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.

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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:

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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).

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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.

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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.”

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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).

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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this process, a great many had grown impatient and suspicious and were perhaps all
the more tempted to see the opposition, which they were forced to confront daily,
in conspiratorial terms.
But it would also be difficult to overestimate the impact of Louis XVI’s Flight to
Varennes on the attitudes of the elites both inside and outside the revolutionary
assemblies. Much has been written in recent years on the purported “desacralization” of the French kingship at the end of the Old RegimeJ^ That sometime
between the high Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century the religious
aura of the kingship had faded in intensity is not to be questioned. Yet the
chronology of that transformation is far from clear, and much of the change may
well have transpired even before the eighteenth century. Based on an analysis of the
cahiers de doléances of 1789, John Markoff has shown that few educated French on
the eve of the revolution still thought the monarch had a divine right to absolute
rule. But those same cahiers also give evidence of a deep, emotive attachment to the
king by much of the population.**” Indeed, the myth of the kingship—as oppo.sed to
the reputation of individual kings—was multivalent. For some among the popular
classes, that myth may have remained partly ‘^religious'”—and thus “sacral”—in
nature. But it was also built on an array of secular legends and folklore, and
classical and feudal traditions, as well as on the images of grandeur cultivated by the
seventeenth and eighteenth-century monarchs through their military prowess and
the splendor of their palaces and court life.
Throughout the first two years of the revolution, most French inhabitants had
persisted in viewing the king with enormous affection and respect, whatever the
ambiguities of the king’s constitutional status in the nation, whatever their doubts
about the ministerial government surrounding him or the aristocratic social
structure of which he was a part. Even in the midst of the turmoil and uncertainty
caused by popular uprisings, religious schism, and threats of foreign intervention,
the great majority continued to rely on the monarch as an anchor of .security, a vital
center of social and emotional stability. As recently as March of 1791, a minor
illness of Louis XVI’s had engendered a great outpouring of affection and concern
for the monarch in letters addressed to the Constituent Assembly.**i
In circumstances such as these, the king’s perceived betrayal in June had a
profoundly destabilizing effect on the whole regime and was a powerful factor in
Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: Tlie Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791
(Princeton, N.J.. 1986). 275-82.
” See, for example, Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth
Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990); and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,
Lydia Cochrane. trans. (Durham. N.C., 1991), chap. 6.
«” John Markoff, “Images of the King at the Beginning of the Revolution,” in Gilbert Shapiro and
John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789
(Stanford, Calif., 1997), 369-76.
“‘ Spontaneous Te Deum services u-ere held throughout the kingdom to give thanks for the king’s
recovery: see, for example. Archives Nationales, C 124-31: Marie de Roux. La révolution à Poitiers et
dans la Vienne (Paris, 1910), 442-43; Eugène Dubois. Histoire de la Révolution dans ¡Ain: Tome I. La
Constituante (1789-1791) (Bourg-en-Bresse. 1931), 330; Marcel Bruneau. Les débuts de la Révolution
dans les départements du Cher et de l’Indre (Paris. 1902). 164; Arnaud. Histoire de la Révolution dans le
département de l’Ariège, 241. Even the principal radical newspapers had continued a positive—or at
least noncommittal—treatment of the king, through the early months of 1791 ; Censer. Prelude to Power
112-15.

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promoting fears of conspiracy emanating from the “executive authority” in the
spring and summer of 1792.” This core of mistrust was visible even among many
moderates of the Legislative as they took their seats in October 1791. In letters to
his constituents, Rabusson-Lamothe announced his hope that Louis had resigned
himself to follow the constitution and that the king’s self-interest would triumph
over the “‘prejudices of his birth and education.” But he also understood that many
of his colleagues in the Assembly displayed “a defiance [toward the king], justified
by the example of the past.”«-‘ More than any other single event, the Flight to
Varennes had shaken the French to the roots of their being and produced a loss of
trust, a loss that rendered the various conspiracy theories altogether possible and
believable.

an understanding of the conspiracy obsession among revolutionary
elites entails several layers of explanation. It is likely that in any given population
a certain number of individuals are prone to view the world in conspiratorial term^
and this was true of some of the deputies as they arrived to take their posts in
Versailles or Paris. Yet at the end of the Old Regime, the “paranoid style” was
probably much less in evidence among the educated classes in France than in
England and North America. Despite the contention of several recent historians,
the great majority of the deputies almost certainly did not share such an outlook
during the early weeks of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the evidence
is conclusive that conspiracy fears had become widespread among the political
elites by the fall of 1791, well before the coming of the war and the threats of
invasion, thus invalidating the explanation proposed by an older generation of
historians.
It is the contention here that the evolution toward an obsession with plots
developed among the elites in the course of the revolution itself. In this process, the
logic of ideas cannot be entirely excluded. There can be no doubt that the language
of the philosophes was more in evidence in the deputies’ discourse in 1791 and 1792
than it had been in 1789. But if anything, these transformations in ideas and
language came after the fact, as it were, through a growing awareness of the
relevance and applicability of such ideas to the transforming political situation.’*^ Of
far greater significance was the deputies’ confrontation with a series of very real
conspiracies and threatened conspiracies, from the attempted ministerial and
military counterrevolution of July 1789 through the elaborate attempt to separate
the king from the revolution in the summer of 1791. The fears engendered by these
experiences were further intensified, as we have seen, through the influence of the
more pervasive paranoid perspectives of the lower classes. It was probably the
radical Jacobins who first came self-consciously to link themselves to the Parisian
masses, but this infiuence gradually spread to the moderate deputies as well,
IN CONCLUSION,

82 On the psychological impact of Varennes. see notably Paolo Viola, // trono vuoto: La transizione
delta sovranità nella rivoluzione francese (Turin, 1989).
^ Rabusson-Lamothe. “Lettres,” 231, 264.
8* Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 64-65, 110-13, 182, 19P. 308-09.

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perhaps particularly to those of more modest rural and small-town origins who sat
in the Legislative Assembly,
The impact of real instances of plots and the influence of popular fears—
mediated through the particular political culture of the Jacobins—go far to explain
the conspiratorial fears of the political elites in the early years of the revolution. But
can such factors alone explain the inflationary expansion of the paranoid style, the
quasi-irrational obsession with the grand, omnipotent conspiracy so prevalent after
the summer of 1791? Here, one might suggest, another level of analysis needs to be
considered, an analysis that may also help us go beyond the contingent events of
one revolution and explore the revolutionary process in a broader perspective. One
of the most pervasive themes in the letters and diaries and in many contemporary
accounts was the general breakdown of order and certainty. The rapidly spreading
anarchy, the unpredictability of events, more impressive than anything previously
encountered in the lifetime of those experiencing the revolution, seemed quite to
defy explanation through the Enlightened analytical apparatus at the revolutionaries’ disposai.
In this respect, it is interesting to note—if only in the guise of a heuristic
approach—the curious parallels between clinical descriptions of paranoia in
individuals and the collective paranoid style increasingly visible in a time of
revolution. As some psychologists would describe it, individual paranoia is often
characterized not only by a deep mistrust of others but by a mistrust of oneself: a
weak and unstable sense of autonomy and an exceptionally frail sense of identity.^s
One might speculate that all revolutionary processes, by their very nature, tend to
intensify similar sentiments within society as a whole. There can be no doubt that
the most sweeping revolutions—the English, the Russian, the Chinese, as well as
the French—commonly set in motion a progressive reexamination of all values,
putting into question society’s sense of collective identity.
This effort to follow the development of revolutionary psychology in France
suggests that, for many elites, the transformation was not a sudden paradigmatic
shift, where one worldview or ideology was abruptly replaced by another, but was
a slow, halting, and painful process.**” It was a liminal experience, par excellence,
enormously unsettling and destabilizing, which left many individuals—to paraphrase Matthew Arnold—wandering between two worlds, the one dying, the other
struggling to be horn. Even the rigid, swaggering self-confidence, projected in the
^^ See, notably, Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens
and Modern America {New York. 1991), 4-23; and David Shapiro. Neurotic Stytes (New York, I%5),
55-88. For more traditional Freudian approaches—which I have found little useful for the present
study—see Yehuda Fried and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis (Boston, 1976); and John
Farrell. Freud’s Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modem Suspicion (New York, 1996). For social
psychological approaches to conspiracy interpretations, see Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici,
eds,. Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York, 1987).
»” Compare Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change, 2d edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1982). Much of the
recent theorizing about revolutions has focused on the initial breakdown—particularly in structural
terms—of the various “Old Regimes” and has had little to say about the process of those revolutions
once they had begun. See, for example, Nikki Keddie, ed.. Debating Revolutions (New York. 1995); and
John Foran, ed.. Theorizing Revolutions (London. 1996). The comparative study of the revolutionary
process by Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions
(Princeton. N.J.. 2000), appeared too late to be integrated into this article. Among other themes, Mayer
stresses the dialectical interaction between revolution and counterrevolution in the emergence of
revolutionary violence and conspiracy fears.

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public pronouncements of many revolutionaries, was often as much bluff and pose
as true self-assurance. The personal correspondence of many such individuals was
pervaded by “the anxieties of nascent liberty,” as Durand had described it, with an
oscillation of moods between hope and fear, with a sentiment of being swept along
by circumstances over which one had little or no control.
It was precisely in the context of sentiments such as these that the king’s desertion
and betrayal in 1791 had such a traumatic effect, leaving many with the feeling of
being cast adrift. With all the bonds of Old Regime society and culture progressively overthrown, there was an increasing fluidity of identity, a growing uncertainty
as to who one was, what one could rely on, and whom one could trust. The
ambiguity of one’s own collective identity reverberated in uncertainty and mistrust
of others—especially those others perceived as outsiders or potential outsiders to
the revolutionary community.
Only a carefully conceived comparative study could adequately test the validity
for other revolutions of the final hypothesis proposed above. But it seems clear, in
the case of the French experience, that the phase change in late 1791 to a
quasi-permanent obsession with grand conspiracy exerted a profound effect on the
origins of a Terror mentality among political elites in the spring and summer of
1792. Indeed, by corollary, one might argue that the very term “Terror” should be
ascribed a more complex meaning than that usually given it by historians. It should
signify not only the judicial apparatus assembled to intimidate and punish the
perceived enemies of the revolution but also the near panic state of fear and
suspicion experienced during the period by the revolutionaries themselves.

Timothy Tackett is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
Among his previous publications are Prie.st and Parish in Eighteenth-Cetiiury
France {1977), Religion, Revohitiorj, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century
France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (1986, and in French translation), and
Becoming a Revolutionary: 77ie Deputies of the French National Assembly and the
Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1996, and in French and Italian
translations). His books and articles have been the recipients of five national
prizes, including the Leo Gershoy Award from the AHA in 1998 {ÍOT Becoming
a Revolutionary). He is currently working on two projects: a book about Louis
XVI’s attempted flight from Paris in 1791 and its impact on the French, and a
larger study of the origins of a political culture of violence among the elites
during the French Revolution.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

JUNE 2000

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