Table Of ContentWILL & CIRCUMSTANCE
WILL &
CIRCUMSTANCE
Montesquieu, Rousseau and
the French Revolution
Norman Hampson
Duckworth
First published in 1983 by
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
The Old Piano Factory
43 Gloucester Crescent
London N W1
1983 by Norman Hampson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 0' '7 8 (cased)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hampson, Norman
Will & circumstance.
1. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de
2. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3. Republicanism—
France
I. Title
944.04 DC220
ISBN 0-7156-1697-8
Photoset in North Wales by
Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd
and printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge
Contents
Preface vii
Part I: The Philosophes
1. Montesquieu 3
2. Rousseau 26
Part II: The Writers
3. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Revolutionary
Generation 55
4. Mercier ' 65
5. Brissot 84
6. Marat 107
7. Robespierre 129
Part III: The Revolutionaries
8. Revolutionary Circumstances 149
9. Brissot II 171
10. Marat II 193
11. Robespierre II 216
12. Saint-Just 244
Epilogue 267
Appendix: A comparison between the opinions of
Brissot and Robespierre 271
Bibliography 276
Index 279
To the York History Department
Preface
Various factors combined to make me want to write this book. I
had been convinced for a long time that modern liberal and
collectivist theories of government originated in the eighteenth
century, in the writings of Montesquieu and Rousseau. Several
years ago, when I wrote a short book on the Enlightenment, I was
quite rightly reproachad-fnr treating these ideas, and the society
in which they originated, in isolation from each other. I did not
share my reviewer’s belief that all that was needed to bring them
together was to say that the Enlightenment was the ideology of
thp hnnrgpnisjjp^nt I was ready enough to agree with him that
political theories must bear some relation to the society in which
they were born. At the time, I could not see what it was or how to
set about discovering it. I gradually came to understand that any
meaningful search for such a connection must involve the
detailed examination of a short period. Any general enquiry over
a long span of time would be only too likely to mean looking for
evidence to support one’s initial assumptions, and there is
always so much evidence around that a more or less plausible
case can be made out for almost anything. I was not so naive as
to imagine that tramping along a few narrow roads would
somehow relieve me of the historian’s version of original sin and
allow the facts to speak for themselves, but I thought it might
give them a better chance. My initial assumptions, whether
conscious or not, were still likely to reappear as conclusions, but I
would have a better prospect of making some unexpected
acquaintances on the road than if I sped over great distances by
motorway.
Quite apart from this, the writings of Robert Darnton and, in
his more popular style, Claude Manceron, revealed to me the
absurdity of treating the men of the French Revolution as though
viii Will & Circumstance
they had all been born in 1789. By that time the great majority of
them had already reached their maturity, and although the
revolutionary years were to impose their own imperatives and
constraints, the men who reacted to them had been formed in a
different period, and that formation was bound to influence their
reactions. Any study of the ideology of the French Revolution
had therefore to begin with the intellectual apprenticeship of the
revolutionaries.
Somewhere at the back of my mind there must have been lying
J.L.Talmon’s Origins of totalitarian democracy, which I read
many years ago. On the whole this got rather a frosty reception
from historians of the French Revolution. This may have been
partly because it told them things they were not keen to hear.
Recent political controversies in England make it seem more
relevant and perhaps more plausible.
Once I had decided on the field, the choice of political
philosophers posed no problems. The most superficial glance at
what was being written in the 1780s showed that everyone drew
his inspiration from Montesquieu or Rousseau or, more often,
from both. Voltaire may have done as much as either of them to
determine the general character of the age, but his specifically
political theories, and notably his 'TTlVlmation" towards
enlightened absolutism, had little appeal to the men who were
going to make the rrencl^RevOluliun.—Montesquieu and
Rousseau, on the~dlTier build, wcicjjj^utedt paraphrased and
misunderstood by everyone who wrote about politics. From my
point-ttfvTew, of coursgrthe-miounde^tgnHingg were more to the
point thanthe findings of rrmdern criticlsrir:-
The nfSCstep was less obvious. A possible line of approach
would have been to look at political issues, especially those
relating to the transformation of almost all French institutions
between 1789 and 1791, to see on what basis, and in terms of
what principles, these changes were discussed. This still tempts
me. It might, however, have confused both author and reader in
a maze of detail and it would have put the emphasis on theories
rather than on people. As a historian, and not a political theorist,
my concern is primarily with what some men thought and did,
rather than with ideas themselves. This pointed towards a
biographical approach but left me with the problem of choosing
a team. Ideally, I wanted men who had written enough before
Preface ix
1789 for their attitudes to be identifiable, and then went on to
take a leading part in the revolution. Necker, Condorcet and
Babeuf were obvious candidates, but they have recently been the
subject of excellent books, by Henri Grange, K.M.Baker and
Barrie Rose, and there seemed no point in reploughing well-
cultivated ground. In the end, after Billaud-Varenne, Carra and
Gorsas proved disappointing, I opted for Brissot, Marat,
Mercier, Robespierre and Saint-Just. In this distinguished
company, Mercier is something of a political lightweight, but he
was the only one of them who had actually seen Montesquieu
and he claimed to have known Rousseau quite well. He also
devoted two volumes to what he optimistically described as an
investigation of Rousseau’s contribution to the revolution. Saint-
Just was too young to have published anything before 1789 but
from 1791 onwards he was so active in both theory and practice
that it seemed reasonable to make an exception in his favour.
Granted Mercier’s political nullity, this left me with three
Montagnards to one Girondin (Brissot). This does not matter
much in practice since I hope to have demonstrated that both
sides shared the same basic principles and responded to the
pressure of circumstances in similar ways.
The title of the book suggested itself at an early stage and I
was encouraged to find later that the people about whom I was
writing were themselves rather fond of talking about la volonte
and la force des choses. The choice between volontarism and
determinism was only one of many issues and it cannot be
separated from the others. No one carried determinism to the
point of fatalism and one of the constant concerns of the
volontarists was to create by an effort of will the most desirable
combination of conditioning forces (Saint-Just’s ‘republican
institutions’). It is a way of looking at things that has its uses if
one does not take it too far.
I shall have failed altogether if I give the impression of
claiming to describe what the French Revolution was ‘really’
about. It was about so many other things as well. I am convinced
that it is too complicated and too contradictory to be fitted into
any book, however long. The same things have a particular
significance when viewed from one perspective and a different
one when viewed from another. They cannot have both at the
same time, even though each may be ‘true’. The most that one
Will & Circumstance
X
can hope to do at one time is to illuminate part of the evidence
from one point of view. I do believe that if the men that I have
described in this book could read what I have written about
them, while they would not accept my criticism, they would
understand what I was trying to say. This is not necessarily true
of everything that has been written about the French Revolution.
It is a pleasure to have this opportunity of acknowledging some
of my debts: to the generosity of the British Academy in helping
to finance some of the early research; to Michel Fleury, President
of the IVe Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, for
accomodation in the Hotel Chalon-Luxembourg, which gives a
special flavour to work in Paris; to Harry Fairhurst, the librarian
of the University of York, for helping me to get hold of books; to
Bill Doyle and Paul Ginsborg for making me think about what I
thought I thought.
1983 N.H.
