Democratic Enlightenment

948 Revolution
United States government made remarkably little effort to extricate him. 39 He was
fortunate to survive. Gorani fled to Switzerland. Cloots, symbol of the Revolution’s
internationalism and the Revolution of Reason, expelled from the Jacobin club for
cosmopolitanism and atheism in early December, was arrested at the same time as
Paine and guillotined soon afterwards. 40
Rousseau’s unitary notion of volonté générale and stress on the ordinary man’s
conscience against ‘philosophy’ and reason powerfully infused the ideology of both
Robespierre and Saint-Just, the former’s closest ally during the Terror. 41 However
much perverted in detail, Rousseau was indeed the unique inspiration of what
Robespierre insisted was the people’s Revolution, that of ‘virtue’, not a revolution
of philosophes. But after Robespierre’s execution on 28 July 1794 and that of those
who had colluded in setting aside the democratic republican constitution, freedom of
the press, cosmopolitanism, and toleration of atheism, the Revolution swung back
behind la philosophie moderne, recognizing this as the Revolution’s true inspiration
and chief identifying and integrating tool. 42 Those believing the Terror followed
naturally from the Revolution of 1789, as royalists, anti-philosophes, and unsympathetic
foreign observers frequently did, could not have been more mistaken. The
official view during the later stages of the Revolution of Reason (1794–1802) was
actually correct: namely, that ‘la Terreur’, as Roederer put it, was a full ‘contrerévolution,
et non une suite ou un complément de la Révolution’, it was in every
respect a complete and bloody tyranny ‘et non un abus ou un accès de la liberté’. 43
Among the charges levelled against Robespierre, after Thermidor, and among the
Revolution’s finer ironies, was the accusation that ‘jealousy’ had prevented his
fittingly honouring Rousseau in the Panthéon. Mirabeau’s remains, after months of
contention over whether or not to evict them, were finally removed on 21 September
1794, a few weeks after Robespierre’s execution, while those of Marat, hero of the
populist Jacobins but of whom Robespierre was jealous, and whose installation in
the Panthéon he had opposed, were installed, albeit not for long. After Thermidor,
the new revolutionary leadership soon recalled that Rousseau opposed representative
democracy, held that a free people should not be governed by ‘représentants’, and that
a true republic works only in a small society. His status, accordingly, receded as that
of Condorcet, Volney, Sieyès, Roederer, Cloots, and others, Diderot included, revived.
44 Deleyre, in enforced inactivity during the Terror, re-emerged after Robespierre’s
downfall as an active reformer, 45 as did Sieyès, Roederer, and other leaders of
the revolutions of 1789 and 1792. At the same time, the publications of all these
reappeared in the bookshops. Condorcet’s works were republished. Naigeon, restored
39 De Staël, Considerations, 339; Foner, Tom Paine, 240, 244; Jacoby, Freethinkers, 41.
40 Culoma, Religion civile, 191.
41 On the militancy of Saint-Just’s Rousseauism, see Hampson, Saint-Just, 70–2, 106–8.
42 Livesey, Making Democracy, 64–5.
43 Roederer, De la philosophie, 29.
44 Jourdan, ‘Le Culte’, 69–70.
45 Mortier and Trouson, Dictionnaire, 131.