Abstract
While Gothic literature and pamphlets on the Bastille revealed an ambivalence towards the prioritizing of transparency in French culture, this drive for publicité reached its culmination during the period of the Terror (1793–1794), as many scholars have noted. What many historians have overlooked, however, has been the surprising continuity between attitudes towards transparency during the Terror and attitudes afterward. While it might be expected that there would be a reaction to this mania for transparency, just as there was a political reaction after Thermidor, in fact prominent so-called Thermidoreans such as Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant found many reasons for the Terror, but they did not pinpoint this aspect of the political culture.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques-Louis David, Letter to the Comité de Sureté Générale, 29 Fructidor Year 2, BNF, NAF 307.
- 2.
Augustin Robespierre, Letter to Maximilien Robespierre, Year 2, BNF, NAF 312.
- 3.
Augustin Robespierre, Letter to Maximilien Robespierre.
- 4.
For recent books on the period of the revolution after Thermidor, see Marc Belissa and Yannick Bosc, Le Directoire: La république sans la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2018); Howard G. Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2006); an older but excellent book on Thermidor is Bronislaw Baczko’s Ending the Terror: The French Revolution after Robespierre, trans. Michel Petheram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1994).
- 5.
See Marisa Linton, Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Timothy Tackett, The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2015); Visages de la Terreur: l’exception politique de l’an II, ed. Michel Biard and Hervé Leuwers (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014); David Andress, The Terror: Civil War in the French Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2005); Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2012); Annie Jourdan, Nouvelle Histoire de la Révolution (Paris: Flammarion, 2018).
- 6.
See François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 1981); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
- 7.
Colin Lucas, “The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 68: 4 (1996): 768–785, 780. See also Jacques Gilhaumou, “Fragments of a Discourse of Denunciation (1789–1794),” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Vol. 4, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987). For a recent article that deals with transparency in the early revolution, see Katlyn Carter, “The Comités des recherches: Procedural Secrecy and the Origins of the French Revolution,” French History 32: 1 (2018): 45–65; see also Timothy Tackett, “Dénoncer au début de la Révolution: le cas de Bordeaux, 1791–1793,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 106 (2018): 3–30.
- 8.
Colin Lucas, “The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution,” Journal of Modern History 68: 4 (1996): 768–785, 769.
- 9.
Colin Lucas, “The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution,” 783.
- 10.
Lucas, 779.
- 11.
J. L. Tallien, Letter to the Section Committee of Montblanc (22 Prairial Year 2) NAF 312.
- 12.
Lucas, 775.
- 13.
Duchesne, “Le Patriotisme opprimé,” (8 June 1793) BNF, NAF 2719.
- 14.
Duchesne, “Le Patriotisme opprimé.”
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Letter from Beaumont to Surveillance Committee of Versailles (28 July 1793), BNF, NAF 2719.
- 20.
Letter from Beaumont to Surveillance Committee of Versailles (28 July 1793).
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Lucas, 774.
- 23.
Révolutions de Paris (7–10 July 1793).
- 24.
Letter from Beaumont to Surveillance Committee of Versailles (28 July 1793).
- 25.
See Ronald Schechter, A Genealogy of Terror of Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018).
- 26.
Jean-Joseph Mounier, the former member of the National Assembly, expressed skepticism in these terms. The emigré journalist Mallet du Pan wrote that Voltaire could not have been part of a revolutionary conspiracy as Barruel claimed, though he believed that the Enlightenment had caused the French Revolution. Joseph de Maistre, a member of the Freemasons, was skeptical of Barruel’s claims of the Freemasons’ involvement in the conspiracy. See Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27: 1 (1993): 27–60, 31.
- 27.
See Amos Hofman, “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel’s Theory of Conspiracy,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27: 1 (1993): 27–60; See also Timothy Tackett, “Conspiracy Obsession in a Time of Revolution: French Elites and the Origins of the Terror, 1789–1792,” The American Historical Review 105: 3 (2000): 691–713.
- 28.
Augustin Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme (London: de l’Imprimerie Françoise, chez Ph. Le Boussonnier and Co., 1797), i–v.
- 29.
Barruel, Mémoires, iii.
- 30.
Barruel, 9.
- 31.
Ibid., 9–14.
- 32.
Ibid., 15.
- 33.
Ibid., 22.
- 34.
Ibid., 30.
- 35.
Ibid., 45.
- 36.
Ibid., 54, 66–70.
- 37.
Ibid., 57.
- 38.
See Conspiracy in the French Revolution, ed. Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007); see also Geoffrey Cubitt, “Robespierre and Conspiracy Theories,” in Robespierre, ed. Colin Haydon and William Doyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); R.B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1978); Pierre Serna, “Pistes de recherches: Du secret de la monarchie à la république des secrets,” in Secret et république, 1795–1840, ed. Bernard Gainot and Pierre Serna (Clermont-Ferrand: Centre d’histoire Espaces et cultures de Clermond-Ferrand, 2004); Mette Harder, “A Second Terror: The Purges of French Revolutionary Legislators after Thermidor,” French Historical Studies 38: 1 (2015): 33–60.
- 39.
See Pierre Serna, “Pistes de recherches: Du secret de la monarchie à la république des secrets,” in Secret et république, 1795–1840; Laura Mason, “Never Was a Plot So Holy: Gracchus Babeuf and the End of the French Revolution,” in Conspiracy in the French Revolution, ed. Peter R. Campbell, Thomas E. Kaiser, and Marisa Linton; idem. Mason, Laura. The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022); R.B. Rose, Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist.
- 40.
See Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution; Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution.
- 41.
Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principle Events of the French Revolution, ed. Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008), 607.
- 42.
Germaine de Staël, Major Writings of Germaine de Staël, trans. Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 362–363, 367–368.
- 43.
De Staël, Considerations, 316.
- 44.
Ibid., 49.
- 45.
Ibid., 58, 62.
- 46.
De Staël, Major Writings of Germaine de Staël, 369.
- 47.
Benjamin Constant, Les Effets de la Terreur, 16.
- 48.
Constant, 14–15.
- 49.
Ibid., 18, 21.
- 50.
Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, ed. Etienne Hofmann (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 108–109.
- 51.
Constant, Principles, 109.
- 52.
See Biancamaria Fontana, Constant and the Post-revolutionary Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 15; see also Steven K. Vincent, Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 53.
Fontana, 91.
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Bauer, N. (2023). The Marat of Versailles: Advocates of Transparency During and After the Terror. In: Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1_7
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