie de la litterature frangaise du XVIIIe siecle, 3 vols. (Paris, 1969) is indispensable for further pursuit of the subject. Better yet is access to and skill in using appropriate indices of the Catalogue de Vhistoire de France. With a few exceptions, archives have been beyond the range of this study. Contemporary memoirs are often rich in both anecdotal and substantial material. On the general subject of dying in eighteenth-century France, there are extensive bibliographies at the end of both Robert Favre’s Mourir au siecle des Lumieres (Lyons, 1978) and John McManners’s Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1981); Favre’s is topically and chronologically arranged. Also useful are the bibliographies in Michel Vovelle’s Piete baroque et dechristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1973) and his Religion et Revolution (Paris, 1976). A fundamental bibliographical guide to the gens de lettres and studies on the Enlightenment can be found at the conclusion of the first volume of Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1977).

Index Absolutism, 2, 3, 6, 12, 19, 32, 210, 211, 219, 293, 302 Academies, 42, 62, 63, 66, 72, 73, 84, 114, 219, 220, 266, 277, 280; Chalons-sur-Marne, 219, 220, 226; Frangaise, 62, 63, 73, 74, 84, 266, 306; Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 266, 268; Medecine, 42, 66, 67; Sciences, 42, 62, 67, 68, 69-71 Achilles, 82 Administration, 18-21, 24, 29, 68, 175, 302 Aeschinus, 269 Aeschylus, 273 Aesthetics, 25, 64, 66, 127, 140, 147-149, 185, 189, 202, 203, 205, 227, 257, 262, 296, 304-308 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius, 86 d’Aguesseau, Henri-Frangois, 13-15, 17, 72 d’Aiguillon, Armand-VignerotDuplessis-Richelieu, due, 301, 302 Aix, xvi, 71 Alcibiades, 82 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 34, 50-53, 58, 61, 63-66, 72, 83, 84, 106, 144, 214, 267, 304 Alexander the Great, 76, 80, 82, 88, 92, 267 America, 166, 262 Anaxagoras, 97 Anckerstroem, Johan Jakob, 278 Angers, 245, 249 Anjou, 131, 185 Apollo, 246, 277 Apuleius, 86

d’Arc, Philippe-Auguste de SainteFoix, chevalier, 139, 153, 162, 167, 171 d’Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis, 30, 31 d’Argenson, Marc-Rene de Voyer, marquis, 88 d’Argenson, Rene-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis, 13, 21, 33, 136, 147, 162 Aries, Philippe, 236, 283 Aristides, 266, 277 Aristocracy, xxi, xxii, 14-17, 61, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110-112, 116, 117, 123, 124, 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 140, 141, 151-153, 161, 163, 164, 166, 168-170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 253, 255, 264, 273, 277, 292, 298, 303, 308-310 Aristophanes, 76, 267 Aristotle, 54, 82, 191, 267, 305, 308 Army, xxii, 117, 121, 126-183, passim, 276. See also Aristocracy; Honour; Militias; Recruits; Soldiers; War Assemblies of France, xix, 58, 120, 121, 186, 194, 195, 196-201, 204, 214-216, 221, 222, 224-228, 230, 244, 254, 257, 261, 269, 279, 280, 282, 288, 300, 306 Astruc, Jean, 43 Atheism, 27, 132, 181, 209, 228, 231, 286, 288 Athens, 64, 82, 96, 263-268, 270, 271, 273, 274, 276 Auger, abbe Athanase, 268-271, 272, 274 Augustus Caesar, 79, 80

320

Mortal Politics

Aulard, Frangois-Victor-Alphonse, 248 Austria, 16, 92, 159, 227, 310; Austrian Netherlands, 91 Auteuil, 15, 268 d’Autichamp, marquise, 131 d’Ayen, comte, 132 Baculard d’Arnaud, FrangoisThomas-Marie, 137 Baehrel, Rene, xviii Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 72-73, 95, 102, 224, 233 Bara, Joseph, 247, 253-255, 273 Barbarism, 105, 112, 120, 186, 192, 203 Barere, Bertrand de, 120, 198, 199, 295, 309 Barnave, Joseph, 95, 121, 122, 225, 309 Barneveldt, Jan van Olden, 277, 278 Baroque, 56, 57, 184, 281, 283, 304 Barry, Jeanne Becu, comtesse du, 90, 164, 314 Barthelemy, Jean-Jacques, 266-267 Barthez, Paul-Joseph, 42, 45 Bastille, 223 Bataillard, Charles, 114 Baudoin freres, editors of Voltaire, 27-28 Bayard, Pierre Terrail de, 162 Bayle, Pierre, 85, 134, 181 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 259 Beaumetz, Albert-Auguste Bruneau, marquis de, 195 Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana, marquis de, 193 Belle-Isle, Charles-Louis-Auguste Fouquet, comte de, 133, 134, 148, 149, 152, 158, 159, 182 Belsunce, Henri-Frangois-Xavier de, archbishop of Marseilles, xvi-xvii Bentham, Jeremy, 300 Berg-op-Zoom, 147

Bernardi, Joseph-Elzear-Dominique, 219-220, 226 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, JacquesHenri, 72 Besenval, Pierre-Victor, baron de, 223, 224, 225, 232 Bessarion, Giovanni Cardinal, 82 Bicetre, 201 Bichat, Xavier, 201 Bien, David D., 118, 119 Bignon, abbe Jean-Paul, 68 Billacois, Francois, 117 Biography, 52-55, 62, 65 Blackstone, Sir William, 304 Bloch, Marc, 105-106 Bluche, Frangois, 118 Bodin,Jean, 3, 8, 25 Boerhaave, Hermann, 30, 70 Bohemia, 148, 163 Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas, 79, 83, 185 Boissy d’Anglas, Frangois-Antoine, comte de, 257 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 52 Bordeaux, 308 Bordes, Charles, 264 Bordeu, Theophile, 30, 35, 42 Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, bishop of Meaux, xviii, 2-6, 8-11, 23, 25, 39, 50, 58-59, 61, 65, 70, 78, 83, 132, 211, 215, 227, 229, 312 Boufflers, child officer, 151 Bouille, Frangois-Claude-Amour, marquis de, 159, 246 Boulainvilliers, Henri, comte de, 210 Boulanger, Nicolas, 297 Bourbon, Louis-Henri-Joseph, prince de Conde, due de, 115 Bourbons, 12, 28, 86, 90, 139, 209, 215, 232, 233 Bourgeoisie, 18, 103, 107, 108, 110-112, 125, 163, 166, 172, 215, 303 Bourgogne, Louis de France, due de, 78, 81-82, 89

Index Bridaine, Pere Jacques, 298-299 Brienne, child officer, 151 Brillat-Savarin, Anselme, 114, 197 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 95, 114, 122, 187, 219, 220, 224 Brittany, xiv, 181, 301 Broglie, Victor-Franyois, due de, 223, 224, 225 Brunot, Ferdinand, 295, 308 Brutus, consul, 55 Brutus (Junius), 86, 87, 246, 263, 277, 288, 310 Bruzen de La Martiniere, Antoine, 87-89 Bude, Guillaume, 61 Buffon, Charles-Louis Leclerc, comte de, 28, 31-32, 35, 44, 63, 72, 296-297 Bureaucracy, 20, 212, 285 Burgundy circle, 12 Burials, 15, 280-290, 298 Burke, Edmund, 236, 305, 306 Byzantium, 36 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, 43, 201, 202, 274 Cahiers, 109, 210-211, 222, 229 Caillard, Abraham-Jacques, 302 Caillois, Roger, 138 Calas, Jean, 25, 185 Caligula, 86, 87, 90, 97 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 221 Campistron, Jean-Gualbert de, 65 Camus, Albert, 231 Canada, 181 Capuchins, 140, 158 Caraccioli, Louis-Antoine, marquis de, 299 Carre, Henri, 112, 117, 123, 223 Cartouche, Louis-Dominique, 88, 185, 190, 197 Cassirer, Ernst, 53 Castries, Armand-Charles-Augustin, due de, 121 Castries, Charles-Eugene-Gabriel de La Croix, due de, 121

321

Catholicism. See Christianity Catinat, Nicolas, 22, 132 Cato the Younger, 277, 278 Causy, war office clerk, 147 Cavalier, Jean, 133 Cazales, Jacques-Antoine-Marie de,

121 Cemeteries, 236, 265, 281-282, 285-286, 291 Censorship, 52, 87, 88, 89, 218, 264 Cerberus, 76, 77 Cevennes, 133 Chabot, Francois, 97 Chabrol, Gaspard-Claude-Frangois, 195 Chalier, Marie-Joseph, 247, 251, 253, 255, 277, 278 Chambord, Henri-CharlesFerdinand-Marie-Dieudonne, comte de, 232 Chamfort, Nicolas-Sebastien-Roch (pseud.), 306-307 Champdeveaux, sieur de, 111 Chaplains, 181-182 Charlemagne, 92 Charles I, of England, 10, 95 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 80 Charles X, of France (comte d’Artois), 115, 223, 224, 302 Charles XII, of Sweden, 93, 130 Charon, 76, 77, 82 Chas, Jean, 96-97 Chateauneuf, Francois de, 245 Chatelet, 224 Chaumette, Pierre-Gaspard (Anaxa¬ goras), 97, 204, 283, 284, 288 Chaunu, Pierre, 73 Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 267 Chauvigny de Blot, Paul-LouisFortune de, 121 Chenier, Andre, 108 Chenier, Marie-Joseph, 139, 243, 245, 248, 249, 253, 262, 266, 271-273, 274, 279 Cherubini, Luigi, 241 Chevalier, Etienne, 120

322

Mortal Politics

Chevert, Frangois de, 158 Chiron, 82 Choiseul, Etienne-Frangois, due de, 157, 160, 164-166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 267, 302 Christianity, 13, 55-60, 62, 73, 74, 77, 82, 87, 97, 99-101, 132, 133, 135, 181, 182, 246, 247, 262, 263, 268, 274, 275, 277-283, 287, 289, 290, 298, 299, 306. See also Religion Christina, queen of Sweden, 84 Cicero, xxiii, 13, 55, 93, 97 Cincinnatus, 277 Cinq-Mars, Henri Coiffier de Ruze, marquis de, 218, 221 Classicism, 64, 240, 246, 247, 257, 259, 261, 263, 267, 268, 283, 288,305 Clausewitz, Karl von, 15, 125 Clermont, Louis de Bourbon-Conde, comte de, 89, 136 Clermont-Tonnerre, Frangois de, bishop of Noyon, 65 Clermont-Tonnerre, Stanislas-MarieAdelai'de, comte de, 194 Clocks, 30, 31, 34 Clovis, king of the Franks, 273 Cobb, Richard, xviii Cola da Rienzi, 77 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 18, 19, 32, 67 Collins, Anthony, 27 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie, 227 Commerce, xiii, 19, 126, 293 Commines, Philippe de, 82 Conde, Louis II de Bourbon, prince de, 15, 92 Conde, Louis-Frangois-Joseph de Bourbon, comte de La Marche, prince de, 223, 295 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot, abbe de, 34, 36, 40, 42

Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine de Caritat, marquis de, 42, 51, 54, 63, 65, 68, 70-72, 126, 145, 227, 308, 309 Confucius, 88 Conseil d’Etat, 165 Conseil de Guerre, 142, 172 Constantine the Great, 92 Conti, Louis-Frangois de Bourbon, prince de, 90-91 Coppet, 289 Corday, Charlotte, 97, 102, 201, 282 Corneille, Pierre, 92, 95, 242, 304 Corsica, 174 Corvisier, Andre, 134, 157, 159, 162, 179 Cosmopolitanism, 51, 129, 130, 277-278 Cottignies, Frangois (“Brule-Maison”), 155-157 Coupigny, Andre-Frangois de, 245, 251, 279 Couthon, Georges, 95, 199 Coyer, abbe Gabriel-Frangois, 137, 213 Crebillon, Prosper Jolyot de, 304 Crime, xx, xxii, 8, 120, 184, 185, 187, 191-193, 195, 196, 198, 199, 212, 213, 217, 225, 240, 256,280 Crisis, 47, 48, 235 Croison, Marie, 187 Cromwell, Oliver, 10, 88, 96 Cruelty, 14, 145-148, 188, 190, 192, 194-196, 198, 219, 293 Culte des adorateurs, 288 Custine, Adam-Philippe, comte de, 198 Damiens, Robert-Frangois, 11, 187, 190, 218, 219, 314 Dampierre, Auguste-Henri-Marie Picot de, 255 Dangeau, Philippe de Courcillon, marquis de, 69

Index Danton, Georges-Jacques, 93, 95, 187, 257, 284 Darnton, Robert, 212 Daubermesnil, Franyois-Antoine, 288-289 David, king of Israel, xviii, 60 David, Jacques-Louis, 204, 205, 246, 253, 254, 277 Dechristianization, xvii, 204-206, 251, 274-276, 278, 283 Deffand, Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du, 126 Deism, 31, 33, 98, 119, 253, 258, 262, 285, 289, 294 Demosthenes, 93, 263, 265, 267, 269, 274, 277 Denain, battle of, 163 Denmark, 129, 171 Descartes, Rene, 10, 22, 23, 29, 32, 35, 50, 72, 80, 84, 101, 255 Desmeunier, Jean-Nicolas, 195 Desmoulins, Camille, 94, 264 Desrues, Antoine-Fran^ois, 188 Dettingen, battle of, 151 Devienne, Charles-Jean-Baptiste d’Agneaux, dom, 241, 244 Didacticism, 81, 82, 92 Diderot, Denis, 10, 27, 29, 36, 37, 42, 45, 48, 53, 62, 70, 88, 100, 106, 113, 115, 144, 162, 187, 193, 194, 214, 236, 287, 288, 298, 305-306 Dieckmann, Herbert, 27 Dinocheau, Jacques, 195 Diogenes, 86 Disgrace, 19, 171, 188, 303, 304 Dolivier, Pierre, 290 Dommanget, Maurice, 275, 285 Douglas, Mary, 53 Dubos, abbe Jean-Baptiste, 185 Duclos, Charles-Pinot, 107, 136, 158, 164 Duelling, xxii, 103-125, passim Dugay-Trouin, Rene de, 127 Dumarsais, Cesar-Chesneau, 27 Duplan, Marie, xv

323

Duport, Adrien, 194, 195, 198, 199 Durkheim, Emile, 248 Duval, Amaury, 285 Ecole militaire royale, 167 Egilsrud, Johan S., 78 Egret, Jean, 118 Eisenach, Eldon, 8 Elitism, 72, 73, 277, 308 Elizabeth I, of England, 88 Emigration, 85, 87, 223, 226 Encyclopedie, 10, 15, 26, 27, 28, 30, 34, 37, 44, 45, 49, 99, 105, 106, 110, 144, 167, 209, 210, 214, 217, 221, 242, 266, 294 England, xiii, 71, 137, 195, 213, 293, 310, 311 Epaminondas, 266, 272 Equality, 237, 238, 260, 261-263, 286 Erasmus, Desiderius, 80 Eristratus, 80 Ermenonville, 253 d’Estrees, Louis-Cesar Letellier, comte, 136 Eulogy, 54, 56, 66-74, 148-150 Execution, 184-190, 193, 195, 198, 199, 202, 206, 218, 224 Fabre d’Eglantine, Philippe-FrangoisNazaire, 275 Fabricius, 277 Famine, xiv, 236 Fauchet, abbe Claude, 96 Favras, Thomas de Mahy, marquis de, 224 Fear, 293-294, 297, 298, 308, 309 Febvre, Lucien, 237 Fenelon, Francois de Salignac de la Mothe, archbishop of Cambrai, 37, 65, 78, 81-83, 85, 86-87, 97, 266, 298 Fenelon, Gabriel-Jacques de Salignac, marquis de La Mothe, 132 Feraud, Jean-Baptiste, 247, 257

324

Mortal Politics

Festivals, 206, 207, 233, 237, 238, 244-254, 267, 269, 271, 277-281, 284, 294 Feuillants, 225, 226 Fleury, Andre-Hercule, Cardinal de,

211 Fleury, Claude, 66 Folard, Jean-Charles de, 130, 140, 158 Fontaine des Bertins, Alexis, 70 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 30, 64, 68-70, 75, 77-78, 79-81, 82, 83, 86, 98, 99, 102, 296 Fontenoy, battle of, 130, 136, 146 Foucault, Michel, 44 Fouche, Joseph, 236, 283, 284, 287 Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine-Quentin, 187,203 Francis, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 92 Frangois I, of France, 52, 83 Franklin, Benjamin, 72, 250, 278 Franks, 106 Frederick II, of Prussia, 213 Freemasonry, 119, 159, 240-241, 253, 268, 269, 271 Frejus, 275 Freron, Elie-Catherine, 147 Freron, Louis-Stanislas, 93 Freteau de Saint-Just, Emanuel-M.-P., 195 Freud, Sigmund, 229, 248 Fronde, 2, 13 Fronto, 56

Gens de lettres, xxi, 15, 27, 41, 51-54, 62, 100, 107, 130, 143, 253, 255 Germany, 149, 163 Girondins, 124, 225, 231, 250, 257, 275, 279, 282, 308 Giroust, Frangois, 240 Gorgias, 265 Gorguereau, Frangois, 122-123 Gossec, Frangois, 241, 243, 245, 246, 250, 251, 253, 279 Gracchi, 263, 277 Grandjean de Fouchy, Jean-Paul, 70 Greece, 54, 263, 264-269, 271-274, 277 Grenoble, 121 Gretry, Andre-Ernest-Modeste, 206 Griffet, Pere Henri, 91-92, 98 Grimm, Joachim Melchior, baron von, 46-47, 144 Guenot, Nicolas, 108 Gueudeville, Nicolas, 85-87 Guibert, Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de, 138-141, 145, 146, 154, 162, 174, 175-176 Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, 200, 201 Guillotine, 73, 200-203, 206, 207, 307 Guiomar, Jean-Yves, 215 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 239, 248 Gustav III, of Sweden, 84, 94, 278 Hades, 75, 77, 79-81, 84, 86, 89-92,

100, 101

Funeral orations, 57-61, 134, 189, 237, 238, 247, 264-266, 268-277, 279

Hahn, Roger, 68 Haller, Albrecht von, 71 Hamel, Jean-Baptiste du, 69 Hannibal, 76

Galen, 43

Hartsoeker, Nicholas, 31 Harvey, William, 80 Hazard, Paul, 80 Health-sickness criteria, 46-48 Hebert, Rene-Jacques, 96, 97, 202-203, 310 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 236,291

Gallais, Jean-Pierre, 93-94 Gallantry, 115, 117, 118, 154 Gauchet, Marcel, 24 Gauthier-Lachapelle, A., 290 Geneva, 71, 222, 253 Genres, xxi, xxii, 54, 75, 76, 78, 87, 98, 230, 239, 242, 243, 248, 265, 267, 273, 304, 316

Heine, Heinrich, 231

Index

Heliogabalus, 86 Helvetius, madame Anne-Catherine, nee de Ligneville, 42 Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 114, 152, 165, 193, 194, 305 Henri III, of France, 83 Henri IV, of France, 17, 52, 83, 89, 91-92, 93, 102, 112, 134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 171, 176, 179, 205, 232-234, 244, 273, 316 Henriette-Anne, duchesse d’Orleans, 58-59 Henriolatry, 91-92, 102, 136-139, 141, 166, 167, 179, 232-234, 244, 316 Henriot, Frangois, 96, 97 Herault de Sechelles, Jean-Marie, 96, 269, 309 Hercules, 82, 277 Hercy, engraver, 207 Heroes, heroism, 23, 69, 71, 73, 74, 112, 126, 129-133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142, 148-152, 168, 171, 181, 182, 189, 251-254, 261, 265, 266, 270, 272, 276-279 Hesiod, 75 Hippocrates, 43 History, 49, 50-56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 70, 73, 78, 83, 98, 131, 186, 237, 248, 265, 273, 278, 292-293, 297, 310, 311, 317 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 5-10, 39, 46, 109, 126, 296, 297, 311, 315 Hoche, Lazare, 246, 247, 281 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron, 33, 37, 48-49, 160, 176, 178, 193, 194, 214, 298, 299 Holland, 19, 85, 86, 88, 159, 293 Homer, 75 Honnete homme, 28 Honour, xiv, xxi, 12, 16, 104, 105, 108, 111, 122, 125, 131, 151, 153, 172, 195, 270, 303, 304, 308, 310, 316 Hospitals, 180 Hume, David, 100

325

Hutcheson, Francis, 305 Hyperides, 265 Icasia, 80 Ideology, xxi, 2, 25, 35, 42, 119, 122, 128, 129, 130, 139, 163, 166, 168, 183, 184, 215, 217, 226, 230, 251, 255, 257, 259, 263, 265, 273, 309, 316 Immortality, 24, 37, 38, 40-42, 45, 49, 53, 60, 63, 67, 98-100, 256, 259, 265, 266, 269, 278, 285, 290, 312-314 Injure, 110-111, 115, 121 Ireland, 157, 159 Isocrates, 263, 268, 269 Ittai the Gittite, xviii Jacobins, 4, 84, 93, 95, 96, 102, 121, 122, 124, 125, 199, 205, 230, 231, 244, 251, 253, 257, 258, 264, 274, 277, 284, 288, 293, 295, 299, 306, 308-31 1, 315 Jansenism, 4, 127, 292, 295, 300 Jaucourt, Louis de, 37, 105, 111, 162, 174, 214, 242, 266 Javogues, Claude, 234 Jesuits, 60, 91, 167, 171, 211, 263 Job, 7 Jonathan, 60 Joubert, Barthelemi-Catherine, 95, 246,281 Judgement, 93, 98-100, 107, 235, 316 Julius Caesar, 86, 87, 294 Jurieu, Pierre, 85 Justice, xxii, 1, 5, 13, 14, 113, 188, 191-194, 210, 214, 224, 228, 250, 301-303, 309, 310; popular justice, 104, 123, 204; private justice, 104, 105, 108, 109, 114, 117, 119; public justice, 104, 114, 116, 118, 120, 122, 123, 184, 186-188, 191, 192, 202

326

Mortal Politics

Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 305 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 236 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 24 Keohane, Nannerl O., 21 “King’s two bodies,” 24, 39 Labbe, Pierre-Paul, 167 La Bruyere, Jean de, 4, 5, 12, 77 La Caze, Louis de, 42 Laclos, Pierre-Ambroise-Frangois Choderlos de, 115 La Condamine, Charles-Marie, 71 Lafayette, Marie-Paul-Joseph-Gilbert du Motier, marquis de, 224, 225, 309 Lakanal, Joseph, 204 Lakanal-Dupuget, Jean-Baptiste, 204, 205 Lameth, Charles de, 121 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 31, 297 Lamoignon de Blancmesnil, Guill¬ aume II de, 22 Language and words, 18, 32, 36, 45, 47, 74, 110, 203, 216, 229, 231, 242, 249, 252, 257-259, 263, 271, 277, 293-295, 300, 304, 308 Lanjuinais, Jean-Denis, 223 La Rochefoucauld, Frangois VI, due de, 4, 78 La Rochefoucauld-Enville, LouisAlexandre, due de, 195 Launay, Bernard-Rene Jourdan de, 223 Lauterberg, battle of, 158 Lavall6e, Joseph, 251 Laveaux, Jean-Charles, 278, 289 Lawfeldt, battle of, 131, 136 Le Bihan, Alain, 241 Lebrun, Frangois, 131, 185 Lebrun, Ponce-Denis Ecouchard, 139, 243, 255 Le Chapelier, Isaac-Ren6-Guile, 195 Legendre, Louis (1655-1735), 106 Legendre, Louis (1756-1797), 279

Legitimacy, 3, 20, 188, 209, 212, 236, 315 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 53, 68 Lemiere, J.-F.-A., 241, 251 Leopold II, emperor of Austria, 92 Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, Michel, 195-197, 198, 247, 251, 253, 255, 277, 278 Lequinio, Joseph-Marie, 230, 284 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 305, 306 Le Tellier, Michel, 18, 141 Liberalism, 6, 9, 109, 219, 303 Liberty, 87, 93, 94, 96, 174, 176, 198, 218, 221, 227, 228, 240, 250, 251, 253, 255-258, 262, 264, 267, 269, 271-275, 278, 279, 280, 283, 288, 293, 303, 304, 310 Lieutaud, Joseph, 71 Ligne, Charles-Joseph, prince de, 91-92, 98, 115, 130, 134, 152, 179,181 Lille, 156 Limousin, 20 Lisbon, 311 Locke, John, 50, 211, 303, 304 Lowendal, Ulrich-FredericWoldemar de, 147 Lomenie de Brienne, Etienne, arch¬ bishop of Toulouse (later of Sens), 58-59 Loraux, Nicole, 265, 273 Lorraine, 159, 233, 246 Louis XI, of France, 82, 90, 93 Louis XII, of France, 83, 89, 233 Louis XIII, of France, 112 Louis XIV, of France, xxi, 1, 2, 6, 8, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20-22, 25-27, 79, 87, 91-92, 94, 102, 108, 112, 114, 129, 134, 135, 140-142, 163, 211, 234, 251, 301

Index

Louis XV, of France, 11, 12, 60, 80, 87, 89-91, 112, 113, 117, 123, 129, 135, 136, 139, 142, 167, 187, 210, 211, 213, 278, 282, 300, 302, 303, 311 Louis XVI, of France, xix, 58, 90, 95, 103, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 136, 139, 168, 171, 177, 187, 195, 202, 205, 212, 222, 224, 226, 228-232, 247, 278, 281, 282, 302, 314 Louis XVIII, of France (comte de Provence), 224, 225, 231 Louis, Antoine, 200, 201 Louis-Ferdinand de Bourbon, dauphin of France, 59, 89, 147 Loustalot, Elysee, 94 Louvois, Frangois-Michel Le Tellier, marquis de, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 32, 141, 157, 177 Lucian of Samosata, 56, 75, 76-77, 78, 81, 82, 85, 86, 89, 99, 267 Lucius Verus, 56 Lucretius, xv Luxembourg, 223 Luxury, 114, 137, 138, 151-154, 175 Lycurgus, 266 Lyons, 251, 275, 280 Lysias, 265, 267, 268, 269 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, abbe de, 33, 36, 48-49, 152, 160, 174, 264 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 88, 96, 159, 228 MacIntyre, Alasdair, xx Maintenon, Frangoise d’Aubigne, marquise de, 135 Maistre, Joseph-Marie, comte de, xiii, 187 Majesty, 208-215, 216, 218, 221-227, 228, 232 Malebranche, Nicolas, 68 Malesherbes, Chretien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de, 89, 90, 95, 184-185, 301-303, 304, 309

327

Malplaquet, battle of, 159 Mandrin, Louis, 189, 197, 240, 314 Manners (moeurs), xxi, 11, 12, 14, 75, 103, 106-109, 110, 113, 115, 118, 119, 175, 182, 188, 190, 206, 261, 266, 270 Mannheim, Karl, 2 Marat, Jean-Paul, 95, 96, 97, 127, 224, 230, 247, 251, 253, 254, 255, 277, 278 Marathon, battle of, 265, 271 Marceau, Frangois-Severin Desgraviers, 95 Marie de Medicis, queen of France, 233 Marie-Antoinette, queen of France, 90, 227, 240, 275, 295 Marmontel, Jean-Frangois, 40-41 Mars, 82 Marseilles, xv-xvii, 43, 253, 311 Martin, Andre, 247 Martin, Gaston, 119 Marx, Karl, xvii, 291 Massillon, bishop Jean-Baptiste, 134 Materialism, 27, 48, 80, 193, 281, 284,285 Mathiez, Albert, 248, 295 Maupeou, Rene-Nicolas-CharlesAugustin de, 89, 90, 174, 300, 301 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis-Moreau de, 35 Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal, 78, 83 Mazauric, Claude, 240 McManners, John, 290 Mechanism, 23-33, 35, 36, 37, 44, 45, 47, 200, 315 Medicine, xvii, 30, 35, 36, 42-49, 71, 180, 201, 234, 315 Mehul, Etienne-Nicolas, 241, 243, 245,279 Meinecke, Friedrich, 53 Melon, Jean-Frangois, 126 Menippus, 76 Menuret de Chambaud, JeanJacques, 49

328

Mortal Politics

Mercenaries, 130, 150, 157, 159, 160 Mercier, Louis-Sebastien, 108, 110, 114, 122, 154, 179, 186, 190, 201, 205, 253, 283, 288-289, 304 Mercury, 76, 82 Merit, xxi, 104, 125, 316 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 291 Meslier, Jean, 188, 211 Metaphor, 29, 36, 43, 45, 49, 315 Michelet, Jules, 246 Military desertion, 173 Military discipline, 117, 128, 152, 154, 155, 158, 159-161, 165, 170, 172, 173 Military incompetence, 136, 137, 138, 163-165 Military models, 167-171, 174, 176, 179, 180, 182 Military strategy, 142-145 Militias, 138, 145, 157, 159, 162-163, 168, 174-178 Minerva, 82 Minos, 75, 76, 89-90, 91, 92, 98, 100 Mirabeau, Gabriel-Honore de Riquetti, comte de, 93, 94, 95, 121, 216-217, 224, 225, 246, 247, 255, 263, 271, 274, 277, 281, 306 Mirabeau, Victor de Riquetti, marquis de, 41 Moland, Louis, 27-28 Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 19, 65, 88 Momoro, Antoine-Frangois, 283 Monarchy, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 20, 25, 46, 51, 61, 62, 67, 80, 88, 90, 104, 109, 128, 134-138, 141, 154, 166, 182, 186, 188, 204, 205, 210-230, 232, 234, 292, 293, 303, 308, 311, 315 Montaigne, Michel de, xxiii, 78, 101 Montalembert, Marc-Rene, marquis de, 112, 113 Montalembert, Jean-Charles de, 113

Montand, Yves, 189 Montcalm de Saint-Veran, LouisJoseph, marquis de, 133, 314 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, xvii, 29, 33, 36, 43-44, 50, 66, 73-74, 105, 106, 109-110, 160, 177, 180, 181, 193, 194, 207, 214, 218, 219, 221, 228, 293-294, 295, 297, 301, 302, 303, 304, 308, 309, 311, 315 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 204 Montmorin, Armand-Marc, comte de, 295 Montpellier, xvii, 30, 35, 42, 43 Moralism, 4, 12, 17, 77-79, 81, 100, 148, 168, 173, 197, 306, 308 Morande, Charles Thevenot de, 212 Morellet, abbe Andre, 193, 219 Morelly, 33, 94, 148, 196 Morin, Edgar, 235 Mornet, Daniel, 213 Mounier, Jean-Joseph, 222 Moy, Charles-Alexandre de, 285, 286-287, 289 Mucius Scaevola, 97, 277 Muller, Dominique, 188, 192 Musee Carnavalet, 207 Musschenbroek, Pieter Van, 31 Muyart de Vouglans, PierreFrangois, 188, 192 Naples, 159 Napoleon I, emperor of the French, 97, 137, 157 Nature, xii, xviii, xix, 35-39, 44, 48, 80, 81, 189, 198, 235, 236, 260, 262, 292, 296-298, 300; law of nature, xx, 6, 10, 29, 34, 37, 196, 231, 296, 315 Necker, Jacques, 18, 215, 244, 283, 289 Necker, Suzanne, nee Curchod, 289 Nero, 86, 87, 90, 97 Nevers, 284 Newton, Sir Isaac, 31, 53, 69, 263

Index

Nicole, Pierre, 5, 10, 57 Nieuwentyt, Bernard, 31 Noailles, Adrien-Maurice, due de, 132, 133, 135, 178 Nobles. See Aristocracy Nogaret, Felix, 240, 243 Notre-Dame de Paris, 204-206 Nutrition, xiii-xiv, 48

329

Parma, Ferdinand, Duke of, 40 Pascal, Blaise, xxiii, 78, 79, 98, 295, 304

Pastoret, Claude-Emmanuel-JosephPierre, marquis de, 184 Patriotism, 122, 125, 137-139, 159, 162, 167, 169, 170, 181, 213, 224, 241, 249, 254, 256, 257, 263, 267, 272, 285, 289, 310 Oaths, 135, 152, 169, 177, 226, Pau, 275 242, 248, 249 Paulinus of Nola, 56 Oise, 275, 285-286 Pausanius, 266 Old Regime, xxii, 93, 103, 109, 120, Pelletier, Jean-Nicolas, 201 144, 155, 157, 159, 162, 166, Pericles, 264, 265, 268, 269, 271, 184, 191, 200, 208, 212, 224, 272, 274 233, 239, 242, 255, 261, 267, Pestilence, xiv-xvii, 43; plague of 268, 280, 281, 285, 293, 306, Marseilles, xv-xvii 316 Peter the Great, emperor of Russia, Opera, 30, 31, 115 92, 176 Oratorians, 263 Petion, Jerome, 96, 198 Organicism, 25, 38, 39, 40, 44, 315 Philippeaux, Pierre, 94 Orleans, 122 Philippon, lyricist, 259 d’Orleans, Philippe, due, regent of Philosophes, philosophy, xiv, 21, 28, France, 11, 89, 211 36, 42, 50, 84, 85, 114, 115, 118, d’Orleans, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, 122, 126, 127, 128, 138, 142, due, 224, 225, 282 145, 154, 171, 192-194, 199, Orosius, 56 213, 214, 217, 218, 262, 264, Ottoman Empire, 293 301, 304, 317 Oxenstierna, Axel, Count, 83 Phocion, 264, 277 Ozouf, Mona, 206, 247, 248, 249 Pidansat de Mairobert, MathieuFrangois, 89-91 Pacificism, 128, 146 Pierquin, Henri, 117, 118 Pages, Frangois-Xavier, 94-96, 97 Pierre, Constant, 239, 251 Paine, Thomas, 223, 227 Pietro Aretino, 79 Palloi, Pierre-Frangois, 271 Piquet, P£re, chaplain, 181 Panegyric, 55-56, 61, 65, 67 Plataea, battle of, 265 Pantheon, 93, 96, 246, 250, 251, Plato, 29, 45, 78, 265, 267 253, 254, 255, 278, 281 Pliny the Younger, 55 Paris, 11, 18, 42, 73, 93, 113, 117, Pluche, abbe Noel-Antoine, 262 120, 121, 122, 154, 186, 189, Plutarch, 52, 62, 101, 263, 266 200, 204-206, 213, 225, 232, Pluto, 77, 89 233, 234, 241, 244, 246, 250, Poitou, 123 251, 253, 271, 273, 278, Poland, 174, 175 281-282, 284, 300-301, 302 Paris du Verney, Joseph, 167 Parlements. See Sovereign courts

330

Mortal Politics

Political power, xviii, xix-xxi, 1-3, 5, 8-10, 33, 39, 48, 55, 191, 202, 210, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 225, 229-231, 237, 265, 270, 287, 288, 292, 296, 297, 300-302, 308, 310, 312, 313 Political science, 21 Polybius, 140, 177, 276 Pompadour, Jeanne-Annette Poisson, marquise de, 136, 164 Poplicola, consul, 55 Population, 180, 313 Posterity, 53, 60, 63, 65, 67, 72, 73, 84, 144, 205, 273, 316 Pottier de La Hestroye, Jean, 32 Pourtrain, gravedigger, 281 Prague, 148-149, 158, 159, 163, 171 Presbyterians, 10 Pringle, John, 71 Progress, 34, 35, 70 Prometheus, 277 Property, 192, 301, 303, 304 Protestants, 27, 60, 85, 86, 88, 129, 132, 133, 159, 280, 293 Proust, Marcel, 103 Prudhomme, Louis-Marie, 224 Prugnon, Louis-Pierre-Joseph, 197 Prunelle de Lamure, Benolt-Melchior, 132 Prunelle de Saint-Didier, PierreSeverin, 132 Prussia, 159, 178, 227, 310, 311 Pufendorf, Samuel, 297 Punishment, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 90, 94, 97, 98, 109, 112, 113, 116, 184-207, passim, 208, 209, 218, 219, 231, 240, 256, 313, 314 Puyguyon, marquis de, 181 Puysegur, Jacques-Frangois de Chastenet, marquis de, 142-143, 144 Quatrem£re de Quincy, AntoineChrysostome, 250

Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul, 195 Racine, Jean, 304 Racolage, 157, 160, 161, 162 Rafaello d’Urbino, 74 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 88 Ramillies, battle of, 159 Ramsay, Andre-Michel de, 37 Ranum, Orest, 61 Rationalism, 4, 18-23, 34, 59, 128, 140-145, 262 Rats, xvii Raynal, abbe Guillaume-ThomasFrangois, 145-146, 147, 214 Recruits, 157, 160, 161 Reforms, 116, 118, 122, 141, 164, 166, 172, 174, 177, 196, 221, 301 Regency, xvii, 11, 14, 20, 88, 142, 211, 224, 316 Reglement Se'gur, 118, 179 Reinhard, Marcel, 232 Religion, xiv-xvi, xx, xxi, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13, 19, 22, 26, 28, 57, 59, 62, 69-72, 97, 126, 131-134, 169, 171, 172, 177, 181, 182, 209, 217, 230, 232, 252, 262, 271, 277-284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 294-297, 308, 313, 315, 316 Renaissance, 8, 52, 105 Rennes, 301 Republicanism, 85-87, 93, 138, 174, 178, 203, 204, 206, 213, 226-229, 232, 237, 243, 244, 249, 252, 256, 259-262, 269, 276, 279, 286, 290, 308-310 Restif de La Bretonne, NicolasEdme, 190 Revenge, 5, 9, 104, 107, 108, 111, 116, 124, 138, 192, 207, 244, 252, 256, 276, 278, 300, 311, 316 Revocation of 1685, 11, 85 Revolte nobiliaire, 118, 119

Index

Revolution, xiii, xiv, xix, xxi, xxii, 2, 42, 47-49, 51, 62, 73, 74, 92-97, 99, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 110, 120, 122-125, 135, 147, 159, 163, 166, 177-179, 182, 184-187, 191, 205, 213, 222-225, 230, 231, 233, 235-253, 255, 262, 263, 264, 266-269, 271, 273-276, 279-285, 288, 293, 294, 299, 305, 308, 309, 314, 315, 316 Rhadamanthys, 75, 76 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de, 78, 83, 105, 140, 141, 218, 221 Richelieu, Louis-Fran^ois-Armand du Plessis, due de, 118, 119, 126, 136, 151, 158 Rights, 7, 106, 196, 197, 250, 275, 303 Robespierre, Maximilien-FrangoisMarie-Isidore-Joseph de, 2, 48, 51, 94, 95, 96, 97, 187, 194, 197-198, 202, 207, 228, 242, 249, 253, 254, 266, 279, 280, 286, 294, 295, 300, 308, 309-310, 311 Rochefort, 180, 284 Roederer, Pierre-Louis, 202 Roffignac, Rene-Annibal de, 112-113 Rohan, chevalier de, 107 Roland, Jean-Marie, 225 Roland, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, 101, 282, 314 Rome, 13, 14, 16, 36, 37, 64, 87, 97, 124, 135, 140, 152, 159, 175, 185, 208, 210, 258, 261, 263, 273, 274, 276, 277, 289, 294, 308, 309, 310, 311 Romme, Gilbert, 258 Rosenberg, Aubrey, 87 Rossbach, battle of, 164, 165 Rossignol, Jean, 108 Roucher, Jean-Antoine, 250 Rouen, 214, 268 Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph, 243

331

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 6, 29, 36, 37, 40, 42-43, 48, 52, 54, 62, 81, 95-96, 101, 115, 138, 148, 168, 169, 173-175, 178, 180, 189, 199, 240, 250, 253, 255, 261, 264, 268, 277, 278, 283, 288, 298, 307, 315 Russia, 62, 130, 159, 175 St. Augustine, 3, 56, 60 Saint-Denis, 58, 206, 282 St. Dominic, 97 Saint-Germain, Claude-Louis, comte de, 129, 134, 139, 141, 162, 171-173, 177, 178 Saint-Just, Louis-Antoine-Leon de, xix, 49, 96, 124, 230, 240, 291, 295, 299, 308, 309, 311, 315 Saint-Pierre, Charles-Irenee de Castel, abbe de, 21-23, 32, 45, 126, 128, 140, 145, 150 St. Thomas Aquinas, 209 Salic law, 231 Salons, 42, 146, 180 Sanson, Charles-Henry, 186-187, 199 Sanson, Gabriel, 190 Sardanapalus, 90 Sardinia, 159 Sarrette, Bernard, 245 Satire, 76, 79, 83, 90, 189, 203, 212, 265 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 248 Saxe, Maurice, comte de, 15, 60, 72, 129, 132, 133, 136, 144, 153, 161, 178 Scepticism, 75, 77, 78, 80, 85, 98, 99, 101 Schmidt, mechanic, 201 Scipio Africanus, 76 Sedaine, Michel-Jean, 112 Senac de Meilhan, Gabriel, 154 Seneca, 306 Sennacherib, xiv Servan, Joseph-Michel-Antoine, 193 Servan de Gerbey, Joseph, 177-178

332

Mortal Politics

Sevigne, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de, 19 Seytres, Paul-Hippolyte-Emmanuel de, 148, 150 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 4th Earl of, S05 Shakespeare, William, 307 Shklar, Judith N., 43-44 Sicard, Augustin, 274 Sidney, Algernon, 250 Sieyes, Emanuel-Joseph, abbe, 124, 195, 221, 222, 273 Simoneau, Henri, 251 Sixtus V, pope, 88 Sleep, death as, 271, 284-285, 287 Smyndirides the Sybarite, 80 Society, 17, 25-29, 34-36, 38, 41, 45, 49, 50, 68, 100, 103-104, 113, 115, 129, 157, 159-161, 186, 192, 196-198, 215-216, 235, 236, 238, 248, 261, 287, 290, 296, 298, 313-316 Socrates, xxiii, 75-76, 81, 82, 277 Soldiers, 155, 157, 159-160, 170, 174, 177, 181, 182 Songs (hymns), 237-245, 248-259, 279 Sorbonne, 62 Sorel, Albert, 226 Sorel, Georges, 293 Soubise, Charles de Rohan, prince de, 136 Soubrany, Pierre-Auguste de, 258 Sovereign courts, xvi, 13, 14, 25, 109, 112, 113, 188, 192, 210, 213, 214, 300-302, 304, 311 Sovereignty, xxii, xxiii, 6-8, 40, 186, 208-210, 214, 216, 221, 228, 302, 314, 315 Soyecourt brothers, 4 Spain, 159 Sparta, 37, 153, 197, 264, 265, 267, 275, 309 Spinoza, Benedict de, 27 Stael, Anne-Louise-Germaine, baronesse de, 110

Stahl, Georg Ernst, 35 Stanislas of Poland, due de Lorraine, 89 Starobinski, Jean, 240 State, 1, 7, 17, 25-28, 32, 36-41, 45, 46, 109, 167, 176, 177, 182, 189, 193, 199, 210, 217, 219, 220, 226, 227, 280, 287-290, 294, 295, 302, 303, 313, 314 Stoicism, 4, 12, 26, 69 Styx, 76, 82, 93 Suard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 191, 194 Sublime, 305-306 Sulla, 95 Sully, Maximilien de Bethune, due de, 72, 171 Sweden, 48, 130 Swift, Jonathan, 296 Switzerland, 35, 40, 157, 159, 160, 168, 175, 223, 246, 262, 274 Sylvester II, pope, 52 Tacitus, 64 Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe, 279 Talleyrand-Perigord, CharlesMaurice, prince de, 195 Target, Guy-Jean-Baptiste, 195 Tartars, 36 Taxation, 175, 188, 300, 301 Teleology, 50 Tell, Wilhelm, 246, 277 Terray, abbe Joseph-Marie, 90 Terror, xxiii, 93, 95, 96, 124, 184, 191, 194, 197, 201, 202, 204, 207, 228, 234, 253, 266, 280, 282, 292-312, passim Theatre, 189, 244, 304-307 Theodicy, 7 Theodosius, Roman emperor, 56 Theophilanthropy, 288 Theory and practice, xx Thermidor, 93, 94, 102 Theseus, 82 Thomas, Antoine-Leonard, 72 Thouret, Jacques-Guillaume, 195

Index

Thucydides, xiv, 45, 263, 264, 266, 267-270, 271, 275, 290 Ticonderoga, battle of, 181 Timoleon, 266, 272, 277, 278 Tissot, Samuel-Auguste-Andre, 35, 45 Toland, John, 27 Toleration, 220, 282, 284, 286-287, 288, 290 Torture, 185, 188, 190-191, 193, 196, 198, 220 Toulon, 275 Tourcoing, 155, 156 Treason, 187, 208-210, 214, 217-224, 226, 228, 231, 234 Tribunal des marechaux, 112, 117, 118, 119 Tronchet, Joseph, 195 Tronchin, Theodore, 71 Trublet, abbe Nicolas-CharlesJoseph, 79 Trudaine, Jean-Charles-Philibert, 71 Turenne, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de, 16, 22, 132, 143, 162, 171, 234 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques de, 17, 20, 34, 42, 61, 85, 90, 171, 302, 311 Tyranny, xix, 5, 10, 230, 231, 234, 249, 272, 273, 274, 276, 308 Ullmann, Walter, 209, 214 Unigenitus, 11, 60, 209, 211 Utility, 20-21, 70, 150, 192-194, 222 Utopianism, 33, 128 Utrecht, treaty of, 85, 163 Valence, 189 Valincourt, Jean-Baptiste du Trousset de, 69 Valmy, battle of, 134 Vandalism, 204-206, 233-234 Varin, stonemason, 205 Vasselin, Georges-Victor, 225 Vauban, Sebastien Le Prestre de, 15-18, 22, 142

333

Vaudreuil, Louis-Philippe Rigaud, 181 Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, marquis de, 4, 83-84, 107, 122, 137, 140, 142, 148-150, 151-152, 153, 155 Vendee, 275 Vendome, Louis-Joseph, due de, 139, 142 Venice, 262 Vergniaud, Pierre-Victurnien, 93 Versailles, 2, 15, 91, 92, 159, 171, 179, 222, 223, 240, 261 Viala, Agricola, 247, 253-255, 273 Vicq-d’Azyr, Felix, 66-67 Villars, Claude-Louis-Hector, due de, 129, 133, 142, 153, 161, 163 Vinson, Elie, 122, 123 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel, 204 Virtue, 13, 16, 17, 52, 53, 60, 66-69, 71, 81-83, 91, 92, 101, 127, 174-176, 178, 195, 277, 282, 284, 286, 293, 294, 299, 305, 308-31 1, 315 Vogel, Christophe, 246 Voisin, Daniel-Frangois, 129 Volney, Charles-Constantin Chasseboeuf de, 214 Voltaire, Frangois-Marie Arouet de, xiii, 11, 17, 25, 27, 28, 31, 36, 50, 51, 52, 77, 83, 95-96, 107, 112, 126, 129, 130, 132, 142, 148, 150-152, 153, 160, 164, 178, 185, 186, 194, 235, 246, 247, 250, 255, 264, 277, 301, 304, 305 Vovelle, Michel, xvii Wade, Ira O., 21 Walter, Gerard, 247 Walzer, Michael, 231

334

Mortal Politics

War, 4, 5, 15-19, 46, 60, 125, 161, 186, 228, 242, 264, 270, 272, 274, 275, 277, 296, 314; civil war, xx, 8, 47, 253, 255; English Civil War, 10; “modern war,” 141; private war, 103, 105, 108; Seven Years War, xiii, 134, 136, 139, 157, 163, 178, 181; Thirty Years War, xv; War of the Austrian Succession, 60, 133, 136, 146, 148, 157; War of the Camisards, 133; War of the Spanish Succession, 11, 88, 129, 135, 143, 155, 181 Washington, George, 229 Will, 6, 38, 48, 236, 315 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 305 Xenophon, 263 Zimmermann, Christian-Emanuel de, 168-171, 177, 178, 241, 242