LUlUSTOCRATlE

LUlUSTOCRATlE lle mille a "The Aristocracy Unmasked. Beware of its caresses, its thousand arms are ready to strike" {ca. 1791-1792 (anonymous, courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). The theme of conspiracy and counterrevolution, hiding behind a reassuring mask, appeared widely in French revolutionary rhetoric. Here, the Janus-like depiction of the aristocratic woman and the priest, bound together by a serpent, is particularly intriguing, prefiguring a common motif in nineteenth-century France. Note the cloven hoof and the claw, only partly hidden by the clergyman's cassock and the woman's gown. Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789-1792 TIMOTHY TACKETT O N THE MORNING OF MAY 23, 1792, in the third year of the French Revolution, Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Armand Gensonné climbed to the rostrum to address the National Assembly. In successive speeches, the two deputies revealed the existence of a terrifying plot to destroy the Assembly and the revolution itself. The whole was masterminded by the "Machiavellian" Austrian minister, Prince Wenzel Von Kaunitz, but it was coordinated in France by a shadowy "Austrian Committee" of the king's closest advisers, and it was said to be responsible for almost all the ills besetting the new French regime: the disappointing results of the recently declared war, the counterrevolutionary movements in the countryside, and even the divisions within the Assembly itself. Brissot recognized that there was very little concrete proof of this plot. But it was the essence of conspiracies to be secret and impenetrable: "they leave no written records." The plotters had hidden their heinous activities behind a mask of pro-revolutionary pronouncements, and if one waited to uncover "legal proof" it might be too late. For the most part, one could only rely on a kind of deductive logic based on signs, unusual coincidences, and rumor.' To what extent this "Austrian Committee" ever existed is difficult to know. Brissot was not above demagoguery, and in the previous months he had proposed several different and sometimes contradictory conspiracy theories.- But whatever An earlier version of this article was read at the Center for History, Society, and Culture at the University of California, Davis. May I express my appreciation to William Hagen, the former director of the center, as well as to Helen Chenut. Philip Dawson, Jon Jacobson, Thomas Kaiser, John Markoff, Darrin McMahon, Peter McPhee. Kenneth Pomeranz. Donald Sutherland, and the members of the Baltimore-Washington Old Regime Group for their assistance in the development of this article. ' See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à ¡860, recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises: Première .série (¡787-1799), Jérôme Mavidal. et al., eds., 99 vols. (Paris, 1867-1995), 44: 33-43 (hereafter,^/*). See also Michael Hochedlinger, ""La cause de tous les maux de la France': Die 'Austrophobie' im revolutionären Frankreich und der Sturz des Königstums, 1789-1792," Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 24, no. 2 (1997): 73-120; and Thomas E. Kaiser, "Who's Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Ausirophobia. and the Queen," French History, forthcoming. - The accusations were also well timed to divert attention from the "Brissotins," who controlled the ministry and who had led the nation into its frustrating war situation. See especially H. A. Goetz-Bernstein. La diplomatie de ¡a Gironde: Jacques-Pierre Brissot (Paris. 1912), 49, 57-58, 74-79. Pierre-Vicior Malouet and A. F. Bertrand de Moleville. two supposed participants in the "Committee," both avowed that it never existed: Antoine-François Bertrand de Moleville, Histoire de ¡a Révolution de France pendant les dernières années du règne de Louis XVl, 10 vols. (Paris, 18Ü1-02), 8: 8-9, 36-37. Goetz-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. 691 692 Timothy Tackelt the reality of the "grand conspiracy" set out by Brissot and Gensonné, it is clear that a Iarge number of their fellow deputies believed it was real. There was a long stunned silence after the two men had spoken. Individual members soon wrote home of the fear and uncertainty generated by the speeches,-^ A few days later, as the representatives continued to debate the accusations, a veritable panic swept through the hall. Word spread rapidly that a plot was about to break to spirit away the king and destroy the Assembly. The deputies went into permanent session, and Paris itself was placed on a war footing, patrolled continually, and illuminated throughout the night. The ultra-radical sans-culotte women and men, armed with pikes and "diverse aggressive instruments," were allowed to parade through the Assembly's hall, beating drums and singing revolutionary songs." Indeed, a consuming fear of the presence of conspiracy, of a small group of perpetrators or even a single master conspirator, willfully seeking to destroy the revolution and the revolutionaries through secret action, beset much of France's political elite between the spring of 1792 and the summer of 1794. During this period, over 90 percent of judicially ordered executions were against individuals accused of various forms of sedition or collusion with enemies of the republic,-'^ An obsession with plots was clearly part and parcel of the politicai culture of the Reign of Terror. The conspiracy fears of the French Revolution are all the more fascinating in that similar reactions have been associated with other revolutionary episodes in world history, Thucydides' grim description of the Hellenic world during the Peioponnesian War is well known: "When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further,.. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one."^ In the period of the American Revolution, as Bernard Bailyn persuasively demonstrated, large numbers of colonists were convinced that the British government or its ministers were engaged in a vast, secret and concerted conspiracy to pervert their libertyJ So, too, the Russians after 1917 experienced waves of conspiracy fears at various moments, from the Bolshevik seizure of power through the Stalinist dictatorship. After the attempted assassination of V, Ï. Lenin in August 1918, Soviet newspapers and government proclamations abounded in revelations of "endless plots perpetrated by counterrevolutionaries and Right Socialist revolutionaries," and of the "huge conspiracy" of the Allied powers and a continually shifting cohort of political and class enemies.** During the Stalinist -' See, for example, the letters of Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe, "Lettres sur l'Assemblée législative," Francisque Mège, ed.. Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand 11 (1869): 346-47,349-50; of Sylvain Codet: Archives départementales de l'IUe-et-Vilaine, L 294 (2), May 30 (written "April 30" by error); of Georges Couthon, Correspondance de Georges Couthon, Francisque Mège, ed. (Paris, 1872), 143. 146-47; and of Blaise Cavellier and Romain-Nicolas Malassis: Archives Communales de Brest, Series D, uncatalogued. May 26. ^AP.44: 189-96,274. •^ Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 81. Compare Mona Ozouf, "'Jacobins': Fortune et infortune d'un mot," in L'école de ¡a France: Essais sur ia Révolution, l'utopie et l'enseignement (Paris, 1984), 82. *• Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett. trans., 2d edn., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), 1: 242. ^ Bernard A. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chaps. 3-4. «William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, ¡9I7-¡92¡, 2 vols. (New York, 1935). 2: AMERICAN HtSTORtCAL REVtEw JUNE 2000 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution 693 purges, plot theories were itivoked both by those ordering arrests and by those who were arrested and who struggled to understand the reason for such unjust accusations.'' The Cultural Revolution in China seems also to have arisen in part from Mao Zedong's suspicions of threats to his power, and the movement soon engendered widespread fears of insidious "bourgeois reactionaries" and foreign enemies plotting to sabotage the revolution and perhaps to launch a white terror. As the Cultural Revolution waned, all the evils of that chaotic episode were attributed to the nefarious Gang of Four conspiring for their own hold on power.'" A cotnparative study of conspiracy obsessions in these various revolutions would be extremely difficult in the present state of our knowledge. It would require a thorough examination of the nature and extent of conspiracy beliefs in the vastly different cultural and political contexts of the countries involved. It would also require an evaluation of the presence or absence of real conspiracies and of the possible promotion of such fears by manipulative leaders. But it seems clear that in a time of revolution substantial numbers of people commonly come to believe in the reality of great webs of secret concerted action perpetrated by small groups of conspirators, threatening their lives and their political goals. It also seems clear that in the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, obsessive fears of this kind led directly to the deaths of many thousands of people. It would thus seem appropriate to explore more carefully the themes and variations of conspiracy obsessions in one of those revolutions. In most of the older historical treatments of the French Revolution, the preoccupation with plots was little emphasized and was often ignored altogether. If mentioned at all, it was usually attributed to the panic fears of the Parisian masses, to the activities of real enemy agents, and above all to the war that pitted France against most of Europe in a life or death struggle to preserve the ideals of 1789.'' But the recent interest in the language of the revolution has brought the whole issue to the fore. Several authors have argued that this peculiar habit of tjiought was 66-69, 77-78, 344; also Orlando Figes,.4 People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London, 1996), 629. 642. ^ F. Beck and W. Godin, The Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (New York, 1951), esp. 221-25; also Sheila Fitzpatrick. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in E.Ktraoräinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 190-217. Reiterated accusations of foreign conspiracy' were also voiced in the Soviet Union during the great war scare of 1927: Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 216-24, 264-67. '" Tai Sung An, Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution (Indianapolis, 1972), 1-4; Thomas W. Robinson, ed.. The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley. Calif., 1971). esp. 51. 95-96. It may be, however, that in the Chinese Cultural Revolution opposition was perceived to arise less from plots and conspiracies than from class and the class struggle in general: see, for example. Hong Yung Lee, Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study (Berkeley, 1978), 41-63. ' ' For example, Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la Révolution française^ 5th edn. (Paris, 1913), esp. 357-66; Albert Maihiez. La Révolution française. 3 vols. (Paris, 1922), 3: chap. S; Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1962-64), 2: 64-76. Crane Brinton never mentions the issue in either The Jacobins (New York, 1930) or The Anatomy of Revolution, rev. edn. (New York, 1952). Robert R. Palmer is more probing, but he devotes only a paragraph to the question: Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, N.J.. 1941), 64. Among nineteenth-century historians, see especially Edgar Quinet, La révolution. 2 vols. (Paris, 1865), 1: 187-89. The only book I have found entirely devoted to the issue is Jacques Duhamel, Essai du rôle des éléments paranoïaques dans la genèse des idées révolutionnaires (Paris. 1929), but it is poorly documented and disappointing. On the related question of denunciations, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds.. Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modem European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago, 1996). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2000 694 Timothy Tackett fundamental not only to the uneducated masses but to the revolutionary elites as well, and that it characterized the mentality and discourse of the leadership from the onset of events. In a particularly influential book, François Furet argued that "the idea of plot in revolutionary ideology . . . was truly a central and polymorphous notion that served as a reference point for organizing and interpreting action. It was the notion that mobilized men's convictions and beliefs, and made it possible at every point to elaborate an interpretation and justification of what had happened."^-^ Lynn Hunt has asserted much the same position: "the obsession with conspiracy became the centrai organizing principle of French revolutionary rhetoric. The narrative of Revolution was dominated by plots."'^ Moreover, for both of these historians, the conspiratorial mode of explanation was linked to the political culture of the French elites on the eve of the revolution. Furet laid particular stress on the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of popular sovereignty as elucidated in The Social Contract (1762). It was the revolutionaries' belief in a single, indivisible "general will" that led them to conclude that all opposition or dissent was criminal and "counterrevolutionary," and that brought them to stipulate the existence of conspiracy—for what other explanation could there be for popular opposition to the "general will"? In this sense, the revolutionaries were following a kind of "Hegelian dialectic"; they "invented a single, indivisible, pervasive enemy and imagined a death struggle with this opposite, whose supposed power and coherence vastly exaggerated the tangible evidence."^* For in Furet's view, the plots were largely illusory, "the figment of a frenzied preoccupation with power."'^ Hunt's interpretation was more complex. Comparing the French situation to that in eighteenth-century England and the nascent United States, she stressed a French lack of familiarity with "politics" before the revolution, as well as the absence of "sacred texts"—like the American Constitution—on which to rely. But she also placed a considerable emphasis on the force of ideas: on a Rousseauist preoccupation with the general will and with transparency and authenticity, all of which seemed to make any kind of factional politics "synonymous with conspiracy.""' The suggestions of Furet and Hunt are intriguing and provocative. They are also self-consciously speculative and subsidiary to the broader interpretations of revolutionary culture developed by these authors. But when in fact did this peculiar obsession begin, how did it evolve over time, and how important to its inception was the dialectic of ideas? Can the revolutionaries themselves give us any indication of 1^ François Furet, Interpreting the Erench Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 53. See also Furet's article "The Terror," in Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the Erench Revolution, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 137-38. 1' Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the Erench Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 39. '•* Colin Lucas, "The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution," in Fitzpatrick and Gellately, Accusatory Practices, 23. Lucas characterizes Furet's point of view, without subscribing to it himself. •' Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 54. "• Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 39-44. Among other historians supporting positions similar to those of Furet and Hunt, see Ozouf, '"Jacobin,"" 82; Norman Hampson, Prelude to Terror: The Constituent Assembly and the Eailure of Consensus (Oxford, 1988). 61-62; G. T. Cubitt, '"Denouncing Conspiracy in the French Revolution," Renaissance and Modern Studies 33 (1989); 145-46; Lucien Jaume, Le discottrs Jacobin et la démocratie (Paris, 1989), esp. part 2. chap. 2; and Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the Erench Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 241-47. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2000 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution 695 the birth of this particular turn of mind? The present essay seeks to explore empirically the origins and development of the conspiracy obsession during the early years of the French Revolution and thus to offer possible points of reference for future comparative studies of other revolutions. It will focus, in particular, on the psychology of conspiratorial fears among the French revolutionary elites, as a complement to the better known history of such fears among the popular classes.''' After a rapid overview of conspiracy beliefs before 1789, it will examine the inception and evolution of such beliefs through the "First Terror" of the summer of 1792 for a key leadership group: the deputies of the Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies."* W E NOW KNOW THAT in the early modern era conspiratorial beliefs were by no means confined to revolutionary periods alone, in a remarkable article written in 1982, Gordon Wood applied the concept of a "paranoid style of politics"—first developed by Richard Hofstadter for nineteenth and twentieth-century America—to the general "Anglo-American world" during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1^ Throughout this region, according to Wood, "conspiratorial interpretations . . . became a major means by which educated men in the early modern period ordered and gave meaning to their political world." "Everywhere people sensed designs within designs, cabals within cabals," assuming the existence of "a world of autonomous, freely acting individuals who were capable of directly and deliberately bringing about events through their decisions and actions." Indeed, "there was scarcely a major figure who did not tend to explain political events in these terms."2o Wood made very little attempt to apply his interpretation to the European continent. But a preliminary investigation of the French case would suggest that in the eighteenth century there were both similarities and differences. Among the masses of the common people in France, historians have found ample evidence of a susceptibility to conspiracy interpretations. Steven Kaplan has documented a pervasive popular belief in "famine plots," which "was built into the structure of the collective mentality" and in which a wide assortment of villains—depending on circumstances—were thought to conspire to starve the population.^^ Ariette Farge ^•^ See esp. Georges Lefebvre. 77ie Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, Joan White, trans. (New York. 1973); George Rude. The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, t959); and Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, Remy Inglis Hall, trans. (Garden City, N.Y., 1972). '^ For an overview of the "First Terror," which includes the August 10 storming of the Tuileries Palace and the Septetnber Massacres, see Georges Lefebvre: La Révoltttion française: La première terreur (Paris, 1952). '^ Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser.. 39 (1982): 401-41; Richard Hofstadter, Tlie Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 1965), 3-40. See also Bailyn, Ideological Origins, chaps. 3-4; and David Brion Davis, ed.. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca. N.Y., 1971). ^" Wood. "Conspiracy," 407. 409, 411. Wood also links the "paranoid style" to the wide assutnption among Anglo-American elites of deceit and dissembling within political circles. -1 Steven L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1982), 1-2, 62. Kaplan argues that certain elements of the educated elites might also adhere to the "famine plot persuasion." AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVÍEW JUNE 2000 696 Timothy Tacken and Jacques Revel have revealed the vulnerability of the Parisian popular classes to plot explanations in the mid-eighteenth century, when thousands could accept rumors that royal officials were abducting local children. The power of popular conspiratorial fears on the eve of the revolution has been explored by Georges Lefebvre in his pioneering study of the Great Fear.— In a world where the undisclosed actions of royal, seigneurial, and ecclesiastical authorities so dominated the lives of the common people, such fears were not necessarily irrational. In fact, throughout much of history, the pervasive explanatory model for understanding events assumed the willed interventions of individual beings, sometimes human, more commonly supernatural—whether gods, saints, demons, or the diverse supernatural beings of popular folklore. The only viable alternative model, one based on chaos or blind chance, probably struck most people as singularly frightening and unacceptable. At other times and in other situations, Jews and Protestants and witches in league with the devil have been invoked to explain various kinds of evil done to individuals, their families, and their communities.-^ In certain situations, some members of the French educated eûtes might also subscribe to plot interpretations. A search for the word "conspiracy" in a broad sample of works published between 1700 and 1789—and available for analysis through the ARTFL database^-*—reveals a handful of writers who believed in the existence of various contemporary conspiracies.-'' In the early and mid-eighteenth century, the most important accusations of this kind were leveled at the Society of Jesus. Voltaire, in particular, long portrayed the Jesuits as the embodiment of the power-grubbing clergy who were such an anathema to the writers of the Enlightenment—an image eagerly reinforced by certain Jansenist authors.-^ But with the suppression of the Jesuits in France in the mid-1760s, such accusations abruptly disappeared. At the end of the Old Regime, the most vigorous conspiratorial allegations were registered by the ex-Jesuit abbé Augustin Barruel in a work implicitly linking the demise of his former order to a plot of the philosophes.^"^ Barruel joined forces with the journalist Elie Fréron and the abbé Thomas-Marie Royou in X\Q Année littéraire., a review that relentlessly indicted the philosophes, the Freemasons, and the Protestants for secretly plotting the destruction of both " Ariette Farge and Jacques Revel, Tfie Vanishing Children of Paris, Claudia Mieville. trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. chap. 4; Lefebvre, Great Fear, esp. part 2. " See, for example, Jean Delumeau, La peur en Occident, XiV^-XVlII^ siècles: Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978); and René Girard, Tlie Scapegoat, Yvonne Freccero, trans. (Baltimore, 1986). ^* "American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language" (ARTFL), a database housed at the University of Chicago and accessible through the World Wide Web: http://humanities. uchicago.edu/ARTFL/. The sample contained 434 works published during this period. The analysis is based on the occurrence of ihe word conspiration (singular or plural). The word appeared 258 times, in about one in seven (62) of the sample works, written by 37 different authors. ^^ Thirteen of the 258 occurrences appeared lo entail a belief in the existence of contemporary conspiracies. These were used in the texts of five different authors. One of the latter was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed his conviction that there was a general conspiracy of philosophes aligned against him personally. ^'' Voltaire, Essai sur l'histoire générale (Geneva, 1756), 143, 337; E. J. F. Barbier, Chronique de la Régence, Tome 7(1761; Paris, 1866),410. In 1757, the Jansenist and Gallican press even insinuated that the Jesuits had supported Robert-François Damiens' assassination attempt against Louis XV: Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime. 1750-1770 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 65-80. See also Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in NineteenthCentury France (Gxford, 1993).' ^^ Augustin Barruel, Les Helviennes, ou Lettres provinciales philosophiques (Amsterdam, 1781). AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2000 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution 697 religion and the monarchy. Such writings directly prefigured the conservative interpretation of the revolution developed in Royou's newspaper L'ami du roi and in Barruel's later conspiratorial "history" of Jacobinism.^» Yet beliefs of this kind would seem to have been the exception among eighteenth-century French writers. The vast majority of authors searched in the ARTFL database never used the word "conspiracy" at all, and those who did referred primarily to events in the historical past.^^ There were accounts of plots and intrigues from Greek and Roman history—with the inevitable stories of the Roman politicians Catiline and Brutus—as well as from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Wars of Religion. Episodes specific to French history were also mentioned: the Conspiracy of Amboise in 1560, the Saint-Bartholomew's Day massacre of Huguenots in 1572, and the marquis de Cinq-Mars' conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu in 1642 were among the most common. Clearly, the fact of past conspiracies persisted in the collective memory of French educated elites.^« Yet very few imagined—or at least wrote about—such machinations in their own day and age. Motitesquieu even specifically announced that conspiracies were far more unlikely in his contemporary world than in Greek and Roman times, a reality he attributed to the wide distribution of information through newspapers, journals, and the public mail system.^' Indeed, by the later eighteenth century, new explanatory models for the analysis of political and economic events were becoming available to the educated classes, models that did not require the willed maneuvering of individuals. Mechanistic explanations of the world, born of Cartesian rationalism and the new astronomical interpretations based on scientific laws and natural causes—as popularized by Voltaire and others—had a profound impact not only on the elites' religious views but on their general understanding of causation as well. Applying such perspectives to human affairs, eighteenth-century French thinkers made important advances in identifying more abstract political and economic processes at work in the world. Such was the case with Montesquieu's analysis of political processes in the "spirit of the laws," for example, or with the physiocrats' examination of the general circulation of wealth and the laws of market forces—anticipating Adam Smith's "hidden hand." Such also, in a sense, was Rousseau's concept of the "general will," predicated on the existence of a collective community of interest active in i^^ 2» Amos Hofman, "The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy," French History 2 (1988): 152-72. See also J. M. Roberts. The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), 140-41; Darrin 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 Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme. 4 vols. (London, 1797-98). 2" A total of 182 (71 percent) of the 258 occurrences referred to the historical past. In most of the remaining cases, the word was used metaphorically or in a literary context—as in the plots of plays or novels. See, for example, Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Du théâtre (Paris. 1773). 49. ^ See also Yves-Marie Bercé and Elena Fasano Guarini, eds., Complots et conjurations dans l'Europe moderne (Rome, 1996). 1-5 (Bercées introduction). Compare John D. Woodbridge, Re-olt in Prerevohitionary France: The Prince de Conti's Conspiracy against Louis XV, I755-¡757 (Princeton, N.J., 1995). 31 Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, Gonzague Truc, ed. (1748; Paris, 1967), 122-23. -" Gordon Wood identifies similar trends In the Anglo-American worid, linking them above all to writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. But he feels that they had a broad effect on the population only after the outbreak of the French Revolution: Wood, "Conspiracy," 430-32. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JIJNE 2000 698 Timothy Tackett If a few eighteenth-century French elites continued to subscribe to conspiracy interpretations of the political events of their day, such beliefs were not widespread, and were probably far less central to the thinking of the educated classes than they were in the Anglo-American world. The writings produced during two major political events at the end of the Old Regime, the Maupeou crisis of the early 1770s and the "pre-revoiution" of 1787-1789, further substantiate this conclusion. In the long struggle between Chancellor René-Nicolas de Maupeou on the one hand and the Parlement of Paris and its liberal "patriot party" supporters on the other, the latter seem almost never to have resorted to plot theories to explain events. Although one Jansenist jurist tried to persuade his colleagues that the affair had been engineered by the Jesuits and that Maupeou was merely their pawn, virtually no one accepted the idea." A rapid reading of the patriot brochure literature of the period reveals no mention of the words ''plot" or "conspiracy." If the chancellor's motives were alluded to at all, he was usually portrayed as acting alone, moved primarily by personal ambition. Most commentators viewed the affair in more abstract institutional terms, as a "constitutional" struggle in which "tyranny" and "despotism" were opposed by those defending liberty, a government of laws, and the "constitution" of the "nation."^"* Throughout the prerevolutionary period, from the winter of 1787 to the spring of 1789, conspiratorial fears again remained remarkably rare, virtually nonexistent among proto-liberal patriots—in sharp contrast to the position of the protoconservatives in the Fréron-Barruel group. In the pamphlet literature written during this period by thirty-two future Third Estate deputies, only one individual, the future Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, gave any indication of a paranoid style. All the other writings were marked, rather, by a tone of optimism and good will. Most revealed an almost boundless praise for the king. And while they were highly critical of the nobility, many claimed to be confident that the nobles could overcome their "prejudices" and be won over to the patriot cause through reason and persuasion.^^ Much the same tone was to be found in the "general" cahiers de doléances drawn up by the urban elites in early 1789. While there were numerous demands for ministerial accountability and public knowledge of government finances, conspiratorial notions and language were largely absent.^^ The reasons for the relative absence of conspiracy fears in French political 33 The Jansenist Robert de Saint-Vincent: Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution, A Study in the History of Libertarianism: France, 1770-1774 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985). 45. ^ See, for example, Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target. Lettres d'un homme à un autre homme sur les affaires du temps (n.p., [1771]). 1 have examined the pamphlets preserved in series Lb^^ and Lb^^ of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, as Usted in the Catalogue de l'histoire de France. See also Shanti Singham. " 'A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen'; Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault on Absolutism during the Maupeou Years, 1770-1775" (PhD dissertation, Princeton University. 1991), 21-23, 99-100: and 'The Correspondance secrète: Forging Patriotic Public Opinion during the Maupeou Years," Historical Reflect ions IRéflexions historiques 18. no. 2 (1992): 65-1Ü0; and Dale Van Kley, "The Religious Origins of the Patriot and Ministerial Parties in Pre-Revolutionary France: Controversy over the Chancellor's Constitutional Coup, 1771-1775," Historical Reflections, same issue, 17-63. ^^ On this sample of pamphlet literature, see Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (¡789-1790) (Princeton, N.J., 1996). 101. Robespierre warned of the insidious "plotting of the enemies of the people" in the Estates of Artois:-4 la nation artésienne, sur la nécessité de réformer les Etats d Artois (n.p., 1788), 4, 83. See also Maximilien Robespierre, Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués (Arras, 1789). 3'' Conclusion based on an extensive reading of the "general cahiers," those drawn up at the final AMERICAN HISTORÍCAL REVIEW Jurre 2000 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution 699 culture, by comparison with the English-speaking world, are undoubtedly complex and cannot be developed here. Perhaps one might look to the impact of Protestantism in the Anglo-American sphere—with its emphasis on the pervasiveness of evil and the deceptive wiles of Satan—and to the general weakness of such a tradition in France. One might also emphasize the very different political traditions in France and Anglo-America. Gordon Wood stressed the increasing complexity and impersonal character of politics in the Augustan Age, where a far greater number of people were involved in decision making than ever before: "The more people became strangers to one another and the less they knew of one another's hearts, the more suspicious and mistrustful they became, ready as never before in Western history to see deceit and deception at work."^^ Compared to the more diffuse 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 power—the lines of authority in the French polity became increasingly centralized and clarified with the growth of absolutism and a strong bureaucracy. Indeed, Yvcs-Maric Bercé would specifically associate the decline of a conspiratorial culture in France in the seventeenth century to the consolidation of the monarchy.''^ But in any case, and whatever the reason, a paranoid style was little in evidence among the future patriot leadership class on the eve of the French Revolution. A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS of the Conspiracy obsession among the elites during the revolutionary period itself would need to be based on a wide diversity of documents, including newspapers, brochures, and speeches within the various clubs and assemblies, both in Paris and the provinces. Here, in the manner of a first approach, I will concentrate on records left by the deputies to the first two revolutionary assemblies, from the early days of the revolution through the period of the First Terror. In this, I will make use of three sets of sources: a compilation of the proceedings of the assemblies,'^"" the published records of the Paris Jacobin Club,"» and the published or manuscript letters of a sample of fourteen deputies or delegations of deputies for whom more or less continuous series of correspondence are preserved.^' Even though the number of deputies represented in the latter stage of the electoral process for the Estates General and intended to be sent with the deputies directly to Versailles. " Wood, "Conspiracy," 410. Wood also linked these trends with the peculiar forms of moral philosophy that arose in the Anglo-American Enlightenment and that sought to find a place for free will in a mechanistic causal universe by identifying "causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals"; p. 416. It is difficult to discern equivalent trends in the French Enlightenment. 38 Bercé and Guarini, Complots et conjurations, 4-5. 3" As based on the AP. I examined selected debates on topics that seemed most likely to lend themselves to conspiratorial interpretations, such as those dealing with popular unrest, emigrants, refractory clergy, international threats, and war. These were identified, first, from the observations of the deputies in their correspondence: see below note 41; and, second, from the cumulative indexes to the AP: vol. 34 (the Constituent Assembly) and vol. 51 (the Legislative Assembly). ^' F.-A. Aulard. ed.. La Société des Jacobins: Rectieil de documents pour l'histoire du club des Jacobins de Paris, 6 vols. (Paris. 1889-97). Unfortunately, Aulard found only sketchy records for the first months of the club's existence. Initially, the Jacobins consisted exclusively of National Assembly deputies. Over time, increasing numbers of non-deputies were admitted. "' I have examined a total of 1,460 letters for seven deputies written during the Constituent Assembly AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 2000 700 • Timothy Tackett sample is small, their correspondence totals close to two thousand letters, dating from May 1789 through September 1792. The sample includes a wide variation of age groups, occupations, and geographic origins, and a full range of political affiliations.-^^ -J-^Q letters from these deputies allow a systematic enumeration of specific indications of conspiracy belief in the refiections individuals shared with their families and friends back home.^^ On the basis of these letters and the published debates, it would seem clear that the paucity of a rhetoric of conspiracy among the patriot elites—observed for the prerevolutionary period—persisted through the first weeks of the Estates General (about 50 per month for the twenty-nine-month duration) and 443 for seven deputies or delegations of deputies written during the first ten months of Ihe Legislative Assembly (about 44 per month for ten months). These specific sets of correspondence were chosen as being among the most continuous and complete series available for the respective bodies. Unfortunately, relatively few letters seem to be preserved for August and September 1792, presumably because of the general chaos of the period. Sources for the Constituent Assembly: François-René-Pierre Ménard de La Groye, Correspondance (1789-1791), Florence Mirouse, éd. (Le Mans, 1989); Pierre-François and Marie-Angélique Lepoutre, Député-paysan etfennière de Flandre en 17S9: La correspondance des Lepoutre., Jean-Pierre Jessenne and Edna Hindie Lemay. eds. (Lille. 1998); Claude Gantheret, ms. letters to Pierre Leflaive: private collection of Françoise Misserey, Dijon; Antoine Durand, ms. journal; Archives Episcopales de Cahors, carton 5-56, and ms. letters to ihe municipality of Cahors; Archives Municipales de Cahors. uneatalogued box; Michel-René Maupetit. "Lettres (1789-91)," Quéruau-Lamérie, ed., Bulletin de la Commission historique et archéologique de ta Mayenne. 2^"'^ sér.. vols. 17-23 (1901-07); Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat. Gaultier de Biauzat, député du Tiers état aux Etats généraux de 1789: Sa vie et sa correspondance. Francisque Mège. ed., 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand. 1890). and Bibliothèque Municipale de Clermont-Ferrand, mss. 788-89; and Jean-André Périsse Du Luc, ms. letters to Jean-Baptiste Willermoz; Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, ms. F.G. 5430. Sources for the Legislative Assembly; Rabusson-Lamothe, "Lettres"; François-Yves Roubaud. "Lettres de François-Yves Roubaud," Edmond Poupé. ed.. Bulletin de la Société d'études scientifiques et archéologiques de Draguignan 36 (1926-27): 3-218; Couthon, Correspondance; Pierre Dubreuil-Chambardel, Lettres parisiennes d'un révolutionnaire poitexûn. Marie-Luce Llorca. éd. (Tours, 1994); Jean-Baptiste-Annibal Aubert-Dubayet. "Aubert-Dubayet. législateur (1791-1792)." F. Vermale, ed., Bulletin de ¡Académie delphinale, 6*" série, 9-10 (1938-39): 115-41; D. Tempier. ed., "Correspondance des députés des Côtes-du-Nord à l'Assemblée législative" (written by five different deputies, although half were penned by Jean-Louis Bagot), Société d'émulation des Côtes-du-Nord, Bulletins et mémoires 28 (1890); 61-169; and ms. letters of the Legislative deputies of Ille-et-Vilaine (six different deputies, although tvt'o—Sylvain Codet and Franco is-Alexandre Tardive au—wrote well over half of them): Archives Départementales de I'llle-etVilaine. L 294. On the use of deputy tetters as a source, see Tackett. Becoming a Revolutionary, 8-13. •"- The sample of Constituent deputies averaged 49.7 years of age in 1789, compared to 46.4 for the body as a whole; while the Legislative deputies averaged 38.6 compared to 38.4 for the whole. There were four lawyers, three judges, three wealthy farmers, two doctors, a bookseller, and a former military officer. Seven came from north of the Loire, seven from south of the Loire, residing in communities that included large towns (Lyons), medium-sized towns (Le Mans, Clermont-Ferrand [three], Grenoble. Rennes, Saint-Brieuc. Mayenne, and Grasse), and small towns or villages (Gourdon. Linselle, Bourgignon, and Avon). A total of five are known to have been Jacobins, four were probably Feuillants, and five were apparently nonaligned. Two of the deputies (the Constituent deputy Gaultier and the Legislative deputy Couthon) were major players in their assemblies, while most of the others were minor players or back-benchers. Note thai for the purpose of these statistics I have used only the deputies from Illc-et-Vilaine and Côtes-du-Nord who largely dominated their delegation's correspondence: respectively. Codet and Bagot. -" I have enumerated all occurrences of a stated belief in the existence of plots or conspiracies (conspirations, complots, intrigues, conjurations, manoeuvres, cabales, trames, brigties., etc.). Overall, such references occurred in 4 percent of the Constituent deputies' letters and 14 percent of the Legislative deputies" letters. I have excluded those deputy reports of conspiracy beliefs held by others that are rejected 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 Constituent deputies only: see Timothy Tackett, "The Constituent Assembly and the Terror," in Keith Baker, ed.. The French Revolution and the Creation of Modem Political Culture, Vol. 4, The Terror (Oxford, 1994), 46-49. AMERICAN HiSTORtCAL REVIEW - JUN E 2000 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution 701 and the National Assembly. There is virtually no such language in deputy correspondence during the major revolutionary developments from early May through late June 1789. In their letters as in their speeches, most of the Third Estate deputies maintained a remarkably upbeat tone and conveyed their continued optimism that they could rely on the support of the king. Significantly, in the debates over the problem of grain shortages, debates that began on June 19 immediately after the creation of the National Assembly, the vast majority of the speakers gave no credence to the "famine plot persuasion." While they recognized the existence of such fears among the popular classes, they took care to distinguish their own enlightened position from the beliefs of "the multitude." The unidentified speaker from Bordeaux who moved for the creation of a Subsistence Committee carefully specified that the shortage came from natural causes, not from the decisions and actions of individuals: "It would be senseless." he announced, "to attribute [the food shortage] to fraudulent hoarding by individuals." "The hail storms and the miserable harvest [of 1788] are the sole causes."** Indeed, the only substantial evidence of a paranoid style in the early Estates General was among certain members of the clergy and nobility. Partly as a tactic for winning over moderate parish priests and noblemen to their position, bishops and conservative aristocrats accused the Third Estate of secretly intriguing to destroy both religion and the nobility. The conservative clergy, in particular, relied on some of the themes developed by the Fréron-Barruel group before the revolution.'t^ yet, if a "Hegelian dialectic" of ideas ever existed among the Third Estate deputies, pushing them toward an obsession with conspiracy, there is no evidence of its presence during the first weeks of the revolution. When a language of conspiracy did appear in the speeches and letters of the patriot deputies, it arose not as "the figment of a frenzied preoccupation with power"—as Furet has proposed—but from fears engendered by the very real plots hatched among elements of the royal government in late June and early July. The massing of mercenary troops around Paris and Versailles and the dismissal of the liberal minister Jacques Necker were part of an initially secret plan improvised by the king's conservative advisers to disband or seize control of the National Assembly by force.*^ François-René-Pierre Ménard de La Groye first mentioned rumors of troop concentrations and "odious plots" on the last day of June, and Comte Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau made a dramatic warning to the Assembly one week later.'*^ But in most cases, it was only after the fall of the Bastille and in direct reference to a royalist plan whose full extent could only be surmised—and easily exaggerated—that the fear of conspiracy penetrated the correspondence of the deputies. Looking back on the previous days, Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat believed there had been an aristocratic plot for "the horrible assassination" of the deputies; and the Burgundy wine merchant Claude Gantheret reported the widely held conviction that the king's emigrant brother Charles, Comte d'Artois, was -'•' AP, 8: 135-37. See also the report by Necker on July 4 and the bureau reports on July 6. il89:AP, 8: 183. 194-98. Compare, however, the speech by Barere:/I/*, 8: 137. ^^ Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 131-32, 135-36. 46 Pierre Caron, "La tentative de contrerévolution de juin-juillet 1789," Revue d'histoire moderne 1 (1906-07): 5-34. 649-78. *'^ Ménard, Correspondance, 55. Mirabeau's speech was on July 8. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW J^™^ 2000 Timothy Tackett organizing a general invasion of the country and a new Saint-Bartholomew's Day Massacre.-'» Plot theories continued rampant during the rural panic of the Great Fear in the summer of 1789. It was in the midst of the alarms at the end of July that the deputies created the revolution's first surveillance committee, the Committee on Research. None of the speakers in the debate surrounding this creation doubted the existence of a counterrevolutionary plot earlier in the month. Terrified by an apparently 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 panies only in the twentieth century'^^—many came to the conclusion that a giant conspiracy must have created the Great Fear as well. "There can be no doubt," announced Adrien Duport to the Assembly, "that plots are being organized against the state." Even speakers on the moderate Monarchien right did not question the reality of conspiracy, although they would have preferred to use regular judicial procedures to carry out an investigation.^^ Over the next two years, the fear of conspiracy never entirely disappeared from the Assembly. (See graph.) But, as attested by the deputies' speeches and correspondence, there were numerous ups and downs in the incidence of such fears, often evolving in response to real and proven instances of counterrevolutionary conspiracies—such as the counterrevolutionary gathering of Catholic national guardsmen at Jales in August 1790 or the conspiracy of Lyons in December of that year. Heightened suspicions were also generated by the major political and economic protest demonstration by women marching on Versailles in October 1789, which most deputies were at a loss to explain by anything other than a plot; and by a confrontation between England and Spain that raised the possibility of French involvement in a war—a war for which the deputies felt desperately unprepared, both militarily and psychologically. Other conspiracy accusations appeared at intervals through the winter and spring of 1790-1791—linked in part to the growing barrage of threats from the emigrant leaders, whose real power and influence was difficult to assess, and, above all, to the growing popular unrest toward the revolutionary transformation of the Catholic Church in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. AH such apprehensions were invariably intensified by the existence in the Assembly itself of a solid phalanx of reactionary deputies from the First and Second Estates, overtly opposed to the revolution and on occasion secretly militating to arouse the opposition of their constituencies.^' Nevertheiess, most deputies at the center and the moderate left of the Assembly were by no means continuously obsessed with conspiracies and were frequently quite critical of the paranoid style—especially after the panic atmosphere of the summer of 1789 had dissipated. Thus the debates on the massive peasant uprisings in Quercy and Limousin during the winter of 1789-1790 were generally calm and *« Gaultier, Correspondance, 2: 175; Ganiheret, private collection, July 26. Georges Lefebvre cites a report in early June of fears among the popular classes of a conspiracy of the clerg>- and the nobility. But widespread fears of an "aristocratic plot" seem to have arisen onJy in early July and. above all, after the fail of the Bastille: Lefebvre. Great Fear. 59-61. Compare the explosion of plot accusations beginning in July in newspapers and brochures: Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, Charlotte Mandell, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 217-33. *^ Lefebvre, Great Fear, pt. 3. ^"AP.S: 293-95. *' Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary^ 271. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 2000 703 Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution be 1 § " s 9 lo è:"S /G ä