Reimagining Politics after the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism

1. The Constitution of the Year III

It was, in a way, the Revolution that explained [Rousseau’s] Social Contract to us. Joseph Lakanal, Rapport sur J. J. Rousseau, fait au nom de Comité d’instruction publique 1 The Constitution of the Year III In the summer of 1795, six years after the staggering events of 1789 and one year removed from the end of the Terror, the representatives of the French nation met and debated a proposed new constitution for France, the third of the Revolution. The newly emergent republican center sought to end the Revolution and establish the Republic on a lasting basis, to replace the “revolutionary state” with “a constitutional order.”1 In their efforts to end the Revolution, the members of the National Convention addressed a vast array of constitutional issues and revisited many of the fundamental questions posed during the first five years of the Revolution. In effect, they set out to form, in the words of the journalist Adrien Lezay, a new “social contract.”2 In so doing, the republican center understood the problems facing the French Republic in classical-republican terms and articulated solutions drawn from the classical-republican repertoire. The result was 1. Pierre-Louis-Charles Baudin des Ardennes, RM, 25:532. 2. Adrien Lezay, Qu’est-ce que la constitution de 95? (Paris, 1795), 14. The Constitution of the Year III 27 a constitution, passed on 22 August 1795, that reflected the early modern classical-republican tradition, both its anxieties and its prescriptions. The Constitution of the Year III, and the classical republicanism it embodied, heralded a break in the political culture of the Revolution, codifying developments in motion since the coup against Robespierre on 9 Thermidor of the Year II (27 July 1794). The redaction of the Constitution of the Year III institutionalized an elitist republicanism and signaled the secularization of politicaltimeintheRevolution,bothofwhichconstitutedprofoundruptures with the radical-democratic and chiliastic political language of Jacobinism. The completion of the Constitution of the Year III marked the culmination of the Thermidorian moment, a transitional period defined first and foremost by the two-pronged aspiration to break forever with the Terror and radical Jacobinism on the one hand and to anchor the republic in stable ground on the other. From the overthrow of Robespierre until the passage of the new constitution, seemingly every project undertaken, every proposal put forward, and every speech in the National Convention manifested a deep-seated desire to bury forever the “tyranny” and “anarchism” of the reign of Robespierre. In this regard, the Thermidorian moment was indelibly marked by what Bronislaw Baczko has called “the political, cultural and existential experience of the Terror.”3 The Thermidorians closed the Paris Jacobin Club, rehabilitated the proscribed members of the Gironde , and put prominent figures on trial, most famously Carrier, the socalled Butcher of Nantes.4 Beyond this set of largely negative maneuvers, the Thermidorians also faced the task of offering a positive program that could stand as an alternative to Jacobinism and provide a foundation for the post-Terror Republic. Even their positive efforts, however, were suffused with the negative project of breaking with Jacobinism. One of the most revealing of the Thermidorians’ often groping efforts on this front was the attempt to reappropriate the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau from 3. Bronislaw Baczko, “La Constitution de l’an III et la promotion culturelle du citoyen,” in L’institution de la raison: La Révolution culturelle des Idéologues, ed. François Azouvi (Paris, 1992), 22. On the Thermidorian moment more broadly, see Baczko, Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge, 1994); and Sergio Luzzatto, L’automne de la Révolution: Luttes et culture politique dans la France thermidorienne, trans. Simone Carpentari Messina (Paris, 2001). 4. On the rehabilitation of the Girondins, see Baczko, “Les Girondins en Thermidor,” in La Gironde et les Girondins, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris, 1991); on Carrier’s trial, see Baczko, Ending the Terror, chap. 3; and Luzzatto, L’automne de la Révolution, 23–31. 28 Reimagining Politics after the Terror the legacy of Robespierre. The Committee on Public Instruction purchased unpublished manuscripts from Rousseau’s widow,5 and Rousseau’s ashes were placed in the Pantheon on 12 October 1794 in a dramatic ceremony that Baczko calls “the first truly Thermidorian festival.”6 Jacobins were officially excluded from the event, Robespierre was roundly criticized for never having placed Rousseau in the Pantheon...