How Intellectual Salons Paved the Way to the French Revolution

<h1 class=”entry-title” style=”font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;”>From Salon to Guillotine Augustin Cochin on the French Revolution</h1>
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Augustin Cochin <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0972061673/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=countercurren-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0972061673″>Organizing the Revolution: Selections From Augustin Cochin</a><img border=”0″ width=”1″ height=”1″ src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=countercurren-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0972061673" style=”border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;” /> Translated by Nancy Derr Polin with a Preface by Claude Polin Rockford, Ill.: Chronicles Press, 2007
The Rockford Institute’s publication of Organizing the Revolution
marks the first appearance in our language of an historian whose
insights apply not only to the French Revolution but to much of modern
politics as well. 
Augustin Cochin
(1876–1916) was born into a family that had distinguished itself for
three generations in the antiliberal “Social Catholicism” movement. He
studied at the Ecole des Chartes and began to specialize in the study of
the Revolution in 1903. Drafted in 1914 and wounded four times, he
continued his researches during periods of convalescence. But he always
requested to be returned to the front, where he was killed on July 8,
1916 at the age of thirty-nine.
Cochin was a philosophical
historian in an era peculiarly unable to appreciate that rare talent. He
was trained in the supposedly “scientific” methods of research
formalized in his day under the influence of positivism, and was in fact
an irreproachably patient and thorough investigator of primary
archives. Yet he never succumbed to the prevailing notion that facts and
documents would tell their own story in the absence of a human
historian’s empathy and imagination. He always bore in mind that the
goal of historical research was a distinctive type of understanding.
Both
his archival and his interpretive labors were dedicated to elucidating
the development of Jacobinism, in which he (rightly) saw the central,
defining feature of the French Revolution. François Furet wrote: “his
approach to the problem of Jacobinism is so original that it has been
either not understood or buried, or both.”[1
Most of his work
appeared only posthumously. His one finished book is a detailed study of
the first phase of the Revolution as it played out in Brittany: it was
published in 1925 by his collaborator Charles Charpentier. He had also
prepared (with Charpentier) a complete collection of the decrees of the
revolutionary government (August 23, 1793–July 27, 1794). His mother
arranged for the publication of two volumes of theoretical writings: The Philosophical Societies and Modern Democracy (1921), a collection of lectures and articles; and The Revolution and Free Thought (1924),
an unfinished work of interpretation. These met with reviews ranging
from the hostile to the uncomprehending to the dismissive.

“Revisionist”
historian François Furet led a revival of interest in Cochin during the
late 1970s, making him the subject of a long and appreciative chapter
in his important study Interpreting the French Revolution and
putting him on a par with Tocqueville. Cochin’s two volumes of
theoretical writings were reprinted shortly thereafter by Copernic, a
French publisher associated with GRECE and the “nouvelle droit.”The
book under review consists of selections in English from these volumes.
The editor and translator may be said to have succeeded in their
announced aim: “to present his unfinished writings in a clear and
coherent form.”Between the death of the pioneering
antirevolutionary historian Hippolyte Taine in 1893 and the rise of
“revisionism” in the 1960s, study of the French Revolution was dominated
by a series of Jacobin sympathizers: Aulard, Mathiez, Lefevre, Soboul.
During the years Cochin was producing his work, much public attention
was directed to polemical exchanges between Aulard, a devotee of Danton,
and his former student Mathiez, who had become a disciple of
Robespierre. Both men remained largely oblivious to the vast ocean of
assumptions they shared.Cochin published a critique of Aulard and
his methods in 1909; an abridged version of this piece is included in
the volume under review. Aulard’s principal theme was that the
revolutionary government had been driven to act as it did by
circumstance:This argument [writes
Cochin tends to prove that the ideas and sentiments of the men of ’93
had nothing abnormal in themselves, and if their deeds shock us it is
because we forget their perils, the circumstances; [and that any man
with common sense and a heart would have acted as they did in their
place. Aulard allows this apology to include even the very last acts of
the Terror. Thus we see that the Prussian invasion caused the massacre
of the priests of the Abbey, the victories of la Rochejacquelein [in the
Vendée uprising caused the Girondins to be guillotined, [etc.. In
short, to read Aulard, the Revolutionary government appears a mere
makeshift rudder in a storm, “a wartime expedient.” (p. 49)Aulard
had been strongly influenced by positivism, and believed that the most
accurate historiography would result from staying as close as possible
to documents of the period; he is said to have conducted more extensive
archival research than any previous historian of the Revolution. But
Cochin questioned whether such a return to the sources would necessarily produce truer history:Mr.
Aulard’s sources—minutes of meetings, official reports, newspapers,
patriotic pamphlets—are written by patriots [i.e., revolutionaries, and
mostly for the public. He was to find the argument of defense
highlighted throughout these documents. In his hands he had a ready-made
history of the Revolution, presenting—beside each of the acts of “the
people,” from the September massacres to the law of Prairial—a
ready-made explanation. And it is this history he has written. (p. 65)In
fact, says Cochin, justification in terms of “public safety” or “self-
defense” is an intrinsic characteristic of democratic governance, and
quite independent of circumstance:When
the acts of a popular power attain a certain degree of arbitrariness
and become oppressive, they are always presented as acts of self-defense
and public safety. Public safety is the necessary fiction in democracy,
as divine right is under an authoritarian regime. [The argument for
defense appeared with democracy itself. As early as July 28, 1789
[i.e., two weeks after the storming of the Bastille one of the leaders
of the party of freedom proposed to establish a search committee, later
called “general safety,” that would be able to violate the privacy of
letters and lock people up without hearing their defense. (pp. 62–63)(Americans of the “War on Terror” era, take note.)But in fact, says Cochin, the appeal to defense is nearly everywhere a post facto rationalization rather than a real motive:Why
were the priests persecuted at Auch? Because they were plotting, claims
the “public voice.” Why were they not persecuted in Chartes? Because
they behaved well there.How often can we not turn this argument around?Why
did the people in Auch (the Jacobins, who controlled publicity) say the
priests were plotting? Because the people (the Jacobins) were
persecuting them. Why did no one say so in Chartes? Because they were
left alone there.In 1794 put a true
Jacobin in Caen, and a moderate in Arras, and you could be sure by the
next day that the aristocracy of Caen, peaceable up till then, would
have “raised their haughty heads,” and in Arras they would go home. (p.
67)In other words, Aulard’s “objective” method of staying close
to contemporary documents does not scrape off a superfluous layer of
interpretation and put us directly in touch with raw fact—it merely
takes the self-understanding of the revolutionaries at face value,
surely the most naïve style of interpretation imaginable. Cochin
concludes his critique of Aulard with a backhanded compliment, calling
him “a master of Jacobin orthodoxy. With him we are sure we have the
‘patriotic’ version. And for this reason his work will no doubt remain
useful and consulted” (p. 74). Cochin could not have foreseen that the
reading public would be subjected to another half century of the same
thing, fitted out with ever more “original documentary research” and
flavored with ever increasing doses of Marxism.But rather than
attending further to these methodological squabbles, let us consider how
Cochin can help us understand the French Revolution and the
“progressive” politics it continues to inspire.It has always been
easy for critics to rehearse the Revolution’s atrocities: the prison
massacres, the suppression of the Vendée, the Law of Suspects, noyades
and guillotines. The greatest atrocities of the 1790s from a strictly
humanitarian point of view, however, occurred in Poland, and some of
these were actually counter-revolutionary reprisals. The
perennial fascination of the French Revolution lies not so much in the
extent of its cruelties and injustices, which the Caligulas and Genghis
Khans of history may occasionally have equaled, but in the sense that
revolutionary tyranny was something different in kind, something uncanny and unprecedented. Tocqueville wrote ofsomething
special about the sickness of the French Revolution which I sense
without being able to describe. My spirit flags from the effort to gain a
clear picture of this object and to find the means of describing it
fairly. Independently of everything that is comprehensible in the French
Revolution there is something that remains inexplicable.Part of
the weird quality of the Revolution was that it claimed, unlike Genghis
and his ilk, to be massacring in the name of liberty, equality, and
fraternity. But a deeper mystery which has fascinated even its enemies
is the contrast between its vast size and force and the negligible
ability of its apparent “leaders” to unleash or control it: the men do
not measure up to the events. For Joseph de Maistre the explanation
could only be the direct working of Divine Providence; none but the
Almighty could have brought about so great a cataclysm by means of such
contemptible characters. For Augustin Barruel it was proof of a vast,
hidden conspiracy (his ideas have a good claim to constitute the world’s
original “conspiracy theory”). Taine invoked a “Jacobin psychology”
compounded of abstraction, fanaticism, and opportunism.Cochin
found all these notions of his antirevolutionary predecessors
unsatisfying. Though Catholic by religion and family background, he
quite properly never appeals to Divine Providence in his scholarly work
to explain events (p. 71). He also saw that the revolutionaries
were too fanatical and disciplined to be mere conspirators bent on
plunder (pp. 56–58; 121–122; 154). Nor is an appeal to the psychology of
the individual Jacobin useful as an explanation of the Revolution: this
psychology is itself precisely what the historian must try to explain
(pp. 60–61).Cochin viewed Jacobinism not primarily as an ideology but as a form of society with its own inherent rules and constraints independent of the desires and intentions of its members.
This central intuition—the importance of attending to the social
formation in which revolutionary ideology and practice were elaborated
as much as to ideology, events, or leaders themselves—distinguishes his
work from all previous writing on the Revolution and was the guiding
principle of his archival research. He even saw himself as a
sociologist, and had an interest in Durkheim unusual for someone of his
Catholic traditionalist background.The term he employs for the type of association he is interested in is société de pensée,
literally “thought-society,” but commonly translated “philosophical
society.” He defines it as “an association founded without any other
object than to elicit through discussion, to set by vote, to spread by
correspondence—in a word, merely to express—the common opinion of its
members. It is the organ of [public opinion reduced to its function as
an organ” (p. 139).It is no trivial circumstance when such
societies proliferate through the length and breadth of a large kingdom.
Speaking generally, men are either born into associations (e.g.,
families, villages, nations) or form them in order to accomplish
practical ends (e.g., trade unions, schools, armies). Why were
associations of mere opinion thriving so luxuriously in France
on the eve of the Revolution? Cochin does not really attempt to explain
the origin of the phenomenon he analyzes, but a brief historical review
may at least clarify for my readers the setting in which these unusual
societies emerged.About the middle of the seventeenth century,
during the minority of Louis XIV, the French nobility staged a clumsy
and disorganized revolt in an attempt to reverse the long decline of
their political fortunes. At one point, the ten year old King had to
flee for his life. When he came of age, Louis put a high priority upon
ensuring that such a thing could never happen again. The means he chose
was to buy the nobility off. They were relieved of the obligations
traditionally connected with their ancestral estates and encouraged to
reside in Versailles under his watchful eye; yet they retained full
exemption from the ruinous taxation that he inflicted upon the rest of
the kingdom. This succeeded in heading off further revolt, but also
established a permanent, sizeable class of persons with a great deal of
wealth, no social function, and nothing much to do with themselves.The salon became the central institution of French life. Men and women of leisure met for gossip, dalliance, witty badinage,
personal (not political) intrigue, and discussion of the latest books
and plays and the events of the day. Refinement of taste and the social
graces reached an unusual pitch. It was this cultivated leisure class
which provided both setting and audience for the literary works of the grand siècle.The
common social currency of the age was talk: outside Jewish yeshivas,
the world had probably never beheld a society with a higher ratio of
talk to action. A small deed, such as Montgolfier’s ascent in a hot air
balloon, could provide matter for three years of self-contented chatter
in the salons.Versailles was the epicenter of this world; Paris
imitated Versailles; larger provincial cities imitated Paris. Eventually
there was no town left in the realm without persons ambitious of
imitating the manners of the Court and devoted to cultivating and
discussing whatever had passed out of fashion in the capital two years
earlier. Families of the rising middle class, as soon as they had means
to enjoy a bit of leisure, aspired to become a part of salon society.Toward
the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in both subject matter and
tone came over this world of elegant discourse. The traditional saloniste gave way to the philosophe,
an armchair statesman who, despite his lack of real responsibilities,
focused on public affairs and took himself and his talk with extreme
seriousness. In Cochin’s words: “mockery replaced gaiety, and politics
pleasure; the game became a career, the festivity a ceremony, the clique
the Republic of Letters” (p. 38). Excluding men of leisure from
participation in public life, as Louis XIV and his successors had done,
failed to extinguish ambition from their hearts. Perhaps in part by way
of compensation, the philosophes graduallycreated
an ideal republic alongside and in the image of the real one, with its
own constitution, its magistrates, its common people, its honors and its
battles. There they studied the same problems—political, economic,
etc.—and there they discussed agriculture, art, ethics, law, etc. There
they debated the issues of the day and judged the officeholders. In
short, this little State was the exact image of the larger one with only
one difference—it was not real. Its citizens had neither direct
interest nor responsible involvement in the affairs they discussed.
Their decrees were only wishes, their battles conversations, their
studies games. It was the city of thought. That was its
essential characteristic, the one both initiates and outsiders forgot
first, because it went without saying. (pp. 123–24)Part of the
point of a philosophical society was this very seclusion from reality.
Men from various walks of life—clergymen, officers, bankers—could forget
their daily concerns and normal social identities to converse as equals
in an imaginary world of “free thought”: free, that is, from
attachments, obligations, responsibilities, and any possibility of
failure.In the years leading up to the Revolution, countless such organizations vied for followers and influence: Amis Réunis, Philalèthes, Chevaliers Bienfaisants, Amis de la Verité,
several species of Freemasons, academies, literary and patriotic
societies, schools, cultural associations and even agricultural
societies—all barely dissimulating the same utopian political spirit
(“philosophy”) behind official pretenses of knowledge, charity, or
pleasure. They “were all more or less connected to one another and
associated with those in Paris. Constant debates, elections,
delegations, correspondence, and intrigue took place in their midst, and
a veritable public life developed through them” (p. 124).Because of the speculative character of the whole enterprise, the philosophes’
ideas could not be verified through action. Consequently, the societies
developed criteria of their own, independent of the standards of
validity that applied in the world outside:Whereas
in the real world the arbiter of any notion is practical testing and
its goal what it actually achieves, in this world the arbiter is the
opinion of others and its aim their approval. That is real which others
see, that true which they say, that good of which they approve. Thus the
natural order is reversed: opinion here is the cause and not, as in
real life, the effect. (p. 39)Many matters of deepest concern to
ordinary men naturally got left out of discussion: “You know how
difficult it is in mere conversation to mention faith or feeling,”
remarks Cochin (p. 40; cf. p. 145). The long chains of reasoning at once
complex and systematic which mark genuine philosophy—and are produced
by the stubborn and usually solitary labors of exceptional men—also have
no chance of success in a society of philosophes (p. 143).
Instead, a premium gets placed on what can be easily expressed and
communicated, which produces a lowest-common-denominator effect (p.
141).The philosophes made a virtue of viewing the world
surrounding them objectively and disinterestedly. Cochin finds an
important clue to this mentality in a stock character of
eighteenth-century literature: the “ingenuous man.” Montesquieu invented
him as a vehicle for satire in the Persian Letters: an
emissary from the King of Persia sending witty letters home describing
the queer customs of Frenchmen. The idea caught on and eventually became
a new ideal for every enlightened mind to aspire to. Cochin calls it
“philosophical savagery”:Imagine an
eighteenth-century Frenchman who possesses all the material attainments
of the civilization of his time—cultivation, education, knowledge, and
taste—but without any of the real well-springs, the instincts and
beliefs that have created and breathed life into all this, that have
given their reason for these customs and their use for these resources.
Drop him into this world of which he possesses everything except the
essential, the spirit, and he will see and know everything but
understand nothing. Everything shocks him. Everything appears illogical
and ridiculous to him. It is even by this incomprehension that
intelligence is measured among savages. (p. 43; cf. p. 148)In other words, the eighteenth-century philosophes
were the original “deracinated intellectuals.” They rejected as
“superstitions” and “prejudices” the core beliefs and practices of the
surrounding society, the end result of a long process of refining and
testing by men through countless generations of practical endeavor. In
effect, they created in France what a contributor to this journal has
termed a “culture of critique”—an intellectual milieu marked by
hostility to the life of the nation in which its participants were
living. (It would be difficult, however, to argue a significant
sociobiological basis in the French version.)This gradual
withdrawal from the real world is what historians refer to as the
development of the Enlightenment. Cochin calls it an “automatic purging”
or “fermentation.” It is not a rational progression like the stages in an argument, however much the philosophes
may have spoken of their devotion to “Reason”; it is a mechanical
process which consists of “eliminating the real world in the mind
instead of reducing the unintelligible in the object” (p. 42). Each
stage produces a more rarified doctrine and human type, just as each
elevation on a mountain slope produces its own kind of vegetation. The
end result is the world’s original “herd of independent minds,” a
phenomenon which would have horrified even men such as Montesquieu and
Voltaire who had characterized the first societies.It is interesting to note that, like our own multiculturalists, many of the philosophes
attempted to compensate for their estrangement from the living
traditions of French civilization by a fascination with foreign laws and
customs. Cochin aptly compares civilization to a living plant which
slowly grows “in the bedrock of experience under the rays of faith,” and
likens this sort of philosophe to a child mindlessly plucking the blossoms from every plant he comes across in order to decorate his own sandbox (pp. 43–44).Accompanying
the natural “fermentation” of enlightened doctrine, a process of
selection also occurs in the membership of the societies. Certain men
are simply more suited to the sort of empty talking that goes on there:young
men because of their age; men of law, letters or discourse because of
their profession; the skeptics because of their convictions; the vain
because of their temperament; the superficial because of their [poor
education. These people take to it and profit by it, for it leads to a
career that the world here below does not offer them, a world in which
their deficiencies become strengths. On the other hand, true, sincere
minds with a penchant for the concrete, for efficacy rather than
opinion, find themselves disoriented and gradually drift away. (pp.
40–41)In a word, the glib drive out the wise.The societies
gradually acquired an openly partisan character: whoever agreed with
their views, however stupid, was considered “enlightened.” By 1776,
d’Alembert acknowledged this frankly, writing to Frederick the Great:
“We are doing what we can to fill the vacant positions in the Académie
française in the manner of the banquet of the master of the household in
the Gospel: with the crippled and lame men of literature” (p. 35).
Mediocrities such as Mably, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Condorcet, and Raynal,
whose works Cochin calls “deserts of insipid prose” were accounted
ornaments of their age. The philosophical societies functioned like
hired clappers making a success of a bad play (p. 46).On the other hand, all who did not belong to the “philosophical” party were subjected to a “dry terror”:Prior
to the bloody Terror of ’93, in the Republic of Letters there was, from
1765 to 1780, a dry terror of which the Encyclopedia was the Committee
of Public Safety and d’Alembert was the Robespierre. It mowed down
reputations as the other chopped off heads: its guillotine was
defamation, “infamy” as it was then called: The term, originating with
Voltaire [écrasez l’infâme!, was used in the provincial
societies with legal precision. “To brand with infamy” was a
well-defined operation consisting of investigation, discussion,
judgment, and finally execution, which meant the public sentence of
“contempt.” (p. 36; cf. p. 123)Having said something of the thought and behavioral tendencies of the philosophes,
let us turn to the manner in which their societies were
constituted—which, as we have noted, Cochin considered the essential
point. We shall find that they possess in effect two
constitutions. One is the original and ostensible arrangement, which our
author characterizes as “the democratic principle itself, in its
principle and purity” (p. 137). But another pattern of governance
gradually takes shape within them, hidden from most of the members
themselves. This second, unacknowledged constitution is what allows the
societies to operate effectively, even as it contradicts the original
“democratic” ideal.The ostensible form of the philosophical society is direct democracy.
All members are free and equal; no one is forced to yield to anyone
else; no one speaks on behalf of anyone else; everyone’s will is
accomplished. Rousseau developed the principles of such a society in his
Social Contract. He was less concerned with the glaringly
obvious practical difficulties of such an arrangement than with the
question of legitimacy. He did not ask: “How could perfect democracy
function and endure in the real word?” but rather: “What must a society
whose aim is the common good do to be founded lawfully?”Accordingly,
Rousseau spoke dismissively of the representative institutions of
Britain, so admired by Montesquieu and Voltaire. The British, he said,
are free only when casting their ballots; during the entire time between
elections there are as enslaved as the subjects of the Great Turk.
Sovereignty by its very nature cannot be delegated, he declared; the
People, to whom it rightfully belongs, must exercise it both directly
and continuously. From this notion of a free and egalitarian society
acting in concert emerges a new conception of law not as a fixed
principle but as the general will of the members at a given moment.Rousseau
explicitly states that the general will does not mean the will of the
majority as determined by vote; voting he speaks of slightingly as an
“empirical means.” The general will must be unanimous. If the merely
“empirical” wills of men are in conflict, then the general will—their
“true” will—must lie hidden somewhere. Where is it to be found? Who will
determine what it is, and how?At this critical point in the
argument, where explicitness and clarity are most indispensable,
Rousseau turns coy and vague: the general will is “in conformity with
principles”; it “only exists virtually in the conscience or imagination
of ‘free men,’ ‘patriots.’” Cochin calls this “the idea of a legitimate people—very similar to that of a legitimate prince. For the regime’s doctrinaires, the people is an ideal being” (p. 158).There
is a strand of thought about the French Revolution that might be called
the “Ideas-Have-Consequences School.” It casts Rousseau in the role of a
mastermind who elaborated all the ideas that less important men such as
Robespierre merely carried out. Such is not Cochin’s position. In his
view, the analogies between the speculations of the Social Contract and Revolutionary practice arise not from one having caused or inspired the other, but from both being based upon the philosophical societies.Rousseau’s
model, in other words, was neither Rome nor Sparta nor Geneva nor any
phantom of his own “idyllic imagination”—he was describing, in a
somewhat idealized form, the philosophical societies of his day. He
treated these recent and unusual social formations as the archetype of
all legitimate human association (cf. pp. 127, 155). As such a
description—but not as a blueprint for the Terror—the Social Contract may be profitably read by students of the Revolution.Indeed,
if we look closely at the nature and purpose of a philosophical
society, some of Rousseau’s most extravagant assertions become
intelligible and even plausible. Consider unanimity, for example. The
society is, let us recall, “an association founded to elicit through
discussion [and set by vote the common opinion of its members.” In
other words, rather than coming together because they agree upon anything, the philosophes come together precisely in order to reach
agreement, to resolve upon some common opinion. The society values
union itself more highly than any objective principle of union. Hence,
they might reasonably think of themselves as an organization free of
disagreement.Due to its unreal character, furthermore, a
philosophical society is not torn by conflicts of interest. It demands
no sacrifice—nor even effort—from its members. So they can all afford to
be entirely “public spirited.” Corruption—the misuse of a public trust
for private ends—is a constant danger in any real polity. But since the
society’s speculations are not of this world, each philosophe is an “Incorruptible”:One
takes no personal interest in theory. So long as there is an ideal to
define rather than a task to accomplish, personal interest, selfishness,
is out of the question. [This accounts for the democrats’ surprising
faith in the virtue of mankind. Any philosophical society is a society
of virtuous, generous people subordinating political motives to the
general good. We have turned our back on the real world. But ignoring
the world does not mean conquering it. (p. 155)(This pattern of
thinking explains why leftists even today are wont to contrast their own
“idealism” with the “selfish” activities of businessmen guided by the
profit motive.)We have already mentioned that the more glib or
assiduous attendees of a philosophical society naturally begin
exercising an informal ascendancy over other members: in the course of
time, this evolves into a standing but unacknowledged system of
oligarchic governance:Out of one
hundred registered members, fewer than five are active, and these are
the masters of the society. [This group is composed of the most
enthusiastic and least scrupulous members. They are the ones who choose
the new members, appoint the board of directors, make the motions, guide
the voting. Every time the society meets, these people have met in the
morning, contacted their friends, established their plan, given their
orders, stirred up the unenthusiastic, brought pressure to bear upon the
reticent. They have subdued the board, removed the troublemakers, set
the agenda and the date. Of course, discussion is free, but the risk in
this freedom minimal and the “sovereign’s” opposition little to be
feared. The “general will” is free—like a locomotive on its tracks. (pp.
172–73) Cochin draws here upon James Bryce’s American Commonwealth and Moisey Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties.
Bryce and Ostrogorski studied the workings of Anglo-American political
machines such as New York’s Tammany Hall and Joseph Chamberlain’s
Birmingham Caucus. Cochin considered such organizations (plausibly, from
what I can tell) to be authentic descendants of the French
philosophical and revolutionary societies. He thought it possible, with
due circumspection, to apply insights gained from studying these later
political machines to previously misunderstand aspects of the
Revolution.One book with which Cochin seems unfortunately not to have been familiar is Robert Michels’ Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy,
published in French translation only in 1914. But he anticipated rather
fully Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” writing, for example, that
“every egalitarian society fatally finds itself, after a certain amount
of time, in the hands of a few men; this is just the way things are” (p.
174). Cochin was working independently toward conclusions notably
similar to those of Michels and Gaetano Mosca, the pioneering Italian
political sociologists whom James Burnham called “the Machiavellians.”
The significance of his work extends far beyond that of its immediate
subject, the French Revolution.The essential operation of a democratic political machine consists of just two steps, continually repeated: the preliminary decision and the establishment of conformity.First,
the ringleaders at the center decide upon some measure. They prompt the
next innermost circles, whose members pass the message along until it
reaches the machine’s operatives in the outermost local societies made
up of poorly informed people. All this takes place unofficially and in
secrecy (p. 179).Then the local operatives ingenuously “make a
motion” in their societies, which is really the ringleaders’ proposal
without a word changed. The motion passes—principally through the
passivity (Cochin writes “inertia”) of the average member. The local
society’s resolution, which is now binding upon all its members, is with
great fanfare transmitted back towards the center.The central
society is deluged with identical “resolutions” from dozens of local
societies simultaneously. It hastens to endorse and ratify these as “the
will of the nation.” The original measure now becomes binding upon
everyone, though the majority of members have no idea what has taken
place. Although really a kind of political ventriloquism by the
ringleaders, the public opinion thus orchestrated “reveals a continuity,
cohesion and vigor that stuns the enemies of Jacobinism” (p. 180).In
his study of the beginnings of the Revolution in Brittany, Cochin found
sudden reversals of popular opinion which the likes of Monsieur Aulard
would have taken at face value, but which become intelligible once
viewed in the light of the democratic mechanism:On
All Saints’ Day, 1789, a pamphlet naïvely declared that not a single
inhabitant imagined doing away with the privileged orders and obtaining
individual suffrage, but by Christmas hundreds of the common people’s
petitions were clamoring for individual suffrage or death. What was the
origin of this sudden discovery that people had been living in shame and
slavery for the past thousand years? Why was there this imperious,
immediate need for a reform which could not wait a minute longer?Such abrupt reversals are sufficient in themselves to detect the operation of a machine. (p. 179)The
basic democratic two-step is supplemented with a bevy of techniques for
confusing the mass of voters, discouraging them from organizing
opposition, and increasing their passivity and pliability: these
techniques include constant voting about everything—trivial as well as
important; voting late at night, by surprise, or in multiple polling
places; extending the suffrage to everyone: foreigners, women,
criminals; and voting by acclamation to submerge independent voices (pp.
182–83). If all else fails, troublemakers can be purged from the
society by ballot:This regime is
partial to people with all sorts of defects, failures, malcontents, the
dregs of humanity, anyone who cares for nothing and finds his place
nowhere. There must not be religious people among the voters, for faith
makes one conscious and independent. [The ideal citizen lacks any
feeling that might oppose the machine’s suggestions; hence also the
preference for foreigners, the haste in naturalizing them. (pp. 186–87)(I bite my lip not to get lost in the contemporary applications.)The
extraordinary point of Cochin’s account is that none of these basic
techniques were pioneered by the revolutionaries themselves; they had
all been developed in the philosophical societies before the Revolution
began. The Freemasons, for example, had a term for their style of
internal governance: the “Royal Art.” “Study the social crisis from
which the Grand Lodge [of Paris Freemasons was born between 1773 and
1780,” says Cochin, “and you will find the whole mechanism of a
Revolutionary purge” (p. 61).Secrecy is essential to the
functioning of this system; the ordinary members remain “free,” meaning
they do not consciously obey any authority, but order and unity are
maintained by a combination of secret manipulation and passivity. Cochin
relates “with what energy the Grand Lodge refused to register its
Bulletin with the National Library” (p. 176). And, of course, the
Freemasons and similar organizations made great ado over refusing to
divulge the precise nature of their activities to outsiders, with
initiates binding themselves by terrifying oaths to guard the sacred
trust committed to them. Much of these societies’ appeal lay precisely
in the natural pleasure men feel at being “in” on a secret of any sort.In
order to clarify Cochin’s ideas, it might be useful to contrast them at
this point with those of the Abbé Barruel, especially as they have been
confounded by superficial or dishonest leftist commentators (“No need
to read that reactionary Cochin! He only rehashes Barruel’s conspiracy
thesis”).Father Barruel was a French Jesuit living in exile in London when he published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
in 1797. He inferred from the notorious secretiveness of the Freemasons
and similar groups that they must have been plotting for many years the
horrors revealed to common sight after 1789—conspiring to abolish
monarchy, religion, social hierarchy, and property in order to hold sway
over the ruins of Christendom.Cochin was undoubtedly thinking of Barruel and his followers when he laments thatthus
far, in the lives of these societies, people have only sought the
melodrama—rites, mystery, disguises, plots—which means they have strayed
into a labyrinth of obscure anecdotes, to the detriment of the true
history, which is very clear. Indeed the interest in the phenomenon in
question is not in the Masonic bric-a-brac, but in the fact that in the
bosom of the nation the Masons instituted a small state governed by its
own rules. (p. 137)For our author, let us recall, a société de pensée
such as the Masonic order has inherent constraints independent of the
desires or intentions of the members. Secrecy—of the ringleaders in
relation to the common members, and of the membership to outsiders—is
one of these necessary aspects of its functioning, not a way of
concealing criminal intentions. In other words, the Masons were not
consciously “plotting” the Terror of ’93 years in advance; the Terror
was, however, an unintended but natural outcome of the attempt to apply a
version of the Mason’s “Royal Art” to the government of an entire
nation.Moreover, writes Cochin, the peculiar fanaticism and force
of the Revolution cannot be explained by a conspiracy theory. Authors
like Barruel would reduce the Revolution to “a vast looting operation”:But
how can this enthusiasm, this profusion of noble words, these bursts of
generosity or fits of rage be only lies and play-acting? Could the
Revolutionary party be reduced to an enormous plot in which each person
would only be thinking [and acting for himself while accepting an iron
discipline? Personal interest has neither such perseverance nor such
abnegation. Throughout history there have been schemers and egoists, but
there have only been revolutionaries for the past one hundred fifty
years. (pp. 121–22)And finally, let us note, Cochin included academic and literary Societies, cultural associations, and schools as sociétés de pensée. Many of these organizations did not even make the outward fuss over secrecy and initiation that the Masons did. By his own admission, Cochin has nothing to tell us about the causes of the Revolution’s outbreak:I
am not saying that in the movement of 1789 there were not real
causes—[e.g., a bad fiscal regime that exacted very little, but in the
most irritating and unfair manner—I am just saying these real causes are
not my subject. Moreover, though they may have contributed to the
Revolution of 1789, they did not contribute to the Revolutions of August
10 [1792, abolition of the monarchy or May 31 [1793, purge of the
Girondins. (p. 125)With these words, he turns his back upon the
entire Marxist “class struggle” approach to understanding the
Revolution, which was the fundamental presupposition of much
twentieth-century research.The true beginning of the Revolution
on Cochin’s account was the announcement in August 1788 that the Estates
General would be convoked for May 1789, for this was the occasion when
the men of the societies first sprang into action to direct a real
political undertaking. With his collaborator in archival work,
Charpentier, he conducted extensive research into this early stage of
the Revolution in Brittany and Burgundy, trying to explain not why it took place but how
it developed. This material is omitted from the present volume of
translations; I shall cite instead from Furet’s summary and discussion
in Interpreting the French Revolution:In
Burgundy in the autumn of 1788, political activity was exclusively
engineered by a small group of men in Dijon who drafted a “patriotic”
platform calling for the doubling of the Third Estate, voting by head,
and the exclusion of ennobled commoners and seigneurial dues collectors
from the assemblies of the Third Estate. Their next step was the
systematic takeover of the town’s corporate bodies. First came the avocats’
corporation where the group’s cronies were most numerous; then the
example of that group was used to win over other wavering or apathetic
groups: the lower echelons of the magistrature, the physicians, the
trade guilds. Finally the town hall capitulated, thanks to one of the
aldermen and pressure from a group of “zealous citizens.” In the end,
the platform appeared as the freely expressed will of the Third Estate
of Dijon. Promoted by the usurped authority of the Dijon town council,
it then reached the other towns of the province.[2.
. . where the same comedy was acted out, only with less trouble since
the platform now apparently enjoyed the endorsement of the provincial
capital. Cochin calls this the “snowballing method” (p. 84).An
opposition did form in early December: a group of nineteen noblemen
which grew to fifty. But the remarkable fact is that the opponents of
the egalitarian platform made no use of the traditional institutions or
assemblies of the nobility; these were simply forgotten or viewed as
irrelevant. Instead, the nobles patterned their procedures on those of
the rival group: they thought and acted as the “right wing” of the
revolutionary party itself. Both groups submitted in advance to
arbitration by democratic legitimacy. The episode, therefore, marked not
a parting of the ways between the supporters of the old regime and
adherents of the new one, but the first of the revolutionary purges.
Playing by its enemies’ rules, the opposition was defeated by
mid-December.[3In Brittany an analogous split occurred in
September and October rather than December. The traditional corporate
bodies and the philosophical societies involved had different names. The
final purge of the nobles was not carried out until January 1789. The
storyline, however, was essentially the same. [4 La Révolution n’a pas de patrie (p. 131).The
regulations for elections to the Estates General were finally announced
on January 24, 1789. As we shall see, they provided the perfect field
of action for the societies’ machinations.The Estates General of
France originated in the fourteenth century, and were summoned by the
King rather than elected. The first two estates consisted of the most
important ecclesiastical and lay lords of the realm, respectively. The
third estate consisted not of the “commoners,” as usually thought, but
of the citizens of certain privileged towns which enjoyed a direct
relation with the King through a royal charter (i.e., they were not
under the authority of any feudal lord). The selection of notables from
this estate may have involved election, although based upon a very
restricted franchise.In the Estates General of those days, the King was addressingthe
nation with its established order and framework, with its various
hierarchies, its natural subdivisions, its current leaders, whatever the
nature or origin of their authority. The king acknowledged in the
nation an active, positive role that our democracies would not think of
granting to the electoral masses. This nation was capable of initiative.
Representatives with a general mandate—professional politicians serving
as necessary intermediaries between the King and the nation—were
unheard of. (pp. 97–98)Cochin opposes to this older “French conception” the “English and parliamentary conception of a people of electors”:A
people made up of electors is no longer capable of initiative; at most,
it is capable of assent. It can choose between two or three platforms,
two or three candidates, but it can no longer draft proposals or appoint
men. Professional politicians must present the people with proposals
and men. This is the role of parties, indispensable in such a regime.
(p. 98)In 1789, the deputies were elected to the States General
on a nearly universal franchise, but—in accordance with the older French
tradition—parties and formal candidacies were forbidden: “a candidate
would have been called a schemer, and a party a cabal” (p. 99).The result was that the “electors were placed not in a situation of freedom, but in a void”:The
effect was marvelous: imagine several hundred peasants, unknown to each
other, some having traveled twenty or thirty leagues, confined in the
nave of a church, and requested to draft a paper on the reform of the
realm within the week, and to appoint twenty or thirty deputies. There
were ludicrous incidents: at Nantes, for example, where the peasants
demanded the names of the assembly’s members be printed. Most could not
have cited ten of them, and they had to appoint twenty-five deputies.Now,
what actually happened? Everywhere the job was accomplished with ease.
The lists of grievances were drafted and the deputies appointed as if by
enchantment. This was because alongside the real people who could not
respond there was another people who spoke and appointed for them. (p.
100)These were, of course, the men of the societies. They
exploited the natural confusion and ignorance of the electorate to the
hilt to obtain delegates according to their wishes. “From the start, the
societies ran the electoral assemblies, scheming and meddling on the
pretext of excluding traitors that they were the only ones to designate”
(p. 153).“Excluding”—that is the key word:The
society was not in a position to have its men nominated directly
[parties being forbidden, so it had only one choice: have all the other
candidates excluded. The people, it was said, had born enemies that
they must not take as their defenders. These were the men who lost by
the people’s enfranchisement, i.e., the privileged men first, but also
the ones who worked for them: officers of justice, tax collectors,
officials of any sort. (p. 104)This raised an outcry, for it
would have eliminated nearly everyone competent to represent the Third
Estate. In fact, the strict application of the principle would have
excluded most members of the societies themselves. But pretexts were
found for excepting them from the exclusion: the member’s
“patriotism” and “virtue” was vouched for by the societies, which “could
afford to do this without being accused of partiality, for no one on
the outside would have the desire, or even the means, to protest” (p.
104)—the effect of mass inertia, once again.Having established
the “social mechanism” of the revolution, Cochin did not do any detailed
research on the events of the following four years (May 1789–June
1793), full of interest as these are for the narrative historian. Purge
succeeded purge: Monarchiens, Feuillants, Girondins. Yet none of the
actors seemed to grasp what was going on:Was
there a single revolutionary team that did not attempt to halt this
force, after using it against the preceding team, and that did not at
that very moment find itself “purged” automatically? It was always the
same naïve amazement when the tidal wave reached them: “But it’s with me
that the good Revolution stops! The people, that’s me! Freedom here,
anarchy beyond!” (p. 57)During this period, a series of elective
assemblies crowned the official representative government of France:
first the Constituent Assembly, then the Legislative Assembly, and
finally the Convention. Hovering about them and partly overlapping with
their membership were various private and exclusive clubs, a
continuation of the pre-Revolutionary philosophical societies. Through a
gradual process of gaining the affiliation of provincial societies,
killing off rivals in the capital, and purging itself and its daughters,
one of these revolutionary clubs acquired by June 1793 an unrivalled
dominance. Modestly formed in 1789 as the Breton Circle, later renamed
the Friends of the Constitution, it finally established its headquarters
in a disused Jacobin Convent and became known as the Jacobin Club:Opposite
the Convention, the representative regime of popular sovereignty, thus
arises the amorphous regime of the sovereign people, acting and
governing on its own. “The sovereign is directly in the popular
societies,” say the Jacobins. This is where the sovereign people reside,
speak, and act. The people in the street will only be solicited for the
hard jobs and the executions.[The
popular societies functioned continuously, ceaselessly watching and
correcting the legal authorities. Later they added surveillance
committees to each assembly. The Jacobins thoroughly lectured, browbeat,
and purged the Convention in the name of the sovereign people, until it
finally adjourned the Convention’s power. (p. 153)Incredibly, to the very end of the Terror, the Jacobins had no legal standing;
they remained officially a private club. “The Jacobin Society at the
height of its power in the spring of 1794, when it was directing the
Convention and governing France, had only one fear: that it would be
‘incorporated’—that it would be ‘acknowledged’ to have authority” (p.
176). There is nothing the strict democrat fears more than the
responsibility associated with public authority.The Jacobins were proud that they did not represent anyone. Their principle was direct democracy, and their operative assumption was that they were
“the people.” “I am not the people’s defender,” said Robespierre; “I am
a member of the people; I have never been anything else” (p. 57; cf. p.
154). He expressed bafflement when he found himself, like any powerful
man, besieged by petitioners.Of course, such “direct democracy” involves a social fiction obvious to outsiders. To the adherent “the word people means the ‘hard core’ minority, freedom means the minority’s tyranny, equality its privileges, and truth
its opinion,” explains our author; “it is even in this reversal of the
meaning of words that the adherent’s initiation consists” (p. 138).But
by the summer of 1793 and for the following twelve months, the Jacobins
had the power to make it stick. Indeed, theirs was the most stable
government France had during the entire revolutionary decade. It
amounted to a second Revolution, as momentous as that of 1789. The purge
of the Girondins (May 31–June 2) cleared the way for it, but the key
act which constituted the new regime, in Cochin’s view, was the levée en masse of August 23, 1793:[This
decree made all French citizens, body and soul, subject to standing
requisition. This was the essential act of which the Terror’s laws would
merely be the development, and the revolutionary government the means.
Serfs under the King in ’89, legally emancipated in ’91, the people
become the masters in ’93. In governing themselves, they do away with
the public freedoms that were merely guarantees for them to use against
those who governed them. Hence the right to vote is suspended, since the
people reign; the right to defend oneself, since the people judge; the
freedom of the press, since the people write; and the freedom of
expression, since the people speak. (p. 77)An absurd series of
unenforceable economic decrees began pouring out of Paris—price
ceilings, requisitions, and so forth. But then, mirabile dictu, it turned out that the decrees needed no enforcement by the center:Every
violation of these laws not only benefits the guilty party but burdens
the innocent one. When a price ceiling is poorly applied in one district
and products are sold more expensively, provisions pour in from
neighboring districts, where shortages increase accordingly. It is the
same for general requisitions, censuses, distributions: fraud in one
place increases the burden for another. The nature of things makes every
citizen the natural enemy and overseer of his neighbor. All these laws
have the same characteristic: binding the citizens materially to one
another, the laws divide them morally.Now
public force to uphold the law becomes superfluous. This is because
every district, panic-stricken by famine, organizes its own raids on its
neighbors in order to enforce the laws on provisions; the government
has nothing to do but adopt a laissez-faire attitude. By March 1794 the Committee of Public Safety even starts to have one district’s grain inventoried by another.This
peculiar power, pitting one village against another, one district
against another, maintained through universal division the unity that
the old order founded on the union of everyone: universal hatred has its
equilibrium as love has its harmony. (pp. 230–32; cf. p. 91) The
societies were, indeed, never more numerous, nor better attended, than
during this period. People sought refuge in them as the only places they
could be free from arbitrary arrest or requisitioning (p. 80; cf. p.
227). But the true believers were made uneasy rather than pleased by
this development. On February 5, 1794, Robespierre gave his notorious
speech on Virtue, declaring: “Virtue is in the minority on earth.” In
effect, he was acknowledging that “the people” were really only a tiny
fraction of the nation. During the months that ensued:there
was no talk in the Societies but of purges and exclusions. Then it was
that the mother society, imitated as usual by most of her offspring,
refused the affiliation of societies founded since May 31. Jacobin
nobility became exclusive; Jacobin piety went from external mission to
internal effort on itself. At that time it was agreed that a society of
many members could not be a zealous society. The agents from Tournan
sent to purge the club of Ozouer-la-Ferrière made no other reproach: the
club members were too numerous for the club to be pure. (p. 56)Couthon
wrote from Lyon requesting “40 good, wise, honest republicans, a colony
of patriots in this foreign land where patriots are in such an
appalling minority.” Similar supplications came from Marseilles,
Grenoble, Besançon; from Troy, where there were less than twenty
patriots; and from Strasbourg, where there were said to be fewer than
four—contending against 6,000 aristocrats!The majority of men, remaining outside the charmed circle of revolutionary virtue, were:“monsters,”
“ferocious beasts seeking to devour

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