Peter McPhee - Liberty or Death: The French Revolution

Copyright 2016 Peter McPhee

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McPhee, Peter, 1948- author.

Liberty or death : the French Revolution, 1789-1799 / Peter McPhee.

New Haven : Yale University Press, 2016.

LCCN 2015040677 | ISBN 9780300189933 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCSH: FranceHistoryRevolution, 1789-1799.

LCC DC148.M4535 2016 | DDC 944.04dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040677

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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For Kit

C ONTENTS

M APS

I NTRODUCTION

I N THE YEARS AFTER 1789 , F RENCH REVOLUTIONARIES SOUGHT to remake their world on the basis of the principles of popular sovereignty, national unity and civic equality. This was an awesome challenge in a large, diverse kingdom hitherto based on absolute monarchy, entrenched privilege and provincial exemptions. Other people, both French and foreign, took up arms in an attempt to destroy a revolution seen to be inimical to established practices of social hierarchy, religious belief and authority.

Contemporaries were polarized in their assessment of what the Revolution achieved. For all of the vicissitudes of the revolutionary decade, all the strength of the reaction against revolutionary excesses both real and imagined, it left an unforgettable, durable image of the possibilities of civic emancipation. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, aged seventy-four, concluded in 1798 that

such a phenomenon in the history of the world will never be forgotten, because it has revealed at the base of human nature a possibility for moral progress which no political figure had previously suspected. Even if we must return to the Old Rgime, these first hours of freedom, as a philosophical testimony, will lose nothing of their value.

Victoire de Froulay de Tess, Marquise de Crquy, was twenty years older than Kant. In contrast, she was vitriolic about what she saw around her at the same time:

Historians, like those who lived through those years, have agreed on the unprecedented and momentous nature of the great acts of revolution in the months between May and October 1789. They have never agreed, however, about why what came to be called the ancien rgime was overthrown with such widespread support, or about why the Revolution took its subsequent course, or about its outcomes. The consequences of the events of 1789 were so complex, violent and significant that reflection and debate on their origins and course show no signs of concluding. The Revolution continues to fascinate, perplex and inspire. Indeed, the two great waves of revolutionary change since the 1980sthe overthrow of regimes in eastern and south-eastern Europe and the Arab springhave served to revivify our interest in the world-changing upheavals of the late eighteenth century.

The drama, successes and tragedies of the Revolution, and the scale of the attempts to arrest or reverse it, have attracted scholars to the subject for more than two centuries. By the time of Napoleon Bonapartes seizure of power in November 1799, the first historians of the Revolution had begun to outline their narratives of these years and their judgements about the origins and consequences of revolutionary change. Why and how did an apparently stable regime collapse in 1789? Why did it prove to be so difficult to stabilize a new order? Did the political turmoil of these years disguise a more fundamental social and economic continuity? Was the French Revolution a major turning point in Frencheven worldhistory, or instead a protracted period of violent upheaval and warfare that wrecked millions of lives? This book seeks to answer those questions.

Like all major revolutions, the French Revolution had many episodes of heroism and horror, civic sacrifice and slaughter. When commenting in 1927 on peasant uprisings in Hunan province, Mao Tse-Tung famously wrote that

Mao was then thirty-four years of age, the same age as a French revolutionary, Maximilien Robespierre, when he responded in November 1792 to the taunts of his political opponents that he had blood on his hands: Citizens, did you want a revolution without revolution? The Parisians who had overthrown Louis XVI in August 1792 and slaughtered hundreds of his guards were, Robespierre insisted, acting for all patriots: to make a crime of a few apparent or real misdemeanours, inevitable during such a great upheaval, would be to punish them for their devotion.

Most general histories of the French Revolution have been written as if it was purely Parisian, and imposed on a recalcitrant, increasingly hostile, countryside. Paris made the Revolution; the provinces reacted to it. In contrast, the underlying approach of this book is that the Revolution is best understood as a process of negotiation and confrontation between governments in Paris and people across the country, in cities, towns and villages. So readers of this book will find much about how the ordinary people of town and country made, opposed and experienced revolutionary change as well as about the history of political struggle in Paris.

It is true that Paris was the epicentre of revolution, but only approximately one French person in fortyabout 650,000 of more than 28 millionlived in Paris in the 1780s. This was a land of villages and small towns. The men who governed France through a decade of revolution were overwhelmingly of provincial origin and brought to their nation-building the perspectives that their constituents communicated to them in waves of correspondence. The book will investigate the ways in which the lived experience of legislative, cultural and social change in France from 1789 to 1799 challenged and transformed assumptions about power and authority across provincial society. How did rural and small-town men and women adopt, adapt to and resist change from Paris? The results are surprising.

As a turbulent, violent crisis in a predominantly visual and oral culture, the Revolution generated a vast quantity of visual representations designed to make sense of what had happened and to pour vituperation or mockery on ones enemies. It also produced a mass of ephemera: objects such as entry cards for political clubs, cartoons, or the revolutionary banknotes

In identifying some of the few signs that survive in the built environment, I received particular assistance from Bernard Richard, who shared his vast knowledge of the physical objects commemorating the Revolution, such as the Bastille stone in the village of Saint-Julien-du-Sault. I have benefited directly from conversations over many years with fine historians, among them David Andress, Michel Biard, Stephen Clay, Ian Coller, Suzanne Desan, Alan Forrest, Paul Hanson, Lynn Hunt, Colin Jones, Peter Jones, Herv Leuwers, Marisa Linton, Jean-Clment Martin, John Merriman, Noelle Plack, Timothy Tackett, Charles Walton, and generations of my students. Heather McCallum, Candida Brazil and Rachael Lonsdale of Yale University Press and their readers have offered encouragement and wisdom; Richard Mason and Samantha Cross applied their professional expertise to copy-editing and design respectively. Mira Adler-Gillies helped me locate some of the illustrations that are so important to this volume, while Julie Johnson produced the index. Other specific assistance was offered by Juliet Flesch, Kit McPhee, Jeremy Teow and Aurore Mulkens. Most important, I am deeply grateful to my partner Charlotte Allen for her engaged, insightful readings of drafts.