Conspiracy in the French Revolution

Edited by Peter R. Campbell,Thomas E. Kaiser and

Marisa Linton

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Manchester University PressManchester and New York

distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave

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Contents

Notes on contributors page vii

Introduction: Conspiracy in the French Revolution: issues and debatesThomas E. Kaiser, Marisa Linton, and Peter R. Campbell 1

1 Perceptions of conspiracy on the eve of the French Revolution Peter R. Campbell 15

2 Conspiratorial thinking in the Constituent Assembly: Mirabeau and the exclusion of deputies from the ministry Barry Shapiro 42

3 The real and imagined conspiracies of Louis XVIJohn Hardman 63

4 ‘Horrible plots and infernal treasons’; conspiracy and the urban landscape in the early RevolutionDavid Andress 85

5 Conspiracy in the village? French revolutionary authorities and the search for ‘subverters of public opinion’ in the rural south-westJill Maciak Walshaw 106

6 ‘Do you believe that we’re conspirators?’ Conspiracies real and imagined in Jacobin politics, 1793–94Marisa Linton 127

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7 The émigrés and conspiracy in the French Revolution, 1789–99Simon Burrows 150

8 Never was a plot so holy: Gracchus Babeuf and the end of the French RevolutionLaura Mason 172

9 Conclusion: Catilina’s revenge – conspiracy, revolution, and historical consciousness from the Old Regime to the Consulate Thomas E. Kaiser 189

Index 00

vi Contents

Notes on the contributors

Dr David Andress is Reader in Modern European History at the Universityof Portsmouth. He has published numerous articles on the politicalculture of the French Revolution, particularly focusing on attitudes tothe activities of the common people. He has also written more broadlyon the course of the Revolution, and is currently developing researchinto the connections between the culture of sentimentalism andmelodrama and the social and political assumptions that underlayrevolutionary political discourse. His recent books include Massacre atthe Champ de Mars (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2000), TheFrench Revolution and the People (London, 2004), and The Terror;Civil War in the French Revolution (London: Little Brown, 2005).

Dr Simon Burrows lectures on Modern European History at the Universityof Leeds (UK), and was formerly a lecturer in the History Departmentat the University of Waikato in New Zealand. His main researchinterests concern French émigré writers during the period 1760–1815,together with their political, publishing, and espionage activities. He isauthor of French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814(Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2002) and coeditor withHannah Barker of Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe andNorth America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), and has published numerous journal articles and chapters inbooks. He is currently working on Blackmail, Scandal and the FrenchRevolution: London’s French Libellistes, 1760–1790 for ManchesterUniversity Press.

Dr Peter Campbell is Senior Lecturer in History at Sussex University (UK).He works on the political culture of France from Louis XIV to theRevolution. He has published four books on the ancien régime andseveral articles: The Ancien Regime in France (Oxford: Blackwell,1988); Louis XIV 1661–1715 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), and Powerand Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–1745 (London and New

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York: Routledge, 1996), currently being translated into French, andedited The Origins of the French Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave,2005). He is working on patriotism in eighteenth-century France andthe relationship between ideology and politics in the 1780s. His nextbook is on Crisis and Revolution: France in the 1780s.

Dr John Hardman was formerly Lecturer in History at the University ofEdinburgh and until recently Senior Research Fellow at the Universityof Sussex. His most recent books include Louis XVI (New Haven andLondon: Yale, 1993), French Politics, 1774–1789 (Harlow: Longman,1995), and Robespierre (Harlow: Longman, 1999), and with MunroPrice, Louis XVI and the Comte de Vergennes: Correspondence,1774–1787 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998). He is presentlycompleting a major study on The Assemblée des Notables of 1787.

Thomas E. Kaiser is Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (USA). He is coauthor of Europe, 1648–1815: From theOld Regime to the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003), and has also published nearly twenty articles on the politics andpolitical culture of eighteenth-century France in such scholarly journalsas Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, FrenchHistory, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Studies on Voltaire and theEighteenth Century. His early work dealt with the public image of theFrench monarchy in the early eighteenth century as reflected in publicfinance, public opinion, royalist propaganda, and royalist historiog-raphy. His later work has focused on the impact of royal mistresses andqueens, especially Madame de Pompadour and Marie-Antoinette, onthe politics and diplomacy of the French monarchy. Currently he isworking on a book entitled Devious Empire: Marie-Antoinette andAustrophobia in Eighteenth-Century France.

Dr Marisa Linton is a Senior Lecturer in History at Kingston University(UK). She has written a book on The Politics of Virtue in EnlightenmentFrance (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), and has also published a numberof articles on the French Revolution and on the political culture ofeighteenth-century France, including: ‘Robespierre’s political principles’(in W. Doyle and C. Haydon, eds, Robespierre (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999)), ‘Ideas of the future in the French Revolu-tion’ (in M. Crook, W. Doyle, and A. Forrest, eds, Enlightenment andRevolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)), and ‘“The Tartuffes of patrio-tism”: fears of conspiracy in the political language of revolutionarygovernment, France 1793–1794’ (in B. Coward and J. Swan, eds,Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early Modern Europe

viii Notes on contributors

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)). She is currently working on a full-lengthstudy of conspiracy, faction, and friendship in the politics of theJacobins.

Laura Mason is Professor of History at the University of Georgia (USA).She is the author of Singing the French Revolution: Popular Cultureand Revolutionary Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, 1996); and the coeditor of The French Revolution: ADocument Collection (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1998) and of aCatalogue of the Pamphlets, Songsheets and Periodicals of the FrenchRevolutionary Era in the Princeton University Library (New York:Garland, 1989). She is the author of numerous articles on the FrenchRevolution, including, ‘The “Bosom of Proof”: Criminal Justice andthe Renewal of Oral Culture during the French Revolution,’ Journal ofModern History 76(1) (March 2004).

Barry M. Shapiro is Professor of History at Allegheny College, MeadvillePA (USA). He is the author of Revolutionary Justice in Paris (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993) and of several articles on psycho-history, revolutionary justice, and early revolutionary politics, includingmost recently ‘Self-Sacrifice, Self-Interest, or Self-Defense? The Con-stituent Assembly and the “Self-Denying Ordinance” of May 1791’(French Historical Studies, Fall 2002). He is currently working on a book-length project examining the psychological ramifications of the early revolutionary confrontation between the deputies of theConstituent Assembly and the monarchy.

Dr Jill Maciak Walshaw is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université deMontréal (Canada). She recently completed a dissertation at theUniversity of York (UK) on the communication of political news andideas in rural France during the eighteenth century. Her research on theseditious speech trials in rural areas and on rural politics during theRevolution has appeared in French History and in The EuropeanReview of History. She is currently working on a book that expandsupon her doctoral research to compare rural political culture in south-western and central France in the early modern period.

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Notes on contributors ix

Introduction: conspiracy in the French Revolution:

issues and debates

Thomas E. Kaiser, Marisa Linton, and Peter R. Campbell

When Edmund Burke in 1790 called the French Revolution ‘the mostastonishing that has hitherto happened in the world,’1 he was hardly alonein his opinion. As the most ambitious effort yet undertaken to recreate asociety from the ground up, the French Revolution was intended toregenerate the nation by means of a new politics founded upon liberty,virtue, and patriotism. In place of the ‘corrupt’ politics of the discreditedancien régime, the Revolutionaries sought to fashion a new transparentpolitical system wherein citizens could voice their opinions by means ofan elected legislature, political clubs, and a free press. Whereas under theancien régime a vague, contradictory set of governing laws had allegedlyallowed corrupt ministers, mistresses, and factions to exploit state powerbehind closed doors for their own selfish ends, the Revolutionaries enacteda new constitution with an explicit delineation of public powers andprivate rights to ensure that state officials – subject to public scrutiny – ranthe government exclusively for the common good.

As it turned out, however, this bold experiment in transparentgovernment was attended from its start by preoccupations with conspiracyso deep and widespread that within four years it helped generate andinform the Terror, a coordinated effort to repress by means of fear justthat sort of conspiratorial behavior the new politics was supposed to haveeliminated. Conspiracies against the new order appeared to spring notonly from among those like the many ‘aristocrats’ who had opposed theRevolution from the start, but also from among erstwhile ‘patriots’ whohad been its most vocal supporters and ardent champions. Indeed, as the Revolution proceeded, conspiracy accusations were leveled againstvirtually all the major political personalities of the age, from the king and

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the queen to the very radicals – Hébert, Danton, and Robespierre – whohad employed the Terror to crush counter-Revolutionary conspiracy. Asthe wars of the Revolution expanded the zone of conflict beyond France’sborders, conspiracies seemed to be hatching across Europe.

Why did the Revolutionaries become so preoccupied with conspiracythat their politics changed profoundly as a result? Strangely enough, untilrecently historians provided few coherent answers, notwithstanding thestudy of certain individual conspiratorial episodes such as GeorgesLefebvre’s celebrated analysis of the agrarian ‘great fear’ of 1789.2 Onereason for this neglect of such a critical Revolutionary phenomenon mayhave been that the majority of twentieth-century historians of the Revolu-tion were to a greater or lesser extent partisans of that great event. To takeseriously the myriad of charges leveled by the Revolutionaries against oneanother might have played into the hands of the still vocal minority ofcounterrevolutionary historians, who had been denouncing the Revolu-tion as a godless conspiracy since 1789. ‘Conspiratorial’ seemed like suchan ugly word to apply to the dynamics of the first French experiment inliberal democracy; far better to view it as the worthy Enlightenment putinto practice. A second reason that conspiracy may not have attracted the attention it deserved was that the reigning ‘social interpretation’ of theRevolution played down the importance of political culture. Within thisparadigm, the Revolution was explained as a clash of bourgeois and nobleclasses that in turn was driven by the emergence of capitalism. Viewed astransparent expressions of class interest, politics in general, and ideologyin particular held relatively little interest, because they seemed to explainso little about the origins and course of the Revolution. It was thus easyto overlook and neglect the fact that so much political thought andmobilization during that decade took ‘conspiratorial’ forms.

Conspiracy did begin to attract scholarly attention by the 1960s,although its first locus was the American rather than French Revolution.Richard Hofstadter published a book of essays entitled The Paranoid Stylein American Politics in 1965 that captured the tone of these early efforts.3Under the influence of psycho-history and the association of ideology withFascism and Communism, historians represented belief in conspiracy asa symptom of psychosis, even if Hofstadter stopped short of callingconspiracy believers ‘certifiable lunatics.’4 The problem with this line of argument soon became apparent to perspicacious historians such asGordon Wood. If the American Revolutionaries were to be judged‘mentally disturbed’ merely because – as Bernard Bailyn and Wood himselfbrilliantly demonstrated5 – they believed an English conspiracy had soughtto crush American liberty in the 1770s, they had a lot of company, forbelief in conspiracy was ubiquitous in the early modern period. Could all

2 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

these believers in conspiracy have been truly delusional? In a thoughtfulreconsideration of the problem, Wood concluded in 1982 that this formof thinking was neither ‘pathological’ nor uniquely American.6 But hecontinued to condescend to believers in conspiracy by historicizing theirmanner of conceptualizing politics, which he claimed had become obsoleteby the nineteenth century. The dawn of social science, Wood argued, madeconspiracy belief in the modern age appear ‘increasingly primitive andquaint’ and ‘out of place.’7 John Roberts made a similar argument whenaddressing the question of secret societies in this period.8 His highlyskeptical and rationalistic view was that the belief in the effective actionof secret societies was the product of an age, an unhistorical explanation,one that is the consequence of a mind set that cannot cope with thecomplexities of causation in a large society. The fact that so manyeighteenth-century founders of social science – e.g. Turgot and Condorcet– had believed in politics by conspiracy, as had, to a considerable extent,the later ‘heirs of Machiavelli’ – Pareto, Mosca, Michels9 – and other‘social scientists’ such as C. Wright Mills, apparently gave Wood andRoberts little pause when advancing this argument.

In the context of French history, matters began to change when – forreasons that cannot be reviewed here – the ‘social interpretation’ collapsedin the 1970s and the Revolution was re-interpreted as a broad-basedstruggle against royal ‘despotism’ rather than as a bourgeois attack upon‘feudal’ aristocracy.10 In the wake of this transformation, politics andpolitical ideology once again reemerged as a critical area of analysis.Drawing upon the work of the right-wing historian Augustin Cochin,François Furet put a new face on the old argument for a ‘conspiratorial’origin and motor for the Revolution in his revisionist attack on the ‘social interpretation’.11 In 1789, he argued, the revolutionaries had seized absolute sovereignty from the king in order to create a reign ofRousseau-inspired democracy. But convinced from the outset that theirimpossible dream was vulnerable to conspiracies engineered by counter-Revolutionaries at home and abroad, they cast their vision of democracyin the mold of the Terror. In other words, the dominating ideology of theRevolution, which Furet condemned as contrary to the ‘real’ socialinterests of the nation, was inherently counterconspiratorial and, beingrelatively unresponsive to the rise and fall of ‘real’ threats, by its verynature required victims to slay. In Furet’s view, the Terror of 1793–94 was not – as some historians had alleged – a product of ‘circumstances,’such as the war beginning in April 1792, which Furet also attributed to the wiles of Revolutionary ideology. Rather, for Furet the Terroremerged ineluctably from the premises of Revolutionary rhetoric alreadyoperational in 1789.

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 3

Far more sympathetic to the Revolution and far more sensitive tocontext than Furet, Lynn Hunt also made conspiracy a key element in herpioneering analysis of the Revolution’s political culture.12 In this work,she demonstrated how fears of conspiracy, real and imagined, ledrevolutionaries into an endless search for ‘transparency,’ that is, theelimination of all guises that counterrevolutionary conspirators might useto undermine the Revolution. It was this imperative, she argued, that laybehind the Jacobins’ demand for repeated demonstrations of patrioticvirtue on the part of every citizen.

Although their insights were original and highly suggestive, neitherFuret nor Hunt dealt with revolutionary conspiracy at length or in detail.But having focused fresh attention on the issue, their intriguing findingsencouraged other historians to advance on their work by tracking moreprecisely in time and space the rise and fall of conspiratorial activity andfears. Among them was an editor of this volume, Thomas Kaiser, who hastraced the course of conspiracy fears regarding Marie-Antoinette as analleged Austrian agent.13 Another was Timothy Tackett,14 who challengedthe notion that pre-Revolutionary high politics was driven by conspiracyfears, and he contended that apart from a few brief spikes of what he calls‘conspiracy obsession’ – such as occurred on the eve of the Bastille’sstorming on 14 July1789 – the early Revolution, too, was relatively freefrom preoccupation with conspiracy, at least among political elites. Eventhe peasantry during the ‘Great Fear’ of 1789, he found, was not nearlyso much given to belief in aristocratic conspiracy as Georges Lefebvre andother historians had alleged. If they feared anything at that moment,Tackett argued, peasants feared the collapse of order. For Tackett, theturning point came in June 1791, when the royal family tried and failedto escape control by the Assembly and its factions by fleeing Paris andrelocating near the French border.15 Now condemned as a perjurer forhaving violated his oath to support the new régime, the king, upon whomrevolutionary leaders had hitherto counted to provide the keystone of thenew régime, could no longer be trusted. Indeed, according to Tackett,trust generally appears to have disappeared by the summer of 1791,leaving the French state in the grip of multiple factions struggling forpower amidst growing fear and mutual recrimination. This atmosphereprovided the perfect setting for the escalation of conspiracies andconspiracy fears that eventually climaxed in the Reign of Terror.

The important work of Furet, Hunt, and Tackett has raised a numberof critical questions to which the contributors to this book have givenfurther consideration: How widespread were conspiracies and conspiracyfears before the Revolution and who held them? How much did theirincidence and nature change during the Revolution? To what extent did

4 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

conspiracy fears reflect the reality of conspiratorial activity? Who wereaccused of fomenting conspiracy and why? How much variation was thereamong the conspiracy fears entertained by different social groups? Whatimpact did conspiracy and conspiracy fears have on the course and legacyof the Revolution? The editors solicited contributions that would providechapters focusing on all the key moments of conspiratorial thinking, suchthat the book offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of thesubject. Contributors were encouraged to address these questions, but the editors imposed no explanatory framework a priori, and each contrib-utor has drawn his/her conclusions independently. The editors’ workingpremise was that conspiracy merited analysis from different angles, indifferent contexts, and in different periods from the late ancien régime tothe Directory. This approach drew inspiration from the collection ofessays edited by Barry Coward and Julian Swann which demonstratedthat the practice and belief in conspiracy were a feature of virtually everypolitical culture of the early modern period.16

To eighteenth-century observers, the banality of conspiratorial thoughtand action was not a pleasant fact of political life, but it could hardly be denied. As Duport de Tertre noted in his ten-volume Histoire desconjurations, conspirations et révolutions célèbres, tant anciennes quemodernes (1754–1760) all governments faced the threat of malcontentswilling ‘to commit every sort of excess, be it to free themselves of a yokethat crushes them, to improve or reestablish their fortune, or to rise to arank to which the modesty of their birth prevents them from aspiring.’17

Although certain political cultures were undoubtedly more given toconspiracy and conspiracy fears than others, even relatively ‘open’societies like that of late Stuart England were not immune from conspir-atorial forms of politics.18 There, as Mark Knights has persuasivelyshown, free-wheeling party conflict and a thriving political print culture– far from calming ‘irrational’ fears of conspiracy – paradoxically fueledbelief in government by plots.19

Each chapter in the present volume on the French Revolution offers anew investigation of the evidence and new conclusions. As Peter Campbelldemonstrates in Chapter 1, French politics at this time revolved aroundthe interplay of semi-formalized associations – court clientage networks,noble entourages, political factions, and religious bodies – that closelyresembled ‘conspiracies’ as contemporaries conceived of them. In light ofthe cynical view of human nature propounded by so many moralists andpolitical analysts of the age from Machiavelli and Pascal to Mandevilleand Helvétius, it did not take an unhinged mind to suppose that theseorganizations were plotting some form of criminal mischief, especially ifone belonged to a competing group. Whether one believed that a ‘plot’ was

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 5

‘real’ and constituted a nefarious conspiracy depended a great deal onone’s view of its goals and methods. Of course, many conspiracyaccusations turned out to be wrong or highly exaggerated – just like many‘social scientific’ projections. But contemporaries did not construe beliefin the existence and potential influence of conspiracies as a sign ofpsychosis, and neither should we. After all, it is not a priori delusional orpassé to think that some events occur because some people are covertlyworking together to make them happen.

That some modern historians have thought otherwise, Campbellsuggests, may be attributed to their overestimation of the reach of theearly modern state. To be sure, the development of armies, militias, andlegal institutions did enable princes to police their subjects more effectivelythan in previous eras, thereby reducing the frequency and destabilizingeffects of conspiracies in the form of armed noble revolts. Nevertheless,contemporaries had good reason to believe in the covert manipulation ofpower by groups seeking to impose their own political agendas. For if theearly modern state had increasingly more effective forces at its disposalto impose order and thereby repress conspiracies, those same instrumentswere susceptible to backstairs manipulation by agents located within thepower structure – be they royal mistresses, foreign spies, or suspectreligious orders – who could harness the growing power of the state fortheir own subversive ends.

In that light, it is perfectly plausible that – and Campbell shows just why– eighteenth-century French political culture before and after 1789provided fertile grounds for belief in conspiratorial activity. Among thepopular urban and agrarian classes, conspiracy helped explain a numberof puzzling phenomena that had life-and-death implications for mostpeople, such the fluctuation of grain prices and the incidence of taxes. Farfrom enjoying immunity to the phenomenon by their superior educationor exposure to the Enlightenment, the French elite, too, subscribed tobelief in conspiracy. This was hardly surprising in an absolute régimedominated by a single royal court, the primordial public space whereinpower was concentrated and negotiated and wherein organized factionslobbying for a cause or interest enjoyed no legally-protected status unlessauthorized by the king. When ministers and their protégés came and went– which happened with great frequency during the reigns of Louis XVand Louis XVI – there was often talk of a ‘cabal,’ if not a ‘conspiracy’launched on their behalf or against them. And when major court figuresdied prematurely or when two members of the same faction died in quicksuccession, rumours frequently spread that they had been poisoned. Thusit was that in the early eighteenth century much elite suspicion surroundedthe regent duc d’Orléans, whose enemies accused him of trying to usurp

6 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

the place of his charge, the young Louis XV. Likewise, the religiouslydissident Jansenists repeatedly peddled the notion that their enemies, the Jesuits, were conspiring to impose ‘despotism’ on France by covertlymanipulating the monarchy. So successful was the Jansenists’ campaignthat the Jesuits were exiled from France in 1762.

It was within this context that the Revolutionaries came to politicalconsciousness. Already inclined by their political education and the eventsof the pre-Revolution of 1787–1789 to think of politics in conspiratorialterms, the Revolutionaries construed their ‘victory’ over the forces ofreaction on 14 July 1789 as a precarious one that had nearly failed. AsSimon Burrows demonstrates, the departure of the émigré princes in thewake of the Bastille’s storming was but the prelude to a series of counter-Revolutionary plots over the succeeding decade, for which enough proofexists to conclude that a good many – if not all – of these plots had somefoundation in reality. That counter-Revolutionaries often resorted toconspiracy must obviously be in part explained ‘objectively,’ i.e., by thenature of the opportunities they had to overturn the Revolution. But asBurrows suggests in Chapter 7, their conspiracies were also motivated bytheir sincere belief that the Revolution constituted a series of plots directedagainst them, which they hoped to preempt via their own conspiratorialactivities.

Did counter-revolutionary conspiracy begin at the top? John Hardmanhas in Chapter 3 taken another look at the murky case for Louis XVI’salleged participation in a conspiratorial plot by examining three majorrevolutionary episodes. Again the results are paradoxical. Hardmanargues that given his situation and political convictions, the king couldhardly have acted other than as he did, that is to say, by deploying thestealth and deception characteristic of conspiracies. But Hardmancontends that if Louis XVI’s behavior was conspiratorial it was no more,and probably less, so than that of the National Assembly, the Feuillants,the Girondins, and the Jacobins, all of whom suspected him of covertlyundermining the Revolution. As in the case of the émigrés, both the kingand his adversaries felt driven and entitled to engage in conspiratorial-likebehavior by the fear that such activity was being plotted by theiradversaries, and there is ample evidence to support many of these beliefs.

The impact of such thinking, Barry Shapiro argues in Chapter 2, wasapparent as early as the autumn of 1789, when the National Assemblyprevented Mirabeau from assuming a ministerial position. There mayhave been good ‘objective’ reasons to throw obstacles in Mirabeau’s path,but Shapiro proposes that something else, something more elusive wasalso at work here. He points to an unconscious fear of executive poweraroused by the 14 July crisis, when the king, to whom the French people

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 7

continued to feel a strong filial attachment, appeared to have abandonedhis people, indeed, to have acquiesced in their extermination. If the French deputies were traumatized by Louis XVI’s alleged complicity in aconspiracy against the nation as Shapiro maintains, it suggests that‘conspiracy obsession’ among the elite after July did not decline as muchas Tackett contends, or at most, was so superficially repressed that this‘obsession’ could easily be reactivated each time the Assembly debatedthe limits of executive power. It can thus be affirmed that the Revolu-tionaries’ belief in conspiracy, although certainly given to distortion, didspring from perceptions of clear, present, and altogether real dangers.

But did it also arise from the very nature of the Revolutionary project,as Furet alleged? Discussions by Jill Walshaw and David Andress give usreasons to think so, reasons that go well beyond the ideological onesproposed by Furet. As Walshaw points out in Chapter 5, the gradual entryof previously excluded groups, e.g. the peasants, into the sphere ofnational politics had the unintended effect of creating new opportunitiesfor and theaters of political malfeasance, even when these groups wereacting on their traditional fears of a ‘famine plot’ directed against them.As a result, peasants who had been beneath suspicion of committing actsof lèse-majesté during the ancien régime were frequently accused ofcommitting acts of lèse-nation under the new order. In the eyes of Revolu-tionary authorities, peasants were worthy enough to merit some degree ofcitizenship, but they also appeared vulnerable to the seductions of elitecounter-Revolutionary plotters and thus required, particularly given theirlarge numbers, increasing surveillance, interrogation, and prosecution.National pride and an unwillingness to admit that the ‘good’ peasantryhad freely rejected the Revolution, Walshaw concludes, reenforced theRevolutionary will to attribute peasant malfeasance to the wiles ofcounterrevolutionary conspirators, even if such was not actually the case.Only in the nineteenth century, when the peasants had sufficiently turnedinto Frenchmen, did elite political culture begin to pay them the dubioushonor of acknowledging their capacity to conspire on their own initiative.

Similarly, Andress argues in Chapter 4 that in the cities conspiracyplayed a critical role not only in the political thinking of the underclasses,but also in how revolutionary authorities responded to the threats ofdisorder from below. A great deal of this belief and action was a residuefrom the ancien régime. Like the peasantry, the urban underclasses did notabandon traditional fears of conspiracies directed against them at theoutbreak of the Revolution; nor did the coming of a new democratic ethos incline Revolution authorities to put much faith in the people’sability to resist entrapment by counter-Revolutionaries or criminals. But,Andress shows, just when new organs of popular opinion, such as the

8 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

radical clubs and Parisian sections, provided fresh means for publiclyventilating popular conspiracy fears, the splintering and constant shiftingof organized power at the top created a growing caste of new enemies toindict for having conspired to inflict upon the people the old scourges ofstarvation and violence. Unlike Tackett, Andress does not considerVarennes a decisive turning point. But he does concur that the SeptemberMassacres of 1792 were a product of popular and elite fears of conspiracythat had been intensifying since 1791.

This widening and deepening spiral of suspicion helped produce theJacobin-dominated Terror, that phase of the Revolution which is generallyregarded as the most deeply informed by conspiracy fears and activity. AsMarisa Linton shows in Chapter 6, if the Jacobins were obsessed byconspiracies directed against them, they had grounds to be fearful.However much the lens of their education may have distorted theirperceptions in innumerable cases, they did face great and perfectly crediblethreats to their shaky régime stemming from undeniably real conspiracies.To be sure, some Jacobins inwardly doubted some of the more exagger-ated conspiratorial claims of the Terror, unlike Robespierre, whosefearsome reputation was enhanced by the supposition that he believedeverything he said. But at least until the Terror distanced itself from theurban popular movement in the spring of 1794, the government feltobliged to take seriously and act in response to the conspiracy fears of thesans-culottes, as it did, for example, when prosecuting Marie-Antoinetteinstead of exiling her as part of a diplomatic hostage exchange. In Linton’saccount, the fear that the Jacobins visited upon France through the Terror appears as a projection of their own escalating fears of the bloodyrepression that declared counterrevolutionaries might inflict and of thesinister conspiracies allegedly plotted by their fellow ‘patriots.’ Theparadox uncovered by Linton is that the more violent the Terror became,the less politically secure the Jacobins felt and had reason to feel. Evenwhen the military situation improved in the spring and summer of 1794,there appeared to be no exit from the vicious cycle of mutual recrimina-tion. Indeed, conspiracies seemed to be sprouting at every level ofgovernment and in all sectors of society: inflation reignited fears of famineplots among peasants and urban workers; a counter-Revolutionary revoltin the Vendée fanned belief in a conspiracy of refractory priests; factionaldisputes within the Committee of Public Safety produced fears of a coupd’état; and the protracted war with Europe engendered belief in a ForeignPlot to be executed by dissident ‘moderate’ and ‘ultra’ elements of theJacobin establishment. In the end, it is difficult to determine whether theTerror collapsed chiefly because its enemies undermined it or because ofits own internal contradictions.

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 9

How did conspiracy look after the Jacobin debacle? Gracchus Babeuf,the notorious organizer of the ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ against theDirectory, provided one reconsideration. As Laura Mason shows inChapter 8, Babeuf was a radical not merely in that he advocated aprimitive form of ‘communism,’ but also in that he inverted the dominantdiscourse of the Revolution by contending that conspiracy could be anoble enterprise if undertaken for the right purposes. Far from viewingconspiracy as antithetical to the republican tradition, Babeuf – drawingupon Machiavelli and Mably – impugned the Directory for having triedto repress just the sort of benign conspiratorial activity responsible forthe Revolution’s great leaps forward since 14 July 1789. The long-termcontribution of Babeuf and his colleague Buonarroti, Mason concludes,was to provide a bridge between the French Revolution and nineteenth-century conspiracies intended to complete the French Revolution’sunfinished agenda.

Mason’s analysis sets up very nicely the critical conundrum faced by French Revolutionaries that Thomas Kaiser examines in Chapter 9which concludes this volume. How could the Revolutionaries denounceconspiracy as the tool of despotism and at the same time engage inactivities so closely resembling conspiracies that counterrevolutionariesmight credibly brand them as such? Were most revolutionaries willing to embrace Babeuf’s idea that conspiracy might, in fact, be the vehicle for progress rather than its most deadly enemy? Kaiser’s answer is thatwhile most Revolutionaries did not formally embrace Babeuf’s view of the Revolution as a sort of conspiracy, neither could they abandon it altogether. Notwithstanding calls for slowing the pace of mutualaccusation that accelerated between 1789 and the Terror, Revolutionarygovernments seemed unable to resist the urge to unmask and prosecutealleged conspirators, including many erstwhile ‘patriots,’ with the resultthat conspiracy appeared nearly inseparable from the Revolution itselfright into the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. The implications of thisdevelopment for the legacy of the Revolution were profound. Not only didthe Revolution leave behind it a deeply divided French constituency, butin addition the uncertainties about the future that had always attended the Revolutionary project were passed down in the next century to itsmajor partisans. The Revolution would have to be fought again manytimes before it became safely institutionalized as the accepted politicalfoundation of the French Republic.

Despite the importance of the theme of conspiracy in the recenthistoriography of the Revolution, this is the first in-depth book on thesubject. The sum of its chapters is greater than that of the parts in that ourresearch supports wider conclusions of significance for our understanding

10 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

of the revolution – both in terms of the contemporary mentality andmodern historiography. We firmly agree with Hunt, Furet, and Tackettregarding the importance of conspiracy for an understanding of revolu-tionary politics, but our conclusions have given rise to a differentframework of explanation for its emergence, development and impact.Whereas Furet viewed belief in conspiracy as a product of Rousseauisticideology that filled the political vacuum left by the collapse of the ancienrégime, we argue that it emerged out of the ordinary processes andpractices of factional contestation associated with the court and of popularperceptions of elite politics as a plot directed against the interests of thelower orders. Unlike Tackett, we maintain that conspiracy was integralto every phase of the Revolution, although we agree that belief inconspiracy escalated in the run-up to and during the Terror, culminatingin what Tackett aptly calls ‘conspiracy obsession.’ However fantastical insome respects, conspiracy claims did have some basis in reality, for therewere very real plots to undermine the Revolution. At the same time,counterrevolutionary plots were inevitably perceived through the lens ofRevolutionary ideology, which made them appear as products of acorruption that threatened to fuel the restoration of despotism. As fearsof conspiracy intensified, all citizens, but especially those who stood outfor their ambition and/or wealth, became vulnerable to the accusationthat they were party to plots against the new order. The difficulty inidentifying conspirators only fueled fear and anxiety, and it partly explainsthe constant reference to masks and duplicity said to be concealing thenefarious activities of those who best spoke the language of virtue andpatriotism, the enemy within. Even Robespierre, the greatest master ofRevolutionary discourse and the so-called Incorruptible, was eventuallyfelled by the charge that he had participated in nefarious plots against theRevolution. Given the provenance of such accusations, it made perfectsense that in the wake of 9 Thermidor he – of all people – would beaccused of having secretly plotted to marry the daughter of the decapitatedking and queen.

In our view, the fear of conspiracy underlay the call for persistentdemonstrations of patriotic virtue under the Terror, which were intendedto allay suspicion of covert dealing with the dark forces of the counter-Revolution. But because patriotism itself had become a conspiratorialmask, professions of civisme carried increasingly less weight, and in the end everyone remained a potential conspirator. Many indeed were theseductions of power, ambition, wealth, and distinction allegedly profferedby Pitt and the Austrian princes, who appeared to have endless resourcesat their disposal. Their point of leverage was clearly the corruptibility ofthe human soul, a vulnerability that had been repeatedly underlined in

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 11

republican polemics and Christian discourse, especially of the Jansenistvariety, and had long been associated with the royal court, a public spaceallegedly devoid of virtue and patriotism. This was the original enemywithin.20 After repeated betrayals – both real and imagined – the Republicappeared increasingly more, not less, vulnerable to hijacking by the runningdogs of despotism, a vision that emerges clearly from Camille Desmoulins’Histoire des Brissotins, which depicts Brissot as the successor to Lafayetteand the duc d’Orléans as the leader of the counterrevolution. In the Jacobin perspective, the longue durée of the Revolution was punctuated bya series of interlinked conspiracies, culminating in the ‘foreign plot,’ whichsubsumed all the other conspiracies against the Republic. Little wonder,then, that the securing of liberty seemed an ever receding goal.

The nineteenth century would hardly put an end either to theorganization of conspiracies or to a belief in their far-reaching powers.Some among the radical left – taking their cue from Babeuf and Buonarotti– saw in benign conspiracy the only hope for a successful renewal of theRevolution and the fulfillment of its uncompleted agenda. The right, nevercertain – and for good reason – that the Restoration had removed onceand for all the threat of revolution, hunted down ‘Jacobins’ all overEurope after 1815 in the belief that Masons, Protestants, Jansenists and/orlatter-day Voltaires were plotting their conspiratorial revenge. In the viewof the right, the Revolution had merely been Act I of a horrific drama thatthreatened to continue if eternal vigilance over the activities of suspicioustypes were not maintained.

It is thus clear that the Revolution’s heritage consisted not merely ofcelebrated myths of “enlightenment” and “reason,” but also of fears andsuspicions of covert malfeasance which, however overlooked by textbookwriters, are no less part of our modern political culture. Although thetotal number of published works has, of course, vastly increased in the lasttwo centuries, it is still significant in our view that in the catalogues of theBritish Library and the Bibliothèque nationale works published duringthe Revolution with the words complot, conjuration, conspiration, orintrigue in their title account for only a tiny proportion of the total numberof such titles. The overwhelming majority – well over 90 percent – werepublished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In them, we discoveralleged plots by capitalists, Jews, the duchesse de Berry, freemasons, Nazis,communists, and spies, making one wonder which historical era has beenthe most obsessed with conspiratorial modes of historical explanation. In that context the preoccupation with conspiracy during the FrenchRevolution should be less surprising to us, for when we study those whoexecuted conspiracies and/or believed in them, we are really examiningourselves.

12 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell

Notes

1 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney(Indianapolis and New York, 1955), p. 11.

2 G. Lefebvre, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris, 1932); another example is A. Lestapis, La Conspiration de Batz (1793–1794) (Paris, 1969).

3 R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays(New York, 1965).

4 G. S. Wood, ‘Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in theEighteenth Century,’ The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser. 19 (1982),p. 404.

5 B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (CambridgeMA, 1967); G. S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787(Chapel Hill, 1969).

6 Wood, ‘Conspiracy,’ p. 429.7 Ibid., p. 441.8 J. Roberts, The Mythology of Secret Societies (London, 1972).9 The phrase is taken from H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The

Re-Orientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, 1958),chap. 7.

10 For a recent historiographical analysis, See P. R. Campbell, ed., The Originsof the French Revolution (Houndmills and New York, 2006), introduction.

11 F. Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris, 1978).12 L. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Los

Angeles, and London, 1994). See also J. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris, 1971).

13 T. E. Kaiser, ‘Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia,and the Queen,’ French History 14 (2000), pp. 241–271; Kaiser, ‘From theAustrian Committee to the Foreign Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia,and the Terror,’ French Historical Studies 26 (2003), pp. 579–617.

14 T. Tackett, ‘Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elitesand the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792,’ American Historical Review105 (2000), pp. 691–713; ‘Collective Panics in the Early French Revolution,1789–1791: A Comparative Perspective,’ French History 17 (2003), pp. 149–171.

15 T. Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge MA, 2003).16 B. Coward and J. Swann, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in Early

Modern Europe: From the Waldensians to the French Revolution (Hampshireand Burlington, 2004.)

17 François-Joachim Duport de Tertre, Histoire des conjurations, conspirationset révolutions célèbres, tant anciennes que modernes, 10 vols (Paris,1754–60), 1, pp. 1–2.

18 Some of these variations are discussed in J. Van Horn Melton, The Rise ofthe Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge UK, 2001), pp. 70–75.

19 M. Knights ‘Faults on Both Sides: The Conspiracies of Party Politics underthe Later Stuarts,’ in Coward and Swann, Conspiracies, pp. 153–172.

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Introduction: conspiracy issues and debates 13

20 On the long history of religious discourses of conspiracy, see the major studyby D. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvinto the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996). This book detailsnumerous and repeated aspects of conspiratorial thinking, by both Jesuits andJansenists, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

14 Kaiser, Linton, and Campbell