LUlUSTOCRATlE
\nlle
\nmille
\na
\n“The Aristocracy Unmasked. Beware of its caresses, its thousand arms are ready to strike” {ca. 1791-1792
\n(anonymous, courtesy of the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France). The theme of conspiracy and counterrevolution, hiding behind a reassuring mask, appeared widely in French revolutionary rhetoric. Here, the
\nJanus-like depiction of the aristocratic woman and the priest, bound together by a serpent, is particularly
\nintriguing, prefiguring a common motif in nineteenth-century France. Note the cloven hoof and the claw, only
\npartly hidden by the clergyman’s cassock and the woman’s gown.<\/p>\n
Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French
\nElites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792
\nTIMOTHY TACKETT<\/p>\n
O N THE MORNING OF MAY 23, 1792, in the third year of the French Revolution,
\nJacques-Pierre Brissot and Armand Gensonn\u00e9 climbed to the rostrum to address
\nthe National Assembly. In successive speeches, the two deputies revealed the
\nexistence of a terrifying plot to destroy the Assembly and the revolution itself. The
\nwhole was masterminded by the “Machiavellian” Austrian minister, Prince Wenzel
\nVon Kaunitz, but it was coordinated in France by a shadowy “Austrian Committee”
\nof the king’s closest advisers, and it was said to be responsible for almost all the ills
\nbesetting the new French regime: the disappointing results of the recently declared
\nwar, the counterrevolutionary movements in the countryside, and even the divisions
\nwithin the Assembly itself. Brissot recognized that there was very little concrete
\nproof of this plot. But it was the essence of conspiracies to be secret and
\nimpenetrable: “they leave no written records.” The plotters had hidden their
\nheinous activities behind a mask of pro-revolutionary pronouncements, and if one
\nwaited to uncover “legal proof” it might be too late. For the most part, one could
\nonly rely on a kind of deductive logic based on signs, unusual coincidences, and
\nrumor.’
\nTo what extent this “Austrian Committee” ever existed is difficult to know.
\nBrissot was not above demagoguery, and in the previous months he had proposed
\nseveral different and sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories.- But whatever
\nAn earlier version of this article was read at the Center for History, Society, and Culture at the
\nUniversity of California, Davis. May I express my appreciation to William Hagen, the former director
\nof the center, as well as to Helen Chenut. Philip Dawson, Jon Jacobson, Thomas Kaiser, John Markoff,
\nDarrin McMahon, Peter McPhee. Kenneth Pomeranz. Donald Sutherland, and the members of the
\nBaltimore-Washington Old Regime Group for their Helpance in the development of this article.
\n‘ See Archives parlementaires de 1787 \u00e0 \u00a1860, recueil complet des d\u00e9bats l\u00e9gislatifs et politiques des
\nchambres fran\u00e7aises: Premi\u00e8re .s\u00e9rie (\u00a1787-1799), J\u00e9r\u00f4me Mavidal. et al., eds., 99 vols. (Paris,
\n1867-1995), 44: 33-43 (hereafter,^\/*). See also Michael Hochedlinger, “”La cause de tous les maux
\nde la France’: Die ‘Austrophobie’ im revolution\u00e4ren Frankreich und der Sturz des K\u00f6nigstums,
\n1789-1792,” Francia: Forschungen zur westeurop\u00e4ischen Geschichte 24, no. 2 (1997): 73-120; and
\nThomas E. Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette Diplomacy, Ausirophobia. and the Queen,”
\nFrench History, forthcoming.
\n– The accusations were also well timed to divert attention from the “Brissotins,” who controlled the
\nministry and who had led the nation into its frustrating war situation. See especially H. A.
\nGoetz-Bernstein. La diplomatie de \u00a1a Gironde: Jacques-Pierre Brissot (Paris. 1912), 49, 57-58, 74-79.
\nPierre-Vicior Malouet and A. F. Bertrand de Moleville. two supposed participants in the “Committee,”
\nboth avowed that it never existed: Antoine-Fran\u00e7ois Bertrand de Moleville, Histoire de \u00a1a R\u00e9volution de
\nFrance pendant les derni\u00e8res ann\u00e9es du r\u00e8gne de Louis XVl, 10 vols. (Paris, 18\u00dc1-02), 8: 8-9, 36-37.
\nGoetz-Bemstein thought that it did exist as a small coterie around the Habsburg queen, MarieAntoinette, who regularly sent French war plans to the Austrian court: Goetz-Bernstein, 215-17.<\/p>\n
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the reality of the “grand conspiracy” set out by Brissot and Gensonn\u00e9, it is clear that
\na Iarge number of their fellow deputies believed it was real. There was a long
\nstunned silence after the two men had spoken. Individual members soon wrote
\nhome of the fear and uncertainty generated by the speeches,-^ A few days later, as
\nthe representatives continued to debate the accusations, a veritable panic swept
\nthrough the hall. Word spread rapidly that a plot was about to break to spirit away
\nthe king and destroy the Assembly. The deputies went into permanent session, and
\nParis itself was placed on a war footing, patrolled continually, and illuminated
\nthroughout the night. The ultra-radical sans-culotte women and men, armed with
\npikes and “diverse aggressive instruments,” were allowed to parade through the
\nAssembly’s hall, beating drums and singing revolutionary songs.”
\nIndeed, a consuming fear of the presence of conspiracy, of a small group of
\nperpetrators or even a single master conspirator, willfully seeking to destroy the
\nrevolution and the revolutionaries through secret action, beset much of France’s
\npolitical elite between the spring of 1792 and the summer of 1794. During this
\nperiod, over 90 percent of judicially ordered executions were against individuals
\naccused of various forms of sedition or collusion with enemies of the republic,-‘^ An
\nobsession with plots was clearly part and parcel of the politicai culture of the Reign
\nof Terror.
\nThe conspiracy fears of the French Revolution are all the more fascinating in that
\nsimilar reactions have been associated with other revolutionary episodes in world
\nhistory, Thucydides’ grim description of the Hellenic world during the Peioponnesian War is well known: “When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who
\nfollowed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further,.. He who succeeded
\nin a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who
\ndetected one.”^ In the period of the American Revolution, as Bernard Bailyn
\npersuasively demonstrated, large numbers of colonists were convinced that the
\nBritish government or its ministers were engaged in a vast, secret and concerted
\nconspiracy to pervert their libertyJ So, too, the Russians after 1917 experienced
\nwaves of conspiracy fears at various moments, from the Bolshevik seizure of power
\nthrough the Stalinist dictatorship. After the attempted assassination of V, \u00cf. Lenin
\nin August 1918, Soviet newspapers and government proclamations abounded in
\nrevelations of “endless plots perpetrated by counterrevolutionaries and Right
\nSocialist revolutionaries,” and of the “huge conspiracy” of the Allied powers and a
\ncontinually shifting cohort of political and class enemies.** During the Stalinist
\n-‘ See, for example, the letters of Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe, “Lettres sur l’Assembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative,”
\nFrancisque M\u00e8ge, ed.. M\u00e9moires de l’Acad\u00e9mie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand 11
\n(1869): 346-47,349-50; of Sylvain Codet: Archives d\u00e9partementales de l’IUe-et-Vilaine, L 294 (2), May
\n30 (written “April 30” by error); of Georges Couthon, Correspondance de Georges Couthon, Francisque
\nM\u00e8ge, ed. (Paris, 1872), 143. 146-47; and of Blaise Cavellier and Romain-Nicolas Malassis: Archives
\nCommunales de Brest, Series D, uncatalogued. May 26.
\n^AP.44: 189-96,274.
\n\u2022^ Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation
\n(Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 81. Compare Mona Ozouf, “‘Jacobins’: Fortune et infortune d’un mot,” in
\nL’\u00e9cole de \u00a1a France: Essais sur ia R\u00e9volution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris, 1984), 82.
\n*\u2022 Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett. trans., 2d edn., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), 1: 242.
\n^ Bernard A. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967),
\nchaps. 3-4.
\n\u00abWilliam Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, \u00a19I7-\u00a192\u00a1, 2 vols. (New York, 1935). 2:<\/p>\n
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purges, plot theories were itivoked both by those ordering arrests and by those who
\nwere arrested and who struggled to understand the reason for such unjust
\naccusations.” The Cultural Revolution in China seems also to have arisen in part
\nfrom Mao Zedong’s suspicions of threats to his power, and the movement soon
\nengendered widespread fears of insidious “bourgeois reactionaries” and foreign
\nenemies plotting to sabotage the revolution and perhaps to launch a white terror.
\nAs the Cultural Revolution waned, all the evils of that chaotic episode were
\nattributed to the nefarious Gang of Four conspiring for their own hold on power.'”
\nA cotnparative study of conspiracy obsessions in these various revolutions would
\nbe extremely difficult in the present state of our knowledge. It would require a
\nthorough examination of the nature and extent of conspiracy beliefs in the vastly
\ndifferent cultural and political contexts of the countries involved. It would also
\nrequire an Assessment of the presence or absence of real conspiracies and of the
\npossible promotion of such fears by manipulative leaders. But it seems clear that in
\na time of revolution substantial numbers of people commonly come to believe in the
\nreality of great webs of secret concerted action perpetrated by small groups of
\nconspirators, threatening their lives and their political goals. It also seems clear that
\nin the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, obsessive fears of this kind led
\ndirectly to the deaths of many thousands of people. It would thus seem appropriate
\nto explore more carefully the themes and variations of conspiracy obsessions in one
\nof those revolutions.
\nIn most of the older historical treatments of the French Revolution, the
\npreoccupation with plots was little emphasized and was often ignored altogether. If
\nmentioned at all, it was usually attributed to the panic fears of the Parisian masses,
\nto the activities of real enemy agents, and above all to the war that pitted France
\nagainst most of Europe in a life or death struggle to preserve the ideals of 1789.”
\nBut the recent interest in the language of the revolution has brought the whole issue
\nto the fore. Several authors have argued that this peculiar habit of tjiought was
\n66-69, 77-78, 344; also Orlando Figes,.4 People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London,
\n1996), 629. 642.
\n^ F. Beck and W. Godin, The Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (New York, 1951), esp.
\n221-25; also Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in E.Ktraor\u00e4inary Times: Soviet Russia
\nin the 1930s (New York, 1999), 190-217. Reiterated accusations of foreign conspiracy’ were also voiced
\nin the Soviet Union during the great war scare of 1927: Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered
\nWorld Politics (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 216-24, 264-67.
\n‘” Tai Sung An, Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution (Indianapolis, 1972), 1-4; Thomas W. Robinson,
\ned.. The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley. Calif., 1971). esp. 51. 95-96. It may be, however, that
\nin the Chinese Cultural Revolution opposition was perceived to arise less from plots and conspiracies
\nthan from class and the class struggle in general: see, for example. Hong Yung Lee, Politics of the
\nChinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study (Berkeley, 1978), 41-63.
\n‘ ‘ For example, Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise^ 5th edn. (Paris, 1913),
\nesp. 357-66; Albert Maihiez. La R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise. 3 vols. (Paris, 1922), 3: chap. S; Georges
\nLefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1962-64), 2: 64-76. Crane Brinton never mentions
\nthe issue in either The Jacobins (New York, 1930) or The Anatomy of Revolution, rev. edn. (New York,
\n1952). Robert R. Palmer is more probing, but he devotes only a paragraph to the question: Twelve Who
\nRuled (Princeton, N.J.. 1941), 64. Among nineteenth-century historians, see especially Edgar Quinet,
\nLa r\u00e9volution. 2 vols. (Paris, 1865), 1: 187-89. The only book I have found entirely devoted to the issue
\nis Jacques Duhamel, Essai du r\u00f4le des \u00e9l\u00e9ments parano\u00efaques dans la gen\u00e8se des id\u00e9es r\u00e9volutionnaires
\n(Paris. 1929), but it is poorly documented and disappointing. On the related question of denunciations,
\nsee Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds.. Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modem
\nEuropean History, 1789-1989 (Chicago, 1996).<\/p>\n
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fundamental not only to the uneducated masses but to the revolutionary elites as
\nwell, and that it characterized the mentality and discourse of the leadership from
\nthe onset of events. In a particularly influential book, Fran\u00e7ois Furet argued that
\n“the idea of plot in revolutionary ideology . . . was truly a central and polymorphous
\nnotion that served as a reference point for organizing and interpreting action. It was
\nthe notion that mobilized men’s convictions and beliefs, and made it possible at
\nevery point to elaborate an interpretation and justification of what had happened.”^-^ Lynn Hunt has asserted much the same position: “the obsession with
\nconspiracy became the centrai organizing principle of French revolutionary rhetoric. The narrative of Revolution was dominated by plots.”‘^
\nMoreover, for both of these historians, the conspiratorial mode of explanation
\nwas linked to the political culture of the French elites on the eve of the revolution.
\nFuret laid particular stress on the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of
\npopular sovereignty as elucidated in The Social Contract (1762). It was the
\nrevolutionaries’ belief in a single, indivisible “general will” that led them to
\nconclude that all opposition or dissent was criminal and “counterrevolutionary,”
\nand that brought them to stipulate the existence of conspiracy\u2014for what other
\nexplanation could there be for popular opposition to the “general will” In this
\nsense, the revolutionaries were following a kind of “Hegelian dialectic”; they
\n“invented a single, indivisible, pervasive enemy and imagined a death struggle with
\nthis opposite, whose supposed power and coherence vastly exaggerated the tangible
\nevidence.”^* For in Furet’s view, the plots were largely illusory, “the figment of a
\nfrenzied preoccupation with power.”‘^ Hunt’s interpretation was more complex.
\nComparing the French situation to that in eighteenth-century England and the
\nnascent United States, she stressed a French lack of familiarity with “politics”
\nbefore the revolution, as well as the absence of “sacred texts”\u2014like the American
\nConstitution\u2014on which to rely. But she also placed a considerable emphasis on the
\nforce of ideas: on a Rousseauist preoccupation with the general will and with
\ntransparency and authenticity, all of which seemed to make any kind of factional
\npolitics “synonymous with conspiracy.””‘
\nThe suggestions of Furet and Hunt are intriguing and provocative. They are also
\nself-consciously speculative and subsidiary to the broader interpretations of revolutionary culture developed by these authors. But when in fact did this peculiar
\nobsession begin, how did it evolve over time, and how important to its inception was
\nthe dialectic of ideas Can the revolutionaries themselves give us any indication of
\n1^ Fran\u00e7ois Furet, Interpreting the Erench Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 53. See also Furet’s article
\n“The Terror,” in Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the Erench Revolution, Arthur
\nGoldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 137-38.
\n1’ Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the Erench Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 39.
\n‘\u2022* Colin Lucas, “The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution,” in Fitzpatrick
\nand Gellately, Accusatory Practices, 23. Lucas characterizes Furet’s point of view, without subscribing
\nto it himself.
\n\u2022’ Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 54.
\n“\u2022 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 39-44. Among other historians supporting positions similar to
\nthose of Furet and Hunt, see Ozouf, ‘”Jacobin,”” 82; Norman Hampson, Prelude to Terror: The
\nConstituent Assembly and the Eailure of Consensus (Oxford, 1988). 61-62; G. T. Cubitt, ‘”Denouncing
\nConspiracy in the French Revolution,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 33 (1989); 145-46; Lucien
\nJaume, Le discottrs Jacobin et la d\u00e9mocratie (Paris, 1989), esp. part 2. chap. 2; and Patrice Higonnet,
\nGoodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the Erench Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 241-47.<\/p>\n
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the birth of this particular turn of mind The present essay seeks to explore
\nempirically the origins and development of the conspiracy obsession during the
\nearly years of the French Revolution and thus to offer possible points of reference
\nfor future comparative studies of other revolutions. It will focus, in particular, on
\nthe psychology of conspiratorial fears among the French revolutionary elites, as a
\ncomplement to the better known history of such fears among the popular classes.”’
\nAfter a rapid overview of conspiracy beliefs before 1789, it will examine the
\ninception and evolution of such beliefs through the “First Terror” of the summer of
\n1792 for a key leadership group: the deputies of the Constituent and the Legislative
\nAssemblies.”*<\/p>\n
W E NOW KNOW THAT in<\/p>\n
the early modern era conspiratorial beliefs were by no means
\nconfined to revolutionary periods alone, in a remarkable article written in 1982,
\nGordon Wood applied the concept of a “paranoid style of politics”\u2014first developed
\nby Richard Hofstadter for nineteenth and twentieth-century America\u2014to the
\ngeneral “Anglo-American world” during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth
\ncenturies.1^ Throughout this region, according to Wood, “conspiratorial interpretations . . . became a major means by which educated men in the early modern
\nperiod ordered and gave meaning to their political world.” “Everywhere people
\nsensed designs within designs, cabals within cabals,” assuming the existence of “a
\nworld of autonomous, freely acting individuals who were capable of directly and
\ndeliberately bringing about events through their decisions and actions.” Indeed,
\n“there was scarcely a major figure who did not tend to explain political events in
\nthese terms.”2o
\nWood made very little attempt to apply his interpretation to the European
\ncontinent. But a preliminary investigation of the French case would suggest that in
\nthe eighteenth century there were both similarities and differences. Among the
\nmasses of the common people in France, historians have found ample evidence of
\na susceptibility to conspiracy interpretations. Steven Kaplan has documented a
\npervasive popular belief in “famine plots,” which “was built into the structure of the
\ncollective mentality” and in which a wide assortment of villains\u2014depending on
\ncircumstances\u2014were thought to conspire to starve the population.^^ Ariette Farge
\n^\u2022^ See esp. Georges Lefebvre. 77ie Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, Joan
\nWhite, trans. (New York. 1973); George Rude. The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, t959); and
\nAlbert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, Remy Inglis Hall, trans. (Garden City, N.Y., 1972).
\n‘^ For an overview of the “First Terror,” which includes the August 10 storming of the Tuileries
\nPalace and the Septetnber Massacres, see Georges Lefebvre: La R\u00e9voltttion fran\u00e7aise: La premi\u00e8re
\nterreur (Paris, 1952).
\n‘^ Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth
\nCentury.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.. 39 (1982): 401-41; Richard Hofstadter, Tlie Paranoid
\nStyle in American Politics (New York, 1965), 3-40. See also Bailyn, Ideological Origins, chaps. 3-4; and
\nDavid Brion Davis, ed.. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution
\nto the Present (Ithaca. N.Y., 1971).
\n^” Wood. “Conspiracy,” 407. 409, 411. Wood also links the “paranoid style” to the wide assutnption
\namong Anglo-American elites of deceit and dissembling within political circles.
\n-1 Steven L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1982),
\n1-2, 62. Kaplan argues that certain elements of the educated elites might also adhere to the “famine
\nplot persuasion.”<\/p>\n
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and Jacques Revel have revealed the vulnerability of the Parisian popular classes to
\nplot explanations in the mid-eighteenth century, when thousands could accept
\nrumors that royal officials were abducting local children. The power of popular
\nconspiratorial fears on the eve of the revolution has been explored by Georges
\nLefebvre in his pioneering study of the Great Fear.\u2014 In a world where the
\nundisclosed actions of royal, seigneurial, and ecclesiastical authorities so dominated
\nthe lives of the common people, such fears were not necessarily irrational. In fact,
\nthroughout much of history, the pervasive explanatory model for understanding
\nevents assumed the willed interventions of individual beings, sometimes human,
\nmore commonly supernatural\u2014whether gods, saints, demons, or the diverse
\nsupernatural beings of popular folklore. The only viable alternative model, one
\nbased on chaos or blind chance, probably struck most people as singularly
\nfrightening and unacceptable. At other times and in other situations, Jews and
\nProtestants and witches in league with the devil have been invoked to explain
\nvarious kinds of evil done to individuals, their families, and their communities.-^
\nIn certain situations, some members of the French educated e\u00fbtes might also
\nsubscribe to plot interpretations. A search for the word “conspiracy” in a broad
\nsample of works published between 1700 and 1789\u2014and available for analysis
\nthrough the ARTFL database^-*\u2014reveals a handful of writers who believed in the
\nexistence of various contemporary conspiracies.-” In the early and mid-eighteenth
\ncentury, the most important accusations of this kind were leveled at the Society of
\nJesus. Voltaire, in particular, long portrayed the Jesuits as the embodiment of the
\npower-grubbing clergy who were such an anathema to the writers of the Enlightenment\u2014an image eagerly reinforced by certain Jansenist authors.-^ But with the
\nsuppression of the Jesuits in France in the mid-1760s, such accusations abruptly
\ndisappeared. At the end of the Old Regime, the most vigorous conspiratorial
\nallegations were registered by the ex-Jesuit abb\u00e9 Augustin Barruel in a work
\nimplicitly linking the demise of his former order to a plot of the philosophes.^”^
\nBarruel joined forces with the journalist Elie Fr\u00e9ron and the abb\u00e9 Thomas-Marie
\nRoyou in XQ Ann\u00e9e litt\u00e9raire., a review that relentlessly indicted the philosophes, the
\nFreemasons, and the Protestants for secretly plotting the destruction of both
\n” Ariette Farge and Jacques Revel, Tfie Vanishing Children of Paris, Claudia Mieville. trans.
\n(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. chap. 4; Lefebvre, Great Fear, esp. part 2.
\n” See, for example, Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XiV^-XVlII^ si\u00e8cles: Une cit\u00e9 assi\u00e9g\u00e9e
\n(Paris, 1978); and Ren\u00e9 Girard, Tlie Scapegoat, Yvonne Freccero, trans. (Baltimore, 1986).
\n^* “American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language” (ARTFL), a database
\nhoused at the University of Chicago and accessible through the World Wide Web: http:\/\/humanities.
\nuchicago.edu\/ARTFL\/. The sample contained 434 works published during this period. The analysis is
\nbased on the occurrence of ihe word conspiration (singular or plural). The word appeared 258 times,
\nin about one in seven (62) of the sample works, written by 37 different authors.
\n^^ Thirteen of the 258 occurrences appeared lo entail a belief in the existence of contemporary
\nconspiracies. These were used in the texts of five different authors. One of the latter was Jean-Jacques
\nRousseau, who expressed his conviction that there was a general conspiracy of philosophes aligned
\nagainst him personally.
\n^” Voltaire, Essai sur l’histoire g\u00e9n\u00e9rale (Geneva, 1756), 143, 337; E. J. F. Barbier, Chronique de la
\nR\u00e9gence, Tome 7(1761; Paris, 1866),410. In 1757, the Jansenist and Gallican press even insinuated that
\nthe Jesuits had supported Robert-Fran\u00e7ois Damiens’ assassination attempt against Louis XV: Dale
\nVan Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien R\u00e9gime. 1750-1770 (Princeton, N.J.,
\n1984), 65-80. See also Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in NineteenthCentury France (Gxford, 1993).’
\n^^ Augustin Barruel, Les Helviennes, ou Lettres provinciales philosophiques (Amsterdam, 1781).<\/p>\n
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religion and the monarchy. Such writings directly prefigured the conservative
\ninterpretation of the revolution developed in Royou’s newspaper L’ami du roi and
\nin Barruel’s later conspiratorial “history” of Jacobinism.^\u00bb
\nYet beliefs of this kind would seem to have been the exception among
\neighteenth-century French writers. The vast majority of authors searched in the
\nARTFL database never used the word “conspiracy” at all, and those who did
\nreferred primarily to events in the historical past.^^ There were accounts of plots
\nand intrigues from Greek and Roman history\u2014with the inevitable stories of the
\nRoman politicians Catiline and Brutus\u2014as well as from the Middle Ages, the
\nRenaissance, and the Wars of Religion. Episodes specific to French history were
\nalso mentioned: the Conspiracy of Amboise in 1560, the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day
\nmassacre of Huguenots in 1572, and the marquis de Cinq-Mars’ conspiracy against
\nCardinal Richelieu in 1642 were among the most common. Clearly, the fact of past
\nconspiracies persisted in the collective memory of French educated elites.^\u00ab Yet
\nvery few imagined\u2014or at least wrote about\u2014such machinations in their own day
\nand age. Motitesquieu even specifically announced that conspiracies were far more
\nunlikely in his contemporary world than in Greek and Roman times, a reality he
\nattributed to the wide distribution of information through newspapers, journals,
\nand the public mail system.^’
\nIndeed, by the later eighteenth century, new explanatory models for the analysis
\nof political and economic events were becoming available to the educated classes,
\nmodels that did not require the willed maneuvering of individuals. Mechanistic
\nexplanations of the world, born of Cartesian rationalism and the new astronomical
\ninterpretations based on scientific laws and natural causes\u2014as popularized by
\nVoltaire and others\u2014had a profound impact not only on the elites’ religious views
\nbut on their general understanding of causation as well. Applying such perspectives
\nto human affairs, eighteenth-century French thinkers made important advances in
\nidentifying more abstract political and economic processes at work in the world.
\nSuch was the case with Montesquieu’s analysis of political processes in the “spirit
\nof the laws,” for example, or with the physiocrats’ examination of the general
\ncirculation of wealth and the laws of market forces\u2014anticipating Adam Smith’s
\n“hidden hand.” Such also, in a sense, was Rousseau’s concept of the “general will,”
\npredicated on the existence of a collective community of interest active in
\ni^^
\n2\u00bb Amos Hofman, “The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy,” French History 2
\n(1988): 152-72. See also J. M. Roberts. The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), 140-41;
\nDarrin M. McMahon, “The Counter-Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,”‘ Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 77-112; and Barruei’s M\u00e9moires pour servir \u00e0 l’histoire
\ndu jacobinisme. 4 vols. (London, 1797-98).
\n2″ A total of 182 (71 percent) of the 258 occurrences referred to the historical past. In most of the
\nremaining cases, the word was used metaphorically or in a literary context\u2014as in the plots of plays or
\nnovels. See, for example, Louis-S\u00e9bastien Mercier. Du th\u00e9\u00e2tre (Paris. 1773). 49.
\n^ See also Yves-Marie Berc\u00e9 and Elena Fasano Guarini, eds., Complots et conjurations dans l’Europe
\nmoderne (Rome, 1996). 1-5 (Berc\u00e9es introduction). Compare John D. Woodbridge, Re-olt in
\nPrerevohitionary France: The Prince de Conti’s Conspiracy against Louis XV, I755-\u00a1757 (Princeton, N.J.,
\n1995).
\n31 Consid\u00e9rations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur d\u00e9cadence, Gonzague Truc, ed.
\n(1748; Paris, 1967), 122-23.
\n-” Gordon Wood identifies similar trends In the Anglo-American worid, linking them above all to
\nwriters of the Scottish Enlightenment. But he feels that they had a broad effect on the population only
\nafter the outbreak of the French Revolution: Wood, “Conspiracy,” 430-32.<\/p>\n
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If a few eighteenth-century French elites continued to subscribe to conspiracy
\ninterpretations of the political events of their day, such beliefs were not widespread,
\nand were probably far less central to the thinking of the educated classes than they
\nwere in the Anglo-American world. The writings produced during two major
\npolitical events at the end of the Old Regime, the Maupeou crisis of the early 1770s
\nand the “pre-revoiution” of 1787-1789, further substantiate this conclusion. In the
\nlong struggle between Chancellor Ren\u00e9-Nicolas de Maupeou on the one hand and
\nthe Parlement of Paris and its liberal “patriot party” supporters on the other, the
\nlatter seem almost never to have resorted to plot theories to explain events.
\nAlthough one Jansenist jurist tried to persuade his colleagues that the affair had
\nbeen engineered by the Jesuits and that Maupeou was merely their pawn, virtually
\nno one accepted the idea.” A rapid reading of the patriot brochure literature of the
\nperiod reveals no mention of the words ”plot” or “conspiracy.” If the chancellor’s
\nmotives were alluded to at all, he was usually portrayed as acting alone, moved
\nprimarily by personal ambition. Most commentators viewed the affair in more
\nabstract institutional terms, as a “constitutional” struggle in which “tyranny” and
\n“despotism” were opposed by those defending liberty, a government of laws, and
\nthe “constitution” of the “nation.”^”*
\nThroughout the prerevolutionary period, from the winter of 1787 to the spring of
\n1789, conspiratorial fears again remained remarkably rare, virtually nonexistent
\namong proto-liberal patriots\u2014in sharp contrast to the position of the protoconservatives in the Fr\u00e9ron-Barruel group. In the pamphlet literature written
\nduring this period by thirty-two future Third Estate deputies, only one individual,
\nthe future Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, gave any indication of a
\nparanoid style. All the other writings were marked, rather, by a tone of optimism
\nand good will. Most revealed an almost boundless praise for the king. And while
\nthey were highly critical of the nobility, many claimed to be confident that the
\nnobles could overcome their “prejudices” and be won over to the patriot cause
\nthrough reason and persuasion.^^ Much the same tone was to be found in the
\n“general” cahiers de dol\u00e9ances drawn up by the urban elites in early 1789. While
\nthere were numerous demands for ministerial accountability and public knowledge
\nof government finances, conspiratorial notions and language were largely absent.^^
\nThe reasons for the relative absence of conspiracy fears in French political
\n33 The Jansenist Robert de Saint-Vincent: Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution, A Study in
\nthe History of Libertarianism: France, 1770-1774 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985). 45.
\n^ See, for example, Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target. Lettres d’un homme \u00e0 un autre homme sur les affaires
\ndu temps (n.p., [1771]). 1 have examined the pamphlets preserved in series Lb^^ and Lb^^ of the
\nBiblioth\u00e8que Nationale de France, as Usted in the Catalogue de l’histoire de France. See also Shanti
\nSingham. ” ‘A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen’; Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault
\non Absolutism during the Maupeou Years, 1770-1775″ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University. 1991),
\n21-23, 99-100: and ‘The Correspondance secr\u00e8te: Forging Patriotic Public Opinion during the Maupeou
\nYears,” Historical Reflect ions IR\u00e9flexions historiques 18. no. 2 (1992): 65-1\u00dc0; and Dale Van Kley, “The
\nReligious Origins of the Patriot and Ministerial Parties in Pre-Revolutionary France: Controversy over
\nthe Chancellor’s Constitutional Coup, 1771-1775,” Historical Reflections, same issue, 17-63.
\n^^ On this sample of pamphlet literature, see Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The
\nDeputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (\u00a1789-1790)
\n(Princeton, N.J., 1996). 101. Robespierre warned of the insidious “plotting of the enemies of the
\npeople” in the Estates of Artois:-4 la nation art\u00e9sienne, sur la n\u00e9cessit\u00e9 de r\u00e9former les Etats d Artois (n.p.,
\n1788), 4, 83. See also Maximilien Robespierre, Les ennemis de la patrie d\u00e9masqu\u00e9s (Arras, 1789).
\n3” Conclusion based on an extensive reading of the “general cahiers,” those drawn up at the final<\/p>\n
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culture, by comparison with the English-speaking world, are undoubtedly complex
\nand cannot be developed here. Perhaps one might look to the impact of Protestantism in the Anglo-American sphere\u2014with its emphasis on the pervasiveness of
\nevil and the deceptive wiles of Satan\u2014and to the general weakness of such a
\ntradition in France. One might also emphasize the very different political traditions
\nin France and Anglo-America. Gordon Wood stressed the increasing complexity
\nand impersonal character of politics in the Augustan Age, where a far greater
\nnumber of people were involved in decision making than ever before: “The more
\npeople became strangers to one another and the less they knew of one another’s
\nhearts, the more suspicious and mistrustful they became, ready as never before in
\nWestern history to see deceit and deception at work.”^^ Compared to the more
\ndiffuse nature of political authority and decision making in Britain and A m e r i c a through the presence of representative bodies and the strength of regional
\npower\u2014the lines of authority in the French polity became increasingly centralized
\nand clarified with the growth of absolutism and a strong bureaucracy. Indeed,
\nYvcs-Maric Berc\u00e9 would specifically associate the decline of a conspiratorial
\nculture in France in the seventeenth century to the consolidation of the monarchy.”^
\nBut in any case, and whatever the reason, a paranoid style was little in evidence
\namong the future patriot leadership class on the eve of the French Revolution.<\/p>\n
A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS of the Conspiracy obsession among the elites during the
\nrevolutionary period itself would need to be based on a wide diversity of documents,
\nincluding newspapers, brochures, and speeches within the various clubs and
\nassemblies, both in Paris and the provinces. Here, in the manner of a first approach,
\nI will concentrate on records left by the deputies to the first two revolutionary
\nassemblies, from the early days of the revolution through the period of the First
\nTerror. In this, I will make use of three sets of sources: a compilation of the
\nproceedings of the assemblies,’^”” the published records of the Paris Jacobin Club,”\u00bb
\nand the published or manuscript letters of a sample of fourteen deputies or
\ndelegations of deputies for whom more or less continuous series of correspondence
\nare preserved.^’ Even though the number of deputies represented in the latter
\nstage of the electoral process for the Estates General and intended to be sent with the deputies directly
\nto Versailles.
\n” Wood, “Conspiracy,” 410. Wood also linked these trends with the peculiar forms of moral
\nphilosophy that arose in the Anglo-American Enlightenment and that sought to find a place for free will
\nin a mechanistic causal universe by identifying “causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will
\nof individuals”; p. 416. It is difficult to discern equivalent trends in the French Enlightenment.
\n38 Berc\u00e9 and Guarini, Complots et conjurations, 4-5.
\n3″ As based on the AP. I examined selected debates on topic (sample nursing essay examples by the best nursing assignment writing service)s that seemed most likely to lend
\nthemselves to conspiratorial interpretations, such as those dealing with popular unrest, emigrants,
\nrefractory clergy, international threats, and war. These were identified, first, from the observations of
\nthe deputies in their correspondence: see below note 41; and, second, from the cumulative indexes to
\nthe AP: vol. 34 (the Constituent Assembly) and vol. 51 (the Legislative Assembly).
\n^’ F.-A. Aulard. ed.. La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Jacobins: Rectieil de documents pour l’histoire du club des Jacobins
\nde Paris, 6 vols. (Paris. 1889-97). Unfortunately, Aulard found only sketchy records for the first months
\nof the club’s existence. Initially, the Jacobins consisted exclusively of National Assembly deputies. Over
\ntime, increasing numbers of non-deputies were admitted.
\n“‘ I have examined a total of 1,460 letters for seven deputies written during the Constituent Assembly<\/p>\n
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sample is small, their correspondence totals close to two thousand letters, dating
\nfrom May 1789 through September 1792. The sample includes a wide variation of
\nage groups, occupations, and geographic origins, and a full range of political
\naffiliations.-^^ -J-^Q letters from these deputies allow a systematic enumeration of
\nspecific indications of conspiracy belief in the refiections individuals shared with
\ntheir families and friends back home.^^
\nOn the basis of these letters and the published debates, it would seem clear that
\nthe paucity of a rhetoric of conspiracy among the patriot elites\u2014observed for the
\nprerevolutionary period\u2014persisted through the first weeks of the Estates General
\n(about 50 per month for the twenty-nine-month duration) and 443 for seven deputies or delegations of
\ndeputies written during the first ten months of Ihe Legislative Assembly (about 44 per month for ten
\nmonths). These specific sets of correspondence were chosen as being among the most continuous and
\ncomplete series available for the respective bodies. Unfortunately, relatively few letters seem to be
\npreserved for August and September 1792, presumably because of the general chaos of the period.
\nSources for the Constituent Assembly: Fran\u00e7ois-Ren\u00e9-Pierre M\u00e9nard de La Groye, Correspondance
\n(1789-1791), Florence Mirouse, \u00e9d. (Le Mans, 1989); Pierre-Fran\u00e7ois and Marie-Ang\u00e9lique Lepoutre,
\nD\u00e9put\u00e9-paysan etfenni\u00e8re de Flandre en 17S9: La correspondance des Lepoutre., Jean-Pierre Jessenne and
\nEdna Hindie Lemay. eds. (Lille. 1998); Claude Gantheret, ms. letters to Pierre Leflaive: private
\ncollection of Fran\u00e7oise Misserey, Dijon; Antoine Durand, ms. journal; Archives Episcopales de Cahors,
\ncarton 5-56, and ms. letters to ihe municipality of Cahors; Archives Municipales de Cahors.
\nuneatalogued box; Michel-Ren\u00e9 Maupetit. “Lettres (1789-91),” Qu\u00e9ruau-Lam\u00e9rie, ed., Bulletin de la
\nCommission historique et arch\u00e9ologique de ta Mayenne. 2^”‘^ s\u00e9r.. vols. 17-23 (1901-07); Jean-Fran\u00e7ois
\nGaultier de Biauzat. Gaultier de Biauzat, d\u00e9put\u00e9 du Tiers \u00e9tat aux Etats g\u00e9n\u00e9raux de 1789: Sa vie et sa
\ncorrespondance. Francisque M\u00e8ge. ed., 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand. 1890). and Biblioth\u00e8que Municipale
\nde Clermont-Ferrand, mss. 788-89; and Jean-Andr\u00e9 P\u00e9risse Du Luc, ms. letters to Jean-Baptiste
\nWillermoz; Biblioth\u00e8que Municipale de Lyon, ms. F.G. 5430. Sources for the Legislative Assembly;
\nRabusson-Lamothe, “Lettres”; Fran\u00e7ois-Yves Roubaud. “Lettres de Fran\u00e7ois-Yves Roubaud,” Edmond Poup\u00e9. ed.. Bulletin de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d’\u00e9tudes scientifiques et arch\u00e9ologiques de Draguignan 36
\n(1926-27): 3-218; Couthon, Correspondance; Pierre Dubreuil-Chambardel, Lettres parisiennes d’un
\nr\u00e9volutionnaire poitex\u00fbn. Marie-Luce Llorca. \u00e9d. (Tours, 1994); Jean-Baptiste-Annibal Aubert-Dubayet.
\n“Aubert-Dubayet. l\u00e9gislateur (1791-1792).” F. Vermale, ed., Bulletin de \u00a1Acad\u00e9mie delphinale, 6*” s\u00e9rie,
\n9-10 (1938-39): 115-41; D. Tempier. ed., “Correspondance des d\u00e9put\u00e9s des C\u00f4tes-du-Nord \u00e0
\nl’Assembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative” (written by five different deputies, although half were penned by Jean-Louis
\nBagot), Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 d’\u00e9mulation des C\u00f4tes-du-Nord, Bulletins et m\u00e9moires 28 (1890); 61-169; and ms. letters
\nof the Legislative deputies of Ille-et-Vilaine (six different deputies, although tvt’o\u2014Sylvain Codet and
\nFranco is-Alexandre Tardive au\u2014wrote well over half of them): Archives D\u00e9partementales de I’llle-etVilaine. L 294. On the use of deputy tetters as a source, see Tackett. Becoming a Revolutionary, 8-13.
\n\u2022”- The sample of Constituent deputies averaged 49.7 years of age in 1789, compared to 46.4 for the
\nbody as a whole; while the Legislative deputies averaged 38.6 compared to 38.4 for the whole. There
\nwere four lawyers, three judges, three wealthy farmers, two doctors, a bookseller, and a former military
\nofficer. Seven came from north of the Loire, seven from south of the Loire, residing in communities
\nthat included large towns (Lyons), medium-sized towns (Le Mans, Clermont-Ferrand [three],
\nGrenoble. Rennes, Saint-Brieuc. Mayenne, and Grasse), and small towns or villages (Gourdon.
\nLinselle, Bourgignon, and Avon). A total of five are known to have been Jacobins, four were probably
\nFeuillants, and five were apparently nonaligned. Two of the deputies (the Constituent deputy Gaultier
\nand the Legislative deputy Couthon) were major players in their assemblies, while most of the others
\nwere minor players or back-benchers. Note thai for the purpose of these statistics I have used only the
\ndeputies from Illc-et-Vilaine and C\u00f4tes-du-Nord who largely dominated their delegation’s correspondence: respectively. Codet and Bagot.
\n-” I have enumerated all occurrences of a stated belief in the existence of plots or conspiracies
\n(conspirations, complots, intrigues, conjurations, manoeuvres, cabales, trames, brigties., etc.). Overall, such
\nreferences occurred in 4 percent of the Constituent deputies’ letters and 14 percent of the Legislative
\ndeputies” letters. I have excluded those deputy reports of conspiracy beliefs held by others that are
\nrejected as unsubstantiated or of dubiou.s authenticity. An earlier overview of conspiracy interpretations in deputy correspondence was based on an impressionistic assessment of selected letters of the
\nConstituent deputies only: see Timothy Tackett, “The Constituent Assembly and the Terror,” in Keith
\nBaker, ed.. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political Culture, Vol. 4, The Terror
\n(Oxford, 1994), 46-49.<\/p>\n
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and the National Assembly. There is virtually no such language in deputy
\ncorrespondence during the major revolutionary developments from early May
\nthrough late June 1789. In their letters as in their speeches, most of the Third Estate
\ndeputies maintained a remarkably upbeat tone and conveyed their continued
\noptimism that they could rely on the support of the king. Significantly, in the
\ndebates over the problem of grain shortages, debates that began on June 19
\nimmediately after the creation of the National Assembly, the vast majority of the
\nspeakers gave no credence to the “famine plot persuasion.” While they recognized
\nthe existence of such fears among the popular classes, they took care to distinguish
\ntheir own enlightened position from the beliefs of “the multitude.” The unidentified
\nspeaker from Bordeaux who moved for the creation of a Subsistence Committee
\ncarefully specified that the shortage came from natural causes, not from the
\ndecisions and actions of individuals: “It would be senseless.” he announced, “to
\nattribute [the food shortage] to fraudulent hoarding by individuals.” “The hail
\nstorms and the miserable harvest [of 1788] are the sole causes.”** Indeed, the only
\nsubstantial evidence of a paranoid style in the early Estates General was among
\ncertain members of the clergy and nobility. Partly as a tactic for winning over
\nmoderate parish priests and noblemen to their position, bishops and conservative
\naristocrats accused the Third Estate of secretly intriguing to destroy both religion
\nand the nobility. The conservative clergy, in particular, relied on some of the themes
\ndeveloped by the Fr\u00e9ron-Barruel group before the revolution.’t^ yet, if a “Hegelian
\ndialectic” of ideas ever existed among the Third Estate deputies, pushing them
\ntoward an obsession with conspiracy, there is no evidence of its presence during the
\nfirst weeks of the revolution.
\nWhen a language of conspiracy did appear in the speeches and letters of the
\npatriot deputies, it arose not as “the figment of a frenzied preoccupation with
\npower”\u2014as Furet has proposed\u2014but from fears engendered by the very real plots
\nhatched among elements of the royal government in late June and early July. The
\nmassing of mercenary troops around Paris and Versailles and the dismissal of the
\nliberal minister Jacques Necker were part of an initially secret plan improvised by
\nthe king’s conservative advisers to disband or seize control of the National
\nAssembly by force.*^ Fran\u00e7ois-Ren\u00e9-Pierre M\u00e9nard de La Groye first mentioned
\nrumors of troop concentrations and “odious plots” on the last day of June, and
\nComte Honor\u00e9-Gabriel de Mirabeau made a dramatic warning to the Assembly one
\nweek later.’*^ But in most cases, it was only after the fall of the Bastille and in direct
\nreference to a royalist plan whose full extent could only be surmised\u2014and easily
\nexaggerated\u2014that the fear of conspiracy penetrated the correspondence of the
\ndeputies. Looking back on the previous days, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Gaultier de Biauzat
\nbelieved there had been an aristocratic plot for “the horrible assassination” of the
\ndeputies; and the Burgundy wine merchant Claude Gantheret reported the widely
\nheld conviction that the king’s emigrant brother Charles, Comte d’Artois, was
\n-‘\u2022’ AP, 8: 135-37. See also the report by Necker on July 4 and the bureau reports on July 6. il89:AP,
\n8: 183. 194-98. Compare, however, the speech by Barere:\/I\/*, 8: 137.
\n^^ Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 131-32, 135-36.
\n46 Pierre Caron, “La tentative de contrer\u00e9volution de juin-juillet 1789,” Revue d’histoire moderne 1
\n(1906-07): 5-34. 649-78.
\n*’^ M\u00e9nard, Correspondance, 55. Mirabeau’s speech was on July 8.<\/p>\n
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\norganizing a general invasion of the country and a new Saint-Bartholomew’s Day
\nMassacre.-‘\u00bb Plot theories continued rampant during the rural panic of the Great
\nFear in the summer of 1789. It was in the midst of the alarms at the end of July that
\nthe deputies created the revolution’s first surveillance committee, the Committee
\non Research. None of the speakers in the debate surrounding this creation doubted
\nthe existence of a counterrevolutionary plot earlier in the month. Terrified by an
\napparently simultaneous outbreak of rural violence everywhere in the c o u n t r y violence that would be confirmed by Georges Lefebvre as a series of chain-reaction
\npanies only in the twentieth century’^^\u2014many came to the conclusion that a giant
\nconspiracy must have created the Great Fear as well. “There can be no doubt,”
\nannounced Adrien Duport to the Assembly, “that plots are being organized against
\nthe state.” Even speakers on the moderate Monarchien right did not question the
\nreality of conspiracy, although they would have preferred to use regular judicial
\nprocedures to carry out an investigation.^^
\nOver the next two years, the fear of conspiracy never entirely disappeared from
\nthe Assembly. (See graph.) But, as attested by the deputies’ speeches and
\ncorrespondence, there were numerous ups and downs in the incidence of such fears,
\noften evolving in response to real and proven instances of counterrevolutionary
\nconspiracies\u2014such as the counterrevolutionary gathering of Catholic national
\nguardsmen at Jales in August 1790 or the conspiracy of Lyons in December of that
\nyear. Heightened suspicions were also generated by the major political and
\neconomic protest demonstration by women marching on Versailles in October
\n1789, which most deputies were at a loss to explain by anything other than a plot;
\nand by a confrontation between England and Spain that raised the possibility of
\nFrench involvement in a war\u2014a war for which the deputies felt desperately
\nunprepared, both militarily and psychologically. Other conspiracy accusations
\nappeared at intervals through the winter and spring of 1790-1791\u2014linked in part
\nto the growing barrage of threats from the emigrant leaders, whose real power and
\ninfluence was difficult to assess, and, above all, to the growing popular unrest
\ntoward the revolutionary transformation of the Catholic Church in the Civil
\nConstitution of the Clergy. AH such apprehensions were invariably intensified by
\nthe existence in the Assembly itself of a solid phalanx of reactionary deputies from
\nthe First and Second Estates, overtly opposed to the revolution and on occasion
\nsecretly militating to arouse the opposition of their constituencies.^’
\nNevertheiess, most deputies at the center and the moderate left of the Assembly
\nwere by no means continuously obsessed with conspiracies and were frequently
\nquite critical of the paranoid style\u2014especially after the panic atmosphere of the
\nsummer of 1789 had dissipated. Thus the debates on the massive peasant uprisings
\nin Quercy and Limousin during the winter of 1789-1790 were generally calm and
\n*\u00ab Gaultier, Correspondance, 2: 175; Ganiheret, private collection, July 26. Georges Lefebvre cites a
\nreport in early June of fears among the popular classes of a conspiracy of the clerg>- and the nobility.
\nBut widespread fears of an “aristocratic plot” seem to have arisen onJy in early July and. above all, after
\nthe fail of the Bastille: Lefebvre. Great Fear. 59-61. Compare the explosion of plot accusations
\nbeginning in July in newspapers and brochures: Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal
\nMetaphor in Revolutionary France, Charlotte Mandell, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 217-33.
\n*^ Lefebvre, Great Fear, pt. 3.
\n^”AP.S: 293-95.
\n*’ Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary^ 271.<\/p>\n
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\nanalytical. No references were made in the printed debates to plots by aristocrats
\nor foreign powers.” Most of the Constituent Assembly deputies whose correspondence I have examined were generally cautious in their reaction to conspiracy
\ntheories. Many were lawyers or magistrates by profession, well trained in the use of
\nevidence and wary of accusations without proof. They took pains in their account
\nof events to distinguish rumors of plots based on unverifiable hearsay from plots for
\nwhich they believed irrefutable confirmation existed. In the summer of 1791, for
\ninstance, the Brest magistrate Lau rent-Fran cois Legendre was careful to assess the
\nreal threat from the presence of foreigners in Paris, concluding that they were too
\nfew in number to represent any genuine danger, despite the contentions of certain
\njournalists.53 Individual deputies could be exceptionally lucid about the very idea of
\nconspiracies. In late 1790, Gaultier reflected on the recent predictions of conspiratorial insurrections that had never materialized: “I have never really placed any
\ncredence in them, and you have seen that [such beliefs] were totally unfounded , . .
\nNothing can more surely arouse fears among the common people than announcements that they are in danger.”54 “Such are the anxieties of nascent liberty,” wrote
\nAntoine Durand, “that we conceive enemies everywhere plotting against us, that we
\ngive ourselves over to imagination, whether to gratify our hopes or feed our
\nfears.”” In the winter of 1790, those deputies who continued to be obsessed with
\nconspiracies\u2014a relatively small number\u2014were viewed by their colleagues as
\ndistinctly marginal to the mainstream of Constituent Assembly thought. Such was
\nthe opinion of Adrien Duquesnoy toward Robespierre, for example, whose
\noratorical style\u2014with its persistent denunciation of hidden conspirators and
\nplots\u2014was portrayed as demagogic and a bit ridiculous.^**<\/p>\n
\u00cfF FOR MOST OF THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY, Conspiracy fears seem to have been only<\/p>\n
episodic, there was one faction that became much more closely linked to a paranoid
\nstyle: the radical Jacobins, those 200 or so deputies who remained in the club in the
\nspring of 1790 after a schism with the Society of 1789. The process by which this
\ngroup came to embrace conspiracy fears is not entirely clear. The Jacobins’ initial
\nmanifesto, written in February 1790 by the young radical from Dauphin\u00e9, Antoine
\nBarnave, spoke of the members’ duty of defending the constitution, but there was
\nno specific mention of plots and conspiracies.57 While conspiratorial concerns
\nappear occasionally in the fragmented early records of the club, they do not seem
\nto have become a dominant feature until late in the summer of 1790. A turning
\npoint may well have occurred in August-September 1790, in reaction to the bloody
\nrepression of soldiers in Nancy who had mutinied against their aristocratic officers,
\na repression led by the reactionary royalist general, Fran\u00e7ois-Claude-Amour, the
\nU: 652-58, 665-73, 676-82.
\n=-^ Laurent-Fran\u00e7ois Legendre, August 31, 1791, Archives Municipales de Brest, series D uncatalogued.
\n^ Gaultier de Biauzat. Biblioth\u00e8que Municipale de Clermont-Ferrand, ms. 788, December 23, 1790.
\n55 Durand to his cousin. May 23. 179\u00dc. Archives Municipales de Cahors.
\n5*^ Adrien-Cyprien Duquesnoy, Journal d’Adrien Duquesnoy, Robert de Cr\u00e8vecoeur ed 2 vols
\n(Paris, 1894), 1: 458-59; 2: 290, 301.
\n” See Aulard, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Jacobins, especially 1: xxviii-xxxiii {R\u00e8glement of the Jacobins).<\/p>\n
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marquis de Bouille. The Nanq\/ Affair aroused strong suspicions among both the
\nJacobins and lower-class Parisians that the marquis de Lafayette, who was Bouill\u00e9’s
\nbrother-in-law and who had vigorously urged the Constituent Assembly to support
\nthe repression in the name of military subordination, was duplicitous and not to be
\ntrusted.5\u00ab Fears of conspiracy among high officials continued in evidence through
\nthe fall, notably when the loyalty of several royal ministers came into question and
\nwhen an emigrant plot to launch a major insurrection in the southeast was
\nuncovered\u2014and then detailed for the members in a report from the Jacobins’
\naffiliate in Lyons. The intensity of the anxiety was revealed in late December, when
\nmany Jacobins came to believe that someone had planted a bomb in the basement
\nof their building and that the newly created Club Monarchique was plotting to kill
\nthem all as part of a generalized massacre.^^
\nTo some extent, the radical left’s obsession with conspiracies arose from a deeply
\nheld sentiment that their version of democratic egalitarianism was profoundly true
\nand right\u2014an ideological commitment that contrasted sharply with the pragmatism
\nof the majority of the patriot deputies. It was only one step further to the
\nassumption that all who disagreed with the Jacobins’ positions must of necessity be
\nfools, dupes, or conspirators. In this sense, the Jacobins’ paranoid style was linked
\nto the intensity of their convictions and not specifically to the tenets of Rousseau’s
\nphilosophy. But. in part, the conspiracy obsession was tied to the radical Jacobins’
\nidentification with the common people. Already, by the autumn of 1789\u2014at a time
\nwhen most deputies were reacting in horror and outrage to the violence of the
\nParisians\u2014many Jacobins were coming to idealize and glorify the urban masses as
\nrepresenting the true soul of the revolution and the embodiment of the democratic
\nvalues for which they had become the principal spokesmen. Had the Parisians not
\nalready come to the Assembly’s rescue on two separate occasions, through their
\ninsurrections of July and October The image of “the good people” rapidly became
\na leitmotif in the writings of many radicals. “Ah, the good people, the good French
\npeople,” wrote M\u00e9nard to his wife. “How much they have been slandered by those
\nwho said that liberty would never suit them.”””
\nIn their self-conscious identification with the lower classes, the radical Jacobins
\nwere all the more susceptible to the infiuence of urban popular culture and to the
\nlongstanding Parisian obsession with conspiracy. Such an infiuence could only have
\nbeen intensified by the influx of non-deputies into the Jacobin Club, including
\nsignificant contingents from the more popular Parisian “fraternal societies” and the
\nCordelier Club. The Cordeliers, in particular, were dominated by a group of
\njournalists\u2014such as Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins, Fran\u00e7ois Robert, and
\nJacques-Ren\u00e9 H\u00e9bert\u2014who specialized in newspapers addressed to the masses and
\nwho had rapidly assumed the perspectives and voice of their audience.’^’ In any case,
\n5\u00ab Aulard, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des lacohins, for example, 1: 283-86. 294. Some 40,000 Parisians were said to have
\ndemonstrated near the Assembly during the debates on the Nancy Affair; Legendre, letter of
\nSeptember 3, 1790.
\ni^ Aulard, Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Jacobins, 1: 324, 390, 422, 431, 437, 448.
\n\u2022^ M\u00e9nard, Correspondance, 246. See also Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary. 254-55.
\n^^ G\u00e9rard Walter, Histoire des Jacobins (Paris, 1946), 53-55; Albert Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers
\npendant la crise de Varennes (Paris, 1910), 8-9; Isabelle Bourdln, Les soci\u00e9t\u00e9s populaires \u00e0 Paris pendant
\nla R\u00e9volution (Paris, 1937), 53, 58, 155-57, 175-76, 199.<\/p>\n
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by 1791, the pursuit and denunciation of conspiracy had become part and parcel of
\nthe Jacobins’ political culture and rhetoric, a common characteristic in the speeches
\nand brochures emanating from members of the group. The first denunciations of
\nthe “Austrian Committee” seem to have appeared in the radical press in early
\n1791.62 js^i almost the same time, the Jacobins adopted a formal oath to be taken by
\nthe entire membership\u2014and by all new members as they were admitted\u2014”to
\ndenounce, even at the risk of our lives and our fortunes, all traitors of the
\nfatherland.””-^
\nFor the Constituent Assembly as a whole, the single most important event in
\nintensifying convictions of conspiracy was the king’s attempted escape from Paris
\nand his capture in the small town of Varennes in June 1791. All the deputies, indeed
\nall the political elites throughout the country, were profoundly shocked and shaken
\nby the experience. Once the deputies had found the monarch’s handwritten
\nstatement formally denouncing most of the revolutionary transformations and
\naffirming that his previous cooperation had been coerced and insincere, there could
\nbe no doubt that he had left of his own accord.^ As the Assembly’s various
\ninvestigative committees delved into the affair, interviewing dozens of witnesses
\nand reading confiscated documents in the royal household, it became patently clear
\nthat a comprehensive plot had been afoot for months, involving numerous
\nparticipants in Paris, in the army, and among the emigrants in Germany; entailing,
\nas well, a pattern of boldfaced deception and perjury on the part of the king\u2014who
\nhad sworn a solemn oath to uphold the constitution in July 1790 and vowed only a
\nfew weeks earlier that he backed the revolution and would do everything in his
\npower to promote it. In the revolutionary ethos, imbued with the ideals of
\ntransparency and authenticity, there was perhaps no greater sin than deceitfully to
\nswear false oaths, and this is precisely what Louis had done.^^ gy^n though a
\nhandful of political journalists, such as Marat and H\u00e9bert, had been prophesying
\nsuch a flight, the Constituent Assembly leadership had dismissed it as irresponsible
\nranting.’^’^ But now, all of these seemingly paranoid predictions had come true.
\nNever, since the revolution began, had there been more extensive and conclusive
\nproof of the reality of grand and coordinated conspiracy at the highest levels.
\nIn the end, the majority of the Constituent Assembly agreed to reinstate the
\nking\u2014despite the bitter opposition of the radical Jacobins\u2014and maintain the
\nconstitution, which the deputies had been drafting for over two years. Partly, it was
\n\u2022^2 Jack Richard Censer, Prehtde to Power: The Parisian Radical Pre.ss, 1789-1791 (Baltimore, 1976)<\/p>\n
96-97.<\/p>\n
” Walter, Histoire des Jacobins. 97-99; Aulard. Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des Jacobins, 2: 46S. This oath is not
\nmentioned In the R\u00e8glement of February 1790.
\n‘”* See, for example, the letters by Lepoutre. Correspondance, 487; and Gantheret. private collection,
\nJune 24, 1791. See also Jean Dreyfus. “Le manifeste royal du 20 juin 1791,”La R\u00e9volution fran\u00e7aise 54
\n(1908): 5-22.
\n\u00ab’ The conclusions here are based on an extensive reading of documents in the Archives Nationales,
\nD XXIX bis 35-38; and C 124-31. The king and queen had been discussing the possibility of flight since
\nthe fall of 1790. On the king’s self-conscious efforts to mislead and lull the revolutionaries into
\nthinking he supported their cause, see, for example. Axel Von Fersen to Baron de Breteuil, April 2,
\n1791, R. M. de Klinckowstrom, ed.. Le comte de Fersen et la cour de France, 2 vols. (Paris. 1877) 197-98.
\n^^ See, for example, Marc-Alexis Vadier\u2014a radical Jacobin and future member of the Committee of
\nGeneral Security\u2014to his constituency in the d\u00e9partement of Ari\u00e8ge, early June, Gaston Arnaud,
\nHistoire de la R\u00e9volution dans le d\u00e9partement de \u00a1’Ari\u00e8ge, 1789-1795 (Toulouse, 1904), 241.<\/p>\n
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a question of apprehension of the unknown and of the anarchy the patriot majority
\nfeared would result if they were to launch the nation at this late date into a regency
\nor a republican government; partly, it was a question of inertia and of the emotional
\ndifficulty in renouncing the time and effort they had already devoted to forging a
\nnew constitution. But the fear of conspiracy and distrust of the king would hang like
\na shadow over that constitution and over the new Legislative Assembly it created.<\/p>\n
of the second revolutionary assembly, the
\n“Legislative,” is less well known than that of the first.”^ Yet the evidence of the
\ndeputy correspondence suggests an inflationary expansion of the paranoid style
\namong its members from the earliest meetings of that body. The sampled letter
\nwriters referred to belief in plots and conspiracies nearly three times more
\nfrequently under the Legislative than under the Constituent Assembly.^\u00ab (See
\ngraph.) For the majority of the Constituent deputies\u2014the Jacobins being the
\nprincipal exception\u2014such fears had been largely episodic, linked for the most part
\nto the explanation of specific events. Now the existence of plots became a true
\nobsession, and not only for radical Jacobins like Georges Couthon but for
\nmoderates like Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe and for the spectrum of deputies with
\ndiverse political positions from the d\u00e9partement of C\u00f4tes-du-Nord.
\nNot only were there more mentions of conspiracy during the Legislative, but the
\nvery nature of the acts envisioned seemed to evolve. Under the Constituent,
\nvirtually all references in the correspondence had been to single plots or to a
\nmultiplicity of plots instigated by diffuse categories of perpetrators. Now the
\ndeputies were increasingly preoccupied with the “grand conspiracy,” wherein all
\nthreats were viewed as part of a monolithic master plan, directed from a single
\nsource\u2014which, depending on the version, might be the emigrant princes, a
\nparticular foreign government, or French “executive authority” itself. While there
\nhad been only one such reference in the correspondence of the sampled deputies
\nduring the twenty-nine months of the Constituent, there were close to twenty during
\nthe first ten months of the Legislative.
\nThe new character of the obsession was clearly in evidence in the Legislative
\nmotion of November 1791 creating a Surveillance Committee\u2014heir to the Constituent’s Committee on Research. While the corresponding motion in 1789 had
\nreferred to a plurality of conspiracies, the Legislative evoked the word in the
\nsingular. “We are surrounded by conspiracy,” proclaimed the deputy Claude Basire.
\n“Everywhere plots are being hatched, and we are brought continual denunciations
\nof specific incidents which can only be linked to the grand conspiracy whose
\nexistence no one here can doubt.”*^^ Indeed, it was probably only in the third year
\nof the revolution\u2014not at the beginning\u2014that a “frenzied” and to some extent
\nUNFORTUNATELY, THE INTERNAL HISTORY<\/p>\n
” The best study is Charles J. Mitchell, The French Legislative Assembly of J791 (Leiden, 1988).
\n\u00d68 There were 2.2 references per month in the letters of the Constituent deputies and 6.0 per month
\nin those of the Legislative deputies.
\n”^AP. 35: 361. Compare Lucas. “Denunciation,” 24. The new Surveillance Committee was formally
\ncreated on November 25, with ten of the first twelve members chosen from the left: AP, 35: 37\u00dc.<\/p>\n
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irrational obsession with ”grand conspiracy” took hold of substantial numbers of
\nthe political elite.
\nThe idea of a general conspiracy appeared frequently in the language of the
\nLegislative during its two most important debates in the fall of 1791: on the
\nproblems of the emigrant nobles and of the refractory clergy. The paranoid style
\nhad been virtually absent eight months earlier, when the Constituent had taken up
\nthe question of emigrants.\u2122 But now Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud announced that
\n“a wall of conspiracy has been formed around [the fatherland],'” that this was closely
\nlinked to “the internal uprisings which are tearing the d\u00e9partements apart,” and that
\nall was directed by a faction close to the king himself. Several days later, Maximin
\nIsnard proclaimed, “I fear that a volcano of conspiracy is about to explode and that
\nwe are being lulled to sleep [endormis] with a false sense of security.” Indeed, the
\nmetaphor of the “endormeurs,” those seeking to hide their nefarious plans through
\nthe pretense of patriotism, became a recurring theme in the rhetoric of the left. The
\nfinal decree formally declared that all emigrants were “under suspicion of conspiracy against the fatherland.”^’ Similar language was mobilized by certain deputies in
\ntbe debates on the refractory clergy. Thus, for the deputy Louis Fran\u00e7ois, all the
\nunrest emerging in the countryside “results from plots hatched secretly, and
\nsometimes even openly, by the greatest enemy of our Revolution, the non-juring
\npriests.””^^
\nThe “grand conspiracy” was also a major theme in the great debates that unrolled
\nin the Legislative Assembly between January and March 1792 over whether the
\nnation should go to war. Increasingly, fears were focused on the royal government
\nitself, viewed by the left as the mastermind of all the threats facing France at home
\nand abroad. Elie Guadet thundered against “this abominable plot” hatched by a
\nleague of enemies both inside and outside the country. Jacques Thuriot accused
\nmembers of the central government of simultaneously launching peasant insurrections, weakening the army, encouraging the export of gold, and inciting the
\nintervention of foreign powers: “We are betrayed by everyone!” And it was in this
\ncontext that Brissot first launched his accusations against the “Austrian Committee.””
\nWhile not all deputies agreed with Brissot’s analysis, the correspondence suggests
\nthat such views were increasingly accepted by a great many moderates as well as by
\nthe left. Indeed, March 1792, on the eve of the war, saw a greater intensity of
\nconspiracy fears than any other month during the first three years of the revolution.
\n(See graph.) Clearly, a paranoid style was coming to dominate much of the
\nAssembly’s rhetoric even before the actual declaration of war on April 20, at a time
\nwhen most deputies seemed optimistic that France could easily defeat any foreign
\narmies. The failures in the initial war effort and the eventual Prussian invasion
\nwould enormously intensify the conspiracy obsession, but the roots of that
\nobsession were already in place before the fighting had begun.
\n\u2122 AP, 23: 566-75. Only the radical Jacobin Prieur [de la Marne] had alluded to the conspiracy theme:
\nAP, 23: 569.
\n‘\u00bb AP, 34: 402-03, 541, 711-12. The bill was vetoed by Louis XVI.
\n‘2-4P. 35: 145.
\n‘ M P . 37: 412-13; and 39: 427. Brissot had suggested the existence of an “Austrian Committee” in
\nJanuary: see his newspaper, Patriote fran\u00e7ais, January 29, 1792.<\/p>\n
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The explanation of this phase change in the nature and intensity of the paranoid
\nstyle under the Legislative Assembly may be related in part to the composition of
\nthat body. The Constituent’s self-exclusionary rule, adopted in the spring of 1791,
\nhad created an entirely new legislative corps devoid of direct continuity with its
\npredecessor. The deputies of the second assembly of the revolution were not only
\na half generation younger than the Constituent deputies, but in far greater numbers
\nthey came from small towns and rural areas and from distinctly lower levels in the
\noccupational hierarchy of the middle class.^* It is at least plausible that some of the
\nLegislative deputies, arriving from more mediocre social positions and from smaller
\ncommunities, felt less social distance from the popular classes than had their
\npredecessors. Possibly, for that very reason, they were in closer contact with a
\npopular culture permeated with fears of plots and conspiracies and less touched by
\nthe rational skepticism of the Enlightenment.
\nIt also seems clear that a substantially greater proportion of the new deputies
\nself-consciously supported the radical left\u2014the faction that, as we have seen, was
\nthe most susceptible to the paranoid style. Based on erroneous figures\u2014figures
\nrepeated by several generations of historians\u2014it is usually argued that deputies
\nsupporting the position of the more moderate Feuillant Club held a decisive
\nmajority at the beginning of the Legislative. But recent research suggests that the
\nbalance between the two factions was close to parity. In October 1791, approximately 150 (20 percent) of the 767 deputies adhered to the Jacobins, while about
\n170 (22 percent) threw in their lot with the Feuillants.”^ At the end of the
\nConstituent, by contrast, only about 80 (7 percent) of the approximately 1,100
\ndeputies still sitting had linked themselves to the Jacobin fold, while 290 (26
\npercent) had adhered to the Feuillants.”^ As for their occupational backgrounds,
\nthe salient fact is that nearly 80 percent of the Legislative deputies had already held
\nelective administrative or judicial positions before 1791.^^ For over a year, they had
\nbeen on the front lines, as it were, in the frustrating efforts to implement the
\nConstituent’s policies toward refractory priests and emigrants in the provinces.
\nMany had exerted strong pressure on the Constituent\u2014to little avail\u2014for a harsher
\ncourse of action on the emigrants, and they had often bitterly opposed tbe edict of
\nMay 1791, which instituted a policy of toleration toward the refractory clergy.^\u00ab In
\n‘” See Timothy Tackett. “Les d\u00e9put\u00e9s de TAssembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative, 1791-1792,” in Pour \u00a1a R\u00e9volution
\nfran\u00e7aise: En hommage \u00e0 Claude Mazauric (Rouen. 1998), 139-44.
\n” Tackett “Les d\u00e9put\u00e9s de l’Assembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative.” 142-43. According to Gensonne, some 2\u00dc\u00dc
\ndeputies were attending the Jacobin Club by October 15: Goetz-Bernstein. La diplomatie, 46. Several
\ng\u00e9n\u00e9rations of historians have mistakenly credited the Feuillants with 264 deputies. On the early de
\nfacto polarization of the Legislative Assembly, see Charles J. Mitchell, “ToliticaJ Divisions within the
\nLegislative Assembly of 1791,” Erench Historical Studies 13 (1983-84): 356-89. See also the suggestions
\nin Fran\u00e7ois Furet, “Les Girondins et la guerre: Les d\u00e9buts de l’Assembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative, ‘ m Furet and
\nMona Ozouf, eds., Li\u00ef Gi>o\u00abi\/e e\/\/e5 G\u00edro\/i\u00ed\/(\u00edis (Paris, 1991), 191.
\n‘0 Figures based on an analysis of the newspaper Journal des d\u00e9bais de la Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 des am\u00a1s de la
\nConstitution s\u00e9ante aux Jacobins de Paris, July 17-September 30. 1791; and. for the Feuillants, on
\nAugustin Challamel, Les clubs contre-r\u00e9volutionnaires (Paris, 1895), 286-93. Since a large number of
\nconservatives ceased attending the sessions in the last months of the Constitutent, the proportion of
\nFeuillant deputies among those actually participating was even greater, probably a majority.
\n” Some 60 percent had been administrators and another 18 percent magistrates of various sorts:
\nTackett, “Les d\u00e9put\u00e9s de l’Assembl\u00e9e l\u00e9gislative,” 141.
\n^8 On the attitudes of administrators toward Constituent policies on emigrants, see the speech by the
\nJacobin Vernier in February 1791: AP, 23: 573. On the refractories, see Timothy Tackett, Religion,<\/p>\n
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this process, a great many had grown impatient and suspicious and were perhaps all
\nthe more tempted to see the opposition, which they were forced to confront daily,
\nin conspiratorial terms.
\nBut it would also be difficult to overestimate the impact of Louis XVI’s Flight to
\nVarennes on the attitudes of the elites both inside and outside the revolutionary
\nassemblies. Much has been written in recent years on the purported “desacralization” of the French kingship at the end of the Old RegimeJ^ That sometime
\nbetween the high Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century the religious
\naura of the kingship had faded in intensity is not to be questioned. Yet the
\nchronology of that transformation is far from clear, and much of the change may
\nwell have transpired even before the eighteenth century. Based on an analysis of the
\ncahiers de dol\u00e9ances of 1789, John Markoff has shown that few educated French on
\nthe eve of the revolution still thought the monarch had a divine right to absolute
\nrule. But those same cahiers also give evidence of a deep, emotive attachment to the
\nking by much of the population.**” Indeed, the myth of the kingship\u2014as oppo.sed to
\nthe reputation of individual kings\u2014was multivalent. For some among the popular
\nclasses, that myth may have remained partly ‘^religious'”\u2014and thus “sacral”\u2014in
\nnature. But it was also built on an array of secular legends and folklore, and
\nclassical and feudal traditions, as well as on the images of grandeur cultivated by the
\nseventeenth and eighteenth-century monarchs through their military prowess and
\nthe splendor of their palaces and court life.
\nThroughout the first two years of the revolution, most French inhabitants had
\npersisted in viewing the king with enormous affection and respect, whatever the
\nambiguities of the king’s constitutional status in the nation, whatever their doubts
\nabout the ministerial government surrounding him or the aristocratic social
\nstructure of which he was a part. Even in the midst of the turmoil and uncertainty
\ncaused by popular uprisings, religious schism, and threats of foreign intervention,
\nthe great majority continued to rely on the monarch as an anchor of .security, a vital
\ncenter of social and emotional stability. As recently as March of 1791, a minor
\nillness of Louis XVI’s had engendered a great outpouring of affection and concern
\nfor the monarch in letters addressed to the Constituent Assembly.**i
\nIn circumstances such as these, the king’s perceived betrayal in June had a
\nprofoundly destabilizing effect on the whole regime and was a powerful factor in
\nRevolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: Tlie Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791
\n(Princeton, N.J.. 1986). 275-82.
\n” See, for example, Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth
\nCentury (Baton Rouge, La., 1990); and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,
\nLydia Cochrane. trans. (Durham. N.C., 1991), chap. 6.
\n\u00ab” John Markoff, “Images of the King at the Beginning of the Revolution,” in Gilbert Shapiro and
\nJohn Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Dol\u00e9ances of 1789
\n(Stanford, Calif., 1997), 369-76.
\n“‘ Spontaneous Te Deum services u-ere held throughout the kingdom to give thanks for the king’s
\nrecovery: see, for example. Archives Nationales, C 124-31: Marie de Roux. La r\u00e9volution \u00e0 Poitiers et
\ndans la Vienne (Paris, 1910), 442-43; Eug\u00e8ne Dubois. Histoire de la R\u00e9volution dans \u00a1Ain: Tome I. La
\nConstituante (1789-1791) (Bourg-en-Bresse. 1931), 330; Marcel Bruneau. Les d\u00e9buts de la R\u00e9volution
\ndans les d\u00e9partements du Cher et de l’Indre (Paris. 1902). 164; Arnaud. Histoire de la R\u00e9volution dans le
\nd\u00e9partement de l’Ari\u00e8ge, 241. Even the principal radical newspapers had continued a positive\u2014or at
\nleast noncommittal\u2014treatment of the king, through the early months of 1791 ; Censer. Prelude to Power
\n112-15.<\/p>\n
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promoting fears of conspiracy emanating from the “executive authority” in the
\nspring and summer of 1792.” This core of mistrust was visible even among many
\nmoderates of the Legislative as they took their seats in October 1791. In letters to
\nhis constituents, Rabusson-Lamothe announced his hope that Louis had resigned
\nhimself to follow the constitution and that the king’s self-interest would triumph
\nover the “‘prejudices of his birth and education.” But he also understood that many
\nof his colleagues in the Assembly displayed “a defiance [toward the king], justified
\nby the example of the past.”\u00ab-‘ More than any other single event, the Flight to
\nVarennes had shaken the French to the roots of their being and produced a loss of
\ntrust, a loss that rendered the various conspiracy theories altogether possible and
\nbelievable.<\/p>\n
an understanding of the conspiracy obsession among revolutionary
\nelites entails several layers of explanation. It is likely that in any given population
\na certain number of individuals are prone to view the world in conspiratorial term^
\nand this was true of some of the deputies as they arrived to take their posts in
\nVersailles or Paris. Yet at the end of the Old Regime, the “paranoid style” was
\nprobably much less in evidence among the educated classes in France than in
\nEngland and North America. Despite the contention of several recent historians,
\nthe great majority of the deputies almost certainly did not share such an outlook
\nduring the early weeks of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the evidence
\nis conclusive that conspiracy fears had become widespread among the political
\nelites by the fall of 1791, well before the coming of the war and the threats of
\ninvasion, thus invalidating the explanation proposed by an older generation of
\nhistorians.
\nIt is the contention here that the evolution toward an obsession with plots
\ndeveloped among the elites in the course of the revolution itself. In this process, the
\nlogic of ideas cannot be entirely excluded. There can be no doubt that the language
\nof the philosophes was more in evidence in the deputies’ discourse in 1791 and 1792
\nthan it had been in 1789. But if anything, these transformations in ideas and
\nlanguage came after the fact, as it were, through a growing awareness of the
\nrelevance and applicability of such ideas to the transforming political situation.’*^ Of
\nfar greater significance was the deputies’ confrontation with a series of very real
\nconspiracies and threatened conspiracies, from the attempted ministerial and
\nmilitary counterrevolution of July 1789 through the elaborate attempt to separate
\nthe king from the revolution in the summer of 1791. The fears engendered by these
\nexperiences were further intensified, as we have seen, through the influence of the
\nmore pervasive paranoid perspectives of the lower classes. It was probably the
\nradical Jacobins who first came self-consciously to link themselves to the Parisian
\nmasses, but this infiuence gradually spread to the moderate deputies as well,
\nIN CONCLUSION,<\/p>\n
82 On the psychological impact of Varennes. see notably Paolo Viola, \/\/ trono vuoto: La transizione
\ndelta sovranit\u00e0 nella rivoluzione francese (Turin, 1989).
\n^ Rabusson-Lamothe. “Lettres,” 231, 264.
\n8* Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 64-65, 110-13, 182, 19P. 308-09.<\/p>\n
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW<\/p>\n
2000<\/p>\n
Timothy Tackett
\nperhaps particularly to those of more modest rural and small-town origins who sat
\nin the Legislative Assembly,
\nThe impact of real instances of plots and the influence of popular fears\u2014
\nmediated through the particular political culture of the Jacobins\u2014go far to explain
\nthe conspiratorial fears of the political elites in the early years of the revolution. But
\ncan such factors alone explain the inflationary expansion of the paranoid style, the
\nquasi-irrational obsession with the grand, omnipotent conspiracy so prevalent after
\nthe summer of 1791 Here, one might suggest, another level of analysis needs to be
\nconsidered, an analysis that may also help us go beyond the contingent events of
\none revolution and explore the revolutionary process in a broader perspective. One
\nof the most pervasive themes in the letters and diaries and in many contemporary
\naccounts was the general breakdown of order and certainty. The rapidly spreading
\nanarchy, the unpredictability of events, more impressive than anything previously
\nencountered in the lifetime of those experiencing the revolution, seemed quite to
\ndefy explanation through the Enlightened analytical apparatus at the revolutionaries’ disposai.
\nIn this respect, it is interesting to note\u2014if only in the guise of a heuristic
\napproach\u2014the curious parallels between clinical descriptions of paranoia in
\nindividuals and the collective paranoid style increasingly visible in a time of
\nrevolution. As some psychologists would describe it, individual paranoia is often
\ncharacterized not only by a deep mistrust of others but by a mistrust of oneself: a
\nweak and unstable sense of autonomy and an exceptionally frail sense of identity.^s
\nOne might speculate that all revolutionary processes, by their very nature, tend to
\nintensify similar sentiments within society as a whole. There can be no doubt that
\nthe most sweeping revolutions\u2014the English, the Russian, the Chinese, as well as
\nthe French\u2014commonly set in motion a progressive reexamination of all values,
\nputting into question society’s sense of collective identity.
\nThis effort to follow the development of revolutionary psychology in France
\nsuggests that, for many elites, the transformation was not a sudden paradigmatic
\nshift, where one worldview or ideology was abruptly replaced by another, but was
\na slow, halting, and painful process.**” It was a liminal experience, par excellence,
\nenormously unsettling and destabilizing, which left many individuals\u2014to paraphrase Matthew Arnold\u2014wandering between two worlds, the one dying, the other
\nstruggling to be horn. Even the rigid, swaggering self-confidence, project ( help with nursing paper writing from experts with MSN & DNP degrees)ed in the
\n^^ See, notably, Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens
\nand Modern America {New York. 1991), 4-23; and David Shapiro. Neurotic Stytes (New York, I%5),
\n55-88. For more traditional Freudian approaches\u2014which I have found little useful for the present
\nstudy\u2014see Yehuda Fried and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis (Boston, 1976); and John
\nFarrell. Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modem Suspicion (New York, 1996). For social
\npsychological approaches to conspiracy interpretations, see Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici,
\neds,. Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York, 1987).
\n\u00bb” Compare Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change, 2d edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1982). Much of the
\nrecent theorizing about revolutions has focused on the initial breakdown\u2014particularly in structural
\nterms\u2014of the various “Old Regimes” and has had little to say about the process of those revolutions
\nonce they had begun. See, for example, Nikki Keddie, ed.. Debating Revolutions (New York. 1995); and
\nJohn Foran, ed.. Theorizing Revolutions (London. 1996). The comparative study of the revolutionary
\nprocess by Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
\n(Princeton. N.J.. 2000), appeared too late to be integrated into this article. Among other themes, Mayer
\nstresses the dialectical interaction between revolution and counterrevolution in the emergence of
\nrevolutionary violence and conspiracy fears.<\/p>\n
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Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution<\/p>\n
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public pronouncements of many revolutionaries, was often as much bluff and pose
\nas true self-assurance. The personal correspondence of many such individuals was
\npervaded by “the anxieties of nascent liberty,” as Durand had described it, with an
\noscillation of moods between hope and fear, with a sentiment of being swept along
\nby circumstances over which one had little or no control.
\nIt was precisely in the context of sentiments such as these that the king’s desertion
\nand betrayal in 1791 had such a traumatic effect, leaving many with the feeling of
\nbeing cast adrift. With all the bonds of Old Regime society and culture progressively overthrown, there was an increasing fluidity of identity, a growing uncertainty
\nas to who one was, what one could rely on, and whom one could trust. The
\nambiguity of one’s own collective identity reverberated in uncertainty and mistrust
\nof others\u2014especially those others perceived as outsiders or potential outsiders to
\nthe revolutionary community.
\nOnly a carefully conceived comparative study could adequately test the validity
\nfor other revolutions of the final hypothesis proposed above. But it seems clear, in
\nthe case of the French experience, that the phase change in late 1791 to a
\nquasi-permanent obsession with grand conspiracy exerted a profound effect on the
\norigins of a Terror mentality among political elites in the spring and summer of
\n1792. Indeed, by corollary, one might argue that the very term “Terror” should be
\nascribed a more complex meaning than that usually given it by historians. It should
\nsignify not only the judicial apparatus assembled to intimidate and punish the
\nperceived enemies of the revolution but also the near panic state of fear and
\nsuspicion experienced during the period by the revolutionaries themselves.<\/p>\n
Timothy Tackett is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
\nAmong his previous publications are Prie.st and Parish in Eighteenth-Cetiiury
\nFrance {1977), Religion, Revohitiorj, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century
\nFrance: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (1986, and in French translation), and
\nBecoming a Revolutionary: 77ie Deputies of the French National Assembly and the
\nEmergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1996, and in French and Italian
\ntranslations). His books and articles have been the recipients of five national
\nprizes, including the Leo Gershoy Award from the AHA in 1998 {\u00cdOT Becoming
\na Revolutionary). He is currently working on two project ( help with nursing paper writing from experts with MSN & DNP degrees)s: a book about Louis
\nXVI’s attempted flight from Paris in 1791 and its impact on the French, and a
\nlarger study of the origins of a political culture of violence among the elites
\nduring the French Revolution.<\/p>\n
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW<\/p>\n
JUNE 2000<\/p>\n
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