Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE ANCIEN

RÉGIME AND THE REVOLUTION

The passage of ten years, and, above all, war, had profoundly modiﬁ ed the

course of the French Revolution. The map of Europe had already undergone

a marked change, and the expansion of French territory to the ‘natural fron-

tiers’ had clearly upset the European equilibrium. Such was the inheritance

of Bonaparte, and it weighed heavily on his policies. It will be advisable

therefore to describe some of the features of that heritage, even if we

disagree with Albert Sorel’s contention that Bonaparte was more the creature

of his destiny than its maker.

Of these features, the most deep-seated was the conﬂ ict which had been

going on since 1789 between the Revolution and Europe. Above all, a social

conﬂ ict existed between the privileged classes and the bourgeoisie, who

were supported by the rest of the Third Estate. A political conﬂ ict existed also

because royal despotism, like privilege, had been condemned, and kings,

having taken the aristocracy under their protection, ventured the risk of

perishing with it. Finally, there was a religious conﬂ ict arising from the

common understanding of the Revolution as the offspring of Cartesian

rationalism, whose merciless critique had destroyed the mysteries and tradi-

tions which were regarded as comprising the foundation of the ancien régime .

The rivalry of nations, each aspiring to hegemony, blurred these conﬂ icts

but did not obliterate them from the consciousness of contemporaries.

Unyielding, they dominated the history of the Napoleonic era.

the legacy of the revolution 6

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICT

The ebbing of the Revolution had been evident since 9 Thermidor. The

Constitution of Year III (1795) had brought to power a bourgeoisie genu-

inely attached to the new order, yet hostile to democracy, which it did not

distinguish from Jacobinism. Along with Madame de Staël and the Idéologues ,

it favoured an oligarchy more modern than that of England but essentially

analogous to it – an oligarchy which would strike a balance between the

interests of the rich and men of talent. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie gradu-

ally set about destroying the work of the Mountain [extreme revolution-

aries], and did not even spare that of the Constituent Assembly. They

abolished family courts and courts of arbitration, and reinstated imprison-

ment for debt and notary fees. The retroactive features of the inheritance

laws of Year II disappeared, and the rights granted to bastards were ﬁ ercely

attacked. The sale of the biens nationaux

no longer beneﬁ ted anyone but the

rich, and in Year VII those who held mortgaged biens nationaux were gratui-

tously given an unencumbered title. The division of communal lands was

suspended, and attempts were once again made to drive the peasants from

the forests, which they had used freely since 1789.

But what basic signiﬁ cance did all this have for the European nobility?

Strive as the Revolution might for bourgeois ideals, it nevertheless remained

a revolution for civil equality. Wherever its armies had penetrated – Belgium,

the Rhineland, Holland, Switzerland – the Revolution had undertaken the

destruction of the ancien régime . The pope was a prisoner; the prince of

Orange, the Rhenish electors and the Swiss patricians were in ﬂ ight.

Suvorov’s victories alone had reconquered Italy and had restored its legiti-

mate princes. The states neighbouring France were being secretly permeated

with subversive propaganda and the news of the liberation of French

pea sants and the victories of the Sansculottes was spoken of everywhere.

Less effective were the efforts of writers and journalists, most of whom had

been either disillusioned by the excesses of the Terror or else forced to be

silent. One could point to men everywhere who wished to make a compact

with the French, as, for example, in South Germany. Even in Prussia the

refusal to perform corvée and to pay feudal dues became more frequent. It

was rumoured that the king would abolish these exactions, and Frederick

William III was besieged with petitions on his accession. Across the sea,

Antonio Nariño had translated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in

* Literally, national property. The property conﬁ scated by the state from the clergy, nobility

and others during the Revolution.

TRANSLATOR .

7the conflict between the ancien régime and the revolution

the United States, Washington’s party suspected Jefferson and the Republicans

of having been contaminated by the egalitarian mania.

Everywhere, even among the great Whig families, the aristocracy was

frightened and rallied around the throne; everywhere, governments tight-

ened their controls. Except for Russia, stooped under the atrocious despotism

of Paul I, the prize went to Austria, where henceforth Colloredo became the

living spirit of an obscurantist police state for which Metternich later

claimed credit. In Prussia, Wöllner, who up until the death of Frederick

William II had attempted to install the same system, had only recently been

dismissed. At Jena, Fichte, accused of atheism and abandoned by the duke of

Weimar, had been forced to surrender his chair in 1799. In England, habeas

corpus had been suspended since 1794, and ‘seditious’ associations and

publications had been prohibited. In 1799 Pitt made printers profess their

allegiance, and he had members of illegal societies sent to penal colonies for

seven years. In America, the Federalists, proﬁ ting by their rupture with the

Directory, voted an Alien Bill aimed at French democrats, and a Sedition Act

to deal with associations and newspapers. In Latin America, the cause of

liberty already had its martyrs. While not entirely groundless, the fears

inspired by ‘Jacobins’ were exaggerated. The rare admirers of France, like

Kant, Fichte and the youthful Hegel, who set out to criticise the Bernese

patriciate and the oligarchy of Württemberg, took great care to stipulate that

they placed their faith solely in legal and peaceful progress. No nation

imitated France spontaneously; rather, it was her armies that spread the

principles of the Revolution.

Lively though the reaction was, it could not be said to have condemned

all reform. Enlightened despotism had shown that some reforms were

reconcilable with absolute monarchy and an aristocratic society. Recognising

that not all of the work of the Constituent Assembly was contemptible,

governments of the ancien régime envied France for its administrative unity

and for its suppression of ﬁ scal privilege. The example of England further

demonstrated to the agricultural countries of the Continent the advantages

of enclosure and the drawbacks of serfdom. Nevertheless, it was only in

Germany, notably in Bavaria and Prussia, that reforms were undertaken

which would permit Western inﬂ uences to combine with national

traditions.

The Aufklärung [German Enlightenment], while it had lost its prestige

among the literati , had nonetheless schooled the bourgeoisie and ofﬁ cialdom.

Count Montgelas, who had recently come to power in Bavaria, was one of

its disciples. In Berlin, the Austrian ambassador bitterly remarked that the

Prussian bureaucracy criticised the enemies of France for wanting to ‘banish

the legacy of the revolution 8

from the earth the rule of reason’, to which Prussia owed her greatness. The

Prussian higher civil service, which was organised into colleges and

recruited by co-optation, maintained a strong esprit de corps . It had watched

with displeasure the ceaseless royal extension of cabinet power, whereby

everything was decided by the king and his camarilla ; such personal admin-

istration of Silesia and the Polish provinces by crown and non-ministerial

advisers (‘cabinet’) had incurred disastrous results in the reign of Frederick

William II. These lofty civil servants would have willingly subjected their

king to the rule of law, and Wilhelm Carmer, who ﬁ nished drafting

Frederick’s law code in 1794, included provisions for personal liberty,

permanence of tenure for judges and religious toleration. They also realised

that the Frederician state, with its peasant serfdom, its provinces jealous of

their particular institutions and divided from each other by customs barriers,

each considering itself autonomous, did not form a single nation. Finally,

like all coastal Baltic states, Prussia had been for a quarter-century a major

exporter of grains and textiles, and enlightened individuals took notice of

the introduction into Denmark of English agricultural methods by Albert

Thaer, the Saxon agronomist. The Prussian civil servants were equally inter-

ested in the economic liberalism of Adam Smith, which was taught in

Hamburg by Johann Büsch, in Vienna by Watteroth, and notably in

Königsberg by Christian Kraus, who exerted a great inﬂ uence on two

eminent administrators of the monarchy, Schön and Schrötter. The people

most inclined to accept new ideas, however, were ofﬁ cials whom Prussia

had drawn from Western Germany or abroad: the Franconian Karl Altenstein;

the Hanoverian Karl von Hardenberg, who governed Ansbach and Bayreuth;

Johann Struensee, who came from Denmark; and most important of all,

Heinrich Baron von und zum Stein, a scion of the Rhenish Ritterschaft

[Imperial Knights], who before taking ofﬁ ce in 1804 had administered the

provinces of Cleves and Mark where the ‘Prussian system’ had never been

introduced.

Nor was this all. Contrary to certain historical accounts, Stein and other

statesmen examined the French experience closely and concluded from it

that the government could increase its power and prestige by giving the

nation some voice in questions of law, taxation and administration.

Nevertheless, since they deﬁ ned the ‘nation’ as the nobility and rich bour-

geoisie, it was on England that they concentrated their attention. Under

Pitt’s guidance that nation appeared to have reconciled royal prerogative

with constitutional law, party rivalry with the maintenance of order and

stability, aristocratic supremacy with bourgeois ambition, and the interests

of the nobility with those of the whole commonwealth. Pitt humoured the

9the conflict between the ancien régime and the revolution

lords, whose ‘pocket’ and ‘rotten’ boroughs assured him a parliamentary

majority, but he did not share their prejudices. Among the ninety-ﬁ ve peers

he appointed were a number of ‘new men’, captains of banking and

commerce who rejuvenated the aristocracy and helped it to remain rich and

able. Thanks to Burke, this miracle of balance and wisdom had won the

adherence of numerous enemies of the Revolution, particularly those of

middle-class and Protestant origin, like Mallet du Pan and François d’Ivernois.

There were admirers of England even among the French émigrés. German

anglophilia naturally abounded in the Hanseatic towns, and in Hanover it

ﬂ ourished at the University of Göttingen. August Rehberg and Heinrich

Brandes acquainted Stein with English ideas, and he used them in his own

political thought. One can ﬁ nd evidence of them in the individualistic

teachings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who would have left the state with

only police and military power, abandoning the other spheres of govern-

ment, as in England, to the spontaneous organisation of society. This, he

believed, would have served to subject the social order to the patronage of

the aristocracy.

The great majority of the privileged classes abhorred these bureaucratic

reformers as much as they did the ‘Jacobins’. In the face of their protests,

sovereigns faltered or fell back. Pitt himself was an example. Without repu-

diating his early projects, he deferred them until a later time. In Austria, the

agrarian reforms of Joseph II had been suspended by Leopold II, and in

1798 his successor Francis II ended by retaining the feudal dues and the

corvées. In his Livonian provinces, Paul I contented himself with wresting

certain mitigations of serfdom from the Diet, and his commissioner in the

Danubian principalities, Paul Kiselev, went no further. In Prussia, the Junkers

had already imposed a revision of Frederick’s code upon Frederick William

II, and Frederick William III soon renounced his plan to suppress ﬁ scal priv-

ileges, a reform which he had contemplated in 1798. True, he resolutely

continued to liberate peasants and reform the agrarian economy in his vast

personal domains, but he did not dare extend these enterprises to the

seigneurial Gut . The Prussian nobility retained its monopoly of high posi-

tions and ranks. In 1800 there were only 695 commoners out of six or

seven thousand ofﬁ cers. Stein himself was unable to effect more than tech-

nical reforms in ﬁ nance, and he failed to abolish the internal customs

barriers.

Thus the reformers outside France were almost as ineffectual as the

Jacobins. It was the ruling hand of Napoleon, or the rude impact of his

armies, that would rejuvenate the Old World. And France had never ceased

to be the bête noire of European monarchies and aristocracies. ‘I am not, nor

the legacy of the revolution 10

can I ever be, sympathetic to the French,’ wrote Maria Carolina of Naples; ‘I

shall always regard them as the assassins of my sister and of the royal family,

and as the oppressors of every monarchy.’ Stolberg called them the ‘Western

Huns’, and Nelson, although he was not born noble, contemptuously

referred to them as the ‘French villains’. The conservatism of the Consulate

and Empire never succeeded in appeasing them except superﬁ cially.

The anti-French Coalitions have been traditionally explained in terms of

national interests, and the entire drama has been reduced to the question of

the balance of power, or, as Pitt said, of security. This conclusion is not

unreasonable since ill will towards the French never once prevented sover-

eigns from dealing with France when they found it expedient; but for all

that, they did not cast off their inﬂ exible enmity, and their entourages

persisted in proclaiming their hatred of France. This is an incalculable factor

which cannot be disregarded. Only in order to conciliate the Whigs did the

Tories publicly deny the intention of imposing on France a government of

their own choice. Lord Grenville was revealing his real feelings when on

22 December 1795 he included amnesty for émigrés and the restitution of

their estates among the numerous conditions of the peace. In January 1800

he added the restoration of the monarchy. This noble lord was revolted by

the necessity of negotiating with republicans, whom he could not even

regard as gentlemen. Nor would Pitt rejoice at having to stomach the man

of whom he would speak on 3 February 1800 as ‘this last adventurer in the

lottery of revolutions’.

THE CONFLICT OF IDEAS

Political and social reaction naturally found their reﬂ ection in the world of

thought. Authority and tradition once again came into fashion, and an

increasing number of writers and publicists passionately applauded its

return. Some were motivated by conviction, others by self-interest – for

governments recognised the value of propaganda and appropriated money

for that purpose. Important among the voices of reaction were French

and Genevan émigrés like Rivarol and Abbé Barruel, François d’Ivernois

and Mallet du Pan. In England, Canning joined the list with the publication

of his periodical The Anti-Jacobin . Usually, events in France were exploited in

order to terrify the population. Abbé Barruel resumed Hoffmann’s charges

against the Illuminati and Freemasons with never-failing success. But

certain writers made it a point of honour to raise the level of the debate by

offering a new defence of traditional thought in opposition to the rationalist

critique.

11the conflict between the ancien régime and the revolution

There was nothing original in this, for during the course of the eighteenth

century, English empiricism, having become conservative with Hume and

even more so with Bentham, had aspired to restore authority and moral

conventions. It was argued that just as reason was able to govern the physical

world by searching for natural law and conforming to it, so reason could

observe social life and discover that traditional institutions, by virtue of their

prolonged existence, were in harmony with the ‘nature of things’. In Burke,

this pragmatism had been complicated by the addition of a social vitalism

borrowed from medical science, such as had been taught in eighteenth-

century France at the school of Montpellier and by Marie-François Bichat

during the period of the Directory. Man was thought to be the fruit of a spon-

taneous and progressive germination caused by an irrational force called life.

Similarly, Burke spoke of society as a plant or animal, the individual being only

one of its organs, so that social authority was imposed on him as a condition

of his existence which he could no more repudiate than his physical needs.

This experimental rationalism, mingled with a mysticism which gave it some

afﬁ nity to Romanticism, passed from England to Germany, where it made a

strong impression on Rehberg and Brandes. It has been said that Friedrich von

Gentz, who translated Burke’s Reflections as early as 1793, and even Metternich

derived their political philosophy from this school of thought.

Very close to these ideas were two French political philosophers, Louis de

Bonald and Joseph de Maistre. In 1796 there appeared the simultaneous

publication of the former’s Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux and the latter’s

Considérations sur la France . They too subordinated the individual to society, and

Bonald frequently referred to the nature of things, but they substituted the

working of Providence in place of the vital life source. According to the

autocratic and authoritarian Bonald, who cherished the royalist tradition as

much as he did Catholicism, the structure that God had set for society

remained immutable. For Joseph de Maistre, who had a sense of history and

who, as a good Ultra-montanist, was somewhat indifferent to forms of

temporal government, the Creator limited himself to preserving society by

inﬁ nitely wise and ﬂ exible means. Thus man had to bow before the facts.

On occasion, even political economy was not above attacking lofty reason.

Observing the England of his time, Malthus in 1798 maintained that the

notion of unlimited human progress was but a chimera, because in spite of

technological efforts, population tended to increase much faster than the

means of subsistence. Thus every social improvement which helped to

increase the species merely resulted in aggravating the evil; it was disease,

‘vice’, famine and war which redressed the balance. Yet Malthus, who was

fundamentally liberal, found an escape by advising that the poor resign

the legacy of the revolution 12

themselves to chastity. The traditionalist thinkers, however, were unani-

mously convinced that he had struck a fatal blow at the hopes of Condorcet

and Godwin.

Having identiﬁ ed the Revolution with rationalism, the traditionalists did

not delay in turning against it the most dreaded enemy that rationalism had

ever encountered, namely the movement inimical to the primacy of reason.

This movement, which had inspired Rousseau and the Sturm und Drang , was

in the process of ﬂ owering, towards the closing years of the century, into

what is usually called the ﬁ rst German Romanticism. Cartesian rationalism

had promised that intellect would be able to solve the riddle of the universe,

and it commanded that reason defend its freedom against instinct and

feeling, which were under the sway of matter operating atomically and

mechanically. It was a philosophy of endeavour in which science and happi-

ness were the rewards. But there are always mystics waiting to experience

the mystery of an inspiration which is pure grace; there are always unruly

spirits hoping that chance may bring them happiness, or taking pleasure in

risk itself; and there are always artists with an inclination for imagination

and fantasy. The wheel of time now brought forward a new generation in

quest of something original in order to win its place in the sun. So it reha-

bilitated the emotions and outlined a metaphysics that endowed emotion

with the ability to attain the absolute through intuition while denying

reason such access. There were philosophers who were entirely of the same

opinion. Kant, in particular, destroyed the Cartesian metaphysic, after which

he constructed another by predicating the existence of an ethical sense,

which was divine intuition in essence.

Mysticism, which had never been stiﬂ ed by rationalism, enjoyed an

extraordinary vogue at the end of the century. It achieved popularity through

the occultism of Swedenborg, de Pasqualis and Saint-Martin, and began to

seep into Freemasonry and Illuminism, since it claimed to rest on scientiﬁ c

theories and discoveries. From medicine it, too, borrowed vitalism, and

from physics it borrowed magnetism, which was also considered to be an

irrational force. Mesmer’s tub, like somnambulism, brought the mind to a

state of entranced unconsciousness, at which point it made contact with the

supernatural world. Even Catholicism was unable to protect so loyal a son as

Joseph de Maistre from its seductive lure.

Nevertheless, the depth of any such movement is not readily evident if its

ideology alone is considered and if no allowance is made for the tempera-

ment and social condition of its adherents. For the most part, these mystics

were either unable to adapt themselves to the social milieu or had not

yet succeeded in doing so. They included the sick, or unstable, whose

13the conflict between the ancien régime and the revolution

helplessness doomed them to melancholy and even to suicide; the young,

thirsting for independence and pleasure and incensed by social restrictions;

and yet others who were trying to make their way in the world and who

collided with the privileges of rank, fortune or established reputations. It is

not surprising that these people tended to idealise the Robin Hood ﬁ gure,

the righter-of-wrongs, nor that with age or success many of them became

wiser. There have always been ‘romantics’, but the eighteenth century

witnessed their proliferation because the rise of the bourgeoisie dislocated

social groupings and a growing number of talented but poor young men

became irritated and desperate.

Literature and art more or less capitulated to the anti-rationalist reaction.

In the name of reason, the French imposed tyrannical aesthetic rules which

greatly restricted opportunities for originality. French works became models

everywhere, and critics, especially in Germany, had every opportunity to

denounce this ‘classic’ art as a foreign importation. In this domain, the

successes of undisciplined individualism far outweighed risks, while actu-

ally promising renown. Originality was sought everywhere – in nature, in

little-known islands, in the Orient, China, America and in the works of the

forgotten past. The English and Scots ecstatically welcomed the spurious

poems of Ossian, and the French invented the troubadour style. Shakespeare

was used to justify all the attacks on the three unities of time, place and

action in French classic drama, as well as the attacks on the distinction of

literary genres. Even Hellenism, which was just being discovered, was

invoked in order to repudiate seventeenth-century tastes.

The plastic arts, less ﬂ exible, did not enjoy the same degree of emancipa-

tion. The end of the century again witnessed the triumph of the classic

spirit, which sought its sources in antiquity and in the Italian Renaissance.

It was owing to the genius of David and Canova that this triumph was

possible. On the other hand, the new spirit was given a powerful stimulus

by the development of instrumental music, a modern art form which

created its own rules, and which was pre-eminently Romantic in that it

suggested rather than described, and was essentially sensual and emotional

in its appeal.

In many ways it seemed that the revolutionary upheaval ought to favour

this new spirit. The Revolution had emancipated the individual, declared

war on all traditions, proclaimed freedom of the press and theatre, and

suppressed the privileged groups whose task it had been to assure the main-

tenance of classical disciplines. It had inﬂ amed human passions, and its

numerous and terrible vicissitudes affected a good many people who were

to develop a morbid taste for the unstable and the horrible – as the success