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"When they are afraid, the French are willing to give up some of their freedoms"

2021-02-12T20:10:22.101Z


FIGAROVOX / GRAND INTERVIEW - Historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel has published Seven Days. June 17-23, 1789, where he recounts the week when France entered into revolution. In an interview with Figarovox, he describes the revolutionary process, its radicalism, and analyzes how ...


Emmanuel de Waresquiel is a historian, essayist and biographer.

He has published numerous works on Talleyrand and Fouché, notably

Talleyrand: latest news from the devil

(Editions du CNRS, 2011) and

Fouché.

Secret files

(Tallandier, 2017).

His last work “Seven days 17

-

23 June 1789 was published by Taillandier.

FIGAROVOX.-In your book "Seven days", you tell of the week in which France entered into revolution.

Why did things change precisely at this point?

What are the conditions that must be met for the “revolt” to turn into a “revolution”?

Emmanuel de WARESQUIEL.-

It looks a bit like plate tectonics or if you prefer a cross-section of an excavation trench.

In the lower part of the trench, you can see the oldest strata.

They correspond to what has been working society for decades: the Enlightenment, the primacy of contract and reason, the criticism of what was called "

ministerial despotism

", the demand for equality, everything that makes up public opinion. .

This first infuses in a vacuum within the elites and what Augustin Cochin called "

thought societies

": academies, reading societies, lodges, then gradually spreads in society, a society which, let us recall, is in 1789, illiterate to nearly 60 ° / °.

This obviously does not go without a kind of revolution of the press, in a climate of great permissiveness and powerlessness of the government, through the proliferation of newspapers, brochures, placards.

In the upper part of our archaeological section, the most recent strata correspond to the immediate circumstances.

Like a wick attached to a barrel of powder.

The great agricultural and commercial prosperity of the second half of the 18th century, the demographic explosion, the kingdom had 26 million inhabitants in 1789, the scarcity of land, all this created the conditions for a crisis and this crisis occurred in 1789 for both climatic and fiscal reasons: rotten summer, exceptionally harsh winter, poor harvests, rise in prices starting with that of bread, supply difficulties and correspondingly worsening of the weight of an unequal and archaic tax system.

The transition to insurrection arises from the meeting of different causes, when the old popular discontents suddenly find their reason for being in utopia.

The whole kingdom was in turmoil from the first months of 1789, all the provinces were affected by the riot.

The passage to the insurrection that I place in June, in Paris as in the provinces, arises from the meeting of these different long and short-term causes, when the old popular discontents suddenly find their reason for being in utopia.

Victor Hugo expressed this very well in Les Misérables, when he evokes the insurgents of the barricade in the rue de la Chanvrerie, all these “

glorious fighters of the future

”, all these “

confessors of utopia

”.

This mixture smells of powder and bundle.

On the one hand there is fear, suspicion, rumors, resentment and on the other there is promise and hope.

The promises of happiness were at work in the spring of 1789, by the reckless decisions of a king unable to remedy the chronic deficits of the public accounts and who ended up choosing, without being convinced, the worst solution: the appeal to opinion, the grievance notebooks, the principle of the election of deputies to the States General.

To read also:

"Without the history of ideas we cannot understand the meaning of the French Revolution"

All of this creates a sort of immense demand for air which will bring together, in a conjunction as momentary as it is improbable, very diverse discontents: on the one hand, the ambitions of the "

enlightened

"

bourgeoisie held back for too long

. an unequal society in law, on the other hand the expectations of the people who see in the abolition of taxes and the reduction in the price of bread the reasons for their salvation.

You criticize the thesis of the two revolutions, one gentle, the other violent.

Was the radicality of the revolutionary project present from the start?

It was the most fanatics who gave it away from the start?

The revolution is a block, said Clémenceau, and this block is constituted during this founding week of June 1789, from June 17 to 23 precisely.

The words of that week are already the words of terror.

On the one hand, those who are going to lock up the revolution and then the republic in principles that are difficult to achieve by their very abstraction: freedom, equality, the indivisibility of the nation;

on the other hand those who designate the culprits and make them so many strangers to the founding project: the “

aristocrats

”, the “

enemies of the nation

”, the plotters, the “

traitors

”;

finally those which indicate the means of their repression: surveillance, the patriotic virtues of the denunciation, the "

crime of lese-nation

".

You show the legal aspect of the French Revolution.

How do the 5 decrees you speak of completely overhaul the regime?

On June 17, the deputies of the Third Estate, gathered in Versailles by the king since the first days of May, constitute themselves, on the motion of Sieyès, in a national assembly, place the public debt under their protection and declare illegal the whole of royal taxation.

These decrees are not the result of a compromise made with the king or with the two other orders of the States General: the nobility and the clergy.

They are taken unilaterally.

They return the "

privileged

"

orders

to their nullity and the king to his solitude.

By appropriating the nation, the deputies of the third state separate the king from the latter.

They deprived him of his principle of incarnation, "

I am one with the nation

" will say Louis XVI again in August 1792, and with him his sovereignty as well as his legitimacy.

The revolution is at the origin of this very French contradiction between two sovereignties, two legitimacies, that of the ballot box, and that of the street.

On June 20, by taking the oath in a tennis court never to separate before having given a constitution to the kingdom, they took a new step.

The national assembly becomes constituent, indissoluble and permanent.

On June 23, after refusing to withdraw from the great room of Menus Pleasures as requested by the king, they declared themselves inviolable.

The Palace of Versailles is invaded for the first time by the crowd.

And Louis XVI gives in.

It has come full circle.

The legal apparatus of the revolution is in place and transfers the seat of sovereignty from the king to the nation.

All against a backdrop of dreams and enthusiasm, but also of fears and suspicions.

The climate of June 1789 was not so springy after all.

What is taking place in these revolutionary days is the invention of representative democracy.

Where did this idea come from?

Is there a French mistrust of representation from the start?

Only a minority of the deputies of the third state thought about the sovereignty of the nation and the means of its exercise.

On this level, Father Sieyès is the great man of this week of June.

He was the first to theorize the notion of delegation on a model borrowed from English economists and made representation through election the principle of incarnation of this new sovereignty.

It is first followed by an active minority of deputies who very quickly find the means of their organization, regroup in an association or in a club baptized the “

Breton club

”, future club of the Jacobins, because its founding members had been elected in Brittany: Le Chapelier, Lanjuinais, Defermon and other Gleizen.

They are the ones who will lead the majority of the Third Estate.

They represent the most radical path of the revolution insofar as they were elected in a very particular context of open war against a Breton nobility, more numerous and poorer than elsewhere, resolutely closed to change.

The deputies of the Third Estate were not born revolutionaries, they have become so.

Everyone talks about a constitution but many don't really know what it will be.

To read also:

Jean-Pierre Jouyet - Emmanuel de Waresquiel: "Are we in 1789?"

In the end, the principle of a single, all-powerful chamber wins out.

We used the people, but very quickly they will find that they are being served poorly.

The revolution is at the origin of this very French contradiction between two sovereignties, two legitimacies, that of the ballot box, and that of the street.

All of our contemporary history attests to this, from the

revolutionary

"

days

" of terror when the sections without pants marched on the National Convention, to the demands of the yellow vests and their demand for a "

citizens

'

initiative referendum

".

You show in your book the king's wait-and-see attitude and his inability to react to events, which is not unlike that which Charles X will have during the July Revolution.

Why is the monarchy unable to grasp the stakes of these fateful days?

The time of the king is not that of the revolution.

He is caught up in a system of court, etiquette and representation that hinders his decisions.

In addition, Louis XVI was particularly isolated in 1789.

His councils are divided, he no longer has, since the death of Vergennes and the dismissal of his finance minister Calonne in 1787, a principal minister in whom he can place his trust.

He is jealous of his power and naturally suspicious.

He hates the former Geneva banker Jacques Necker, whom he must have taken against his heart in 1788.

We judged Louis XVI in the light of this situation, we made him a hesitant and inconsistent king by forgetting the rest of his reign as his successes.

If he has the intelligence to reform, he does not have the temperament.

For years, he has been caught in a kind of impasse, between his desire to modernize its administration and its taxation system, and the desire to maintain society as it is and as it is the basis of its sovereignty: a society of orders. unequal in law made up of a multitude of "

franchises and freedoms

" which make the kingdom a complex and increasingly ungovernable mosaic, defended by all kinds of interest groups, starting with its parliaments.

There could not be a worse time to call the States General.

On the one hand the risks of bankruptcy, on the other a royal administration and an army deeply discontented and which only partially support the king.

Finally Louis XVI faces the deputies of the Third Estate in the midst of a family crisis.

His brothers do not follow him, his cousins ​​are hostile to him, starting with the Duke of Orleans, and he loses on June 4, his eldest son who died in Meudon, at the age of seven, from bone tuberculosis.

The collapse is total.

Louis XVI was judged in the light of this situation, he was made a hesitant and inconsistent king, forgetting the rest of his reign as his successes: the restoration of the royal navy, his victories against England alongside the American insurgents, the Peace of Paris of 1783 which resembles a revenge on the humiliating peace that his grandfather Louis XV had to sign in 1763.

You show how the revolution was immediately mythologized and how these myths still weigh today.

The yellow vests have seized many revolutionary symbols.

How did you interpret this movement as a historian?

We have placed the principles of 1789 so high that we have been running after more than two centuries.

For example, what equality are we talking about in 1789, civil equality, political equality or social equality?

These ambiguities were already at work under the terror.

For political reasons but also to legitimize a republic that was immediately contested and in the throes of civil war as well as external war, the “

promise

” of June 1789 was very quickly sanctified and magnified.

We speak of the “

holy oath

” and of the tennis court as the “

temple of freedom

”.

From 1791, David made the day of June 20 the triumphant allegory of the entire revolution.

The French are deeply attached to words and symbols, to what Thiers called "the real imaginary".

We made the tennis court oath the first secular oath of the republic, we wanted it to be unanimous while some among the deputies of the third party will regret it later and that we swore it in a way of defense , under the influence of fear, against the bellicose intentions attributed to the king and to the "

aristocrats

".

Many of the deputies of June 20, 1789 believed themselves threatened with arrest and imprisonment.

There was talk of an "

aristocratic plot

," the queen, it was said, had had the hall of the States General undermined, the king wanted to shoot balls at Paris from the Montmartre hill.

Conspiracy rumor is at the heart of revolutionary dynamics, it is even its fuel even under terror.

»READ ALSO

- The French Revolution, like a river of blood

Everything happened as if the words, the symbols, the gestures, the colors had won out over the complexity, the disorder and the contradictions of this week in June.

Likewise, the storming of the Bastille, which from my point of view is only a peripheral event compared to what happened in June, will be the great symbolic victory of the people, a "

total event

".

Even though at the end of the day the Bastille surrendered, its governor the Marquis de Launay had lost his head long before it was cut off, as Rivarol maliciously says, and we had only come there look for powder.

The French are deeply attached to words and symbols, to what Thiers already called in his History of the Consulate and the Empire, the “

real imaginary

”.

We saw it recently when some yellow vests gave a press conference in front of the Jeu de Paume hall in Versailles.

The period in which we are living is very restrictive of freedoms, but yet we have seen few demonstrations against confinement in France, despite the revolutionary reputation of our people.

Does this mean that in our country we never revolt for freedom but always for equality?

Whenever we are afraid, we are quite easily willing to give up some of our freedoms, as long as we are kept the equality or at least the one we dream of.

Since the revolution, our periods of constitutional freedom have been quite rare.

We threw ourselves into the arms of Bonaparte in 1799 and those of Pétain in 1940. There was indeed some resistance, but still in the minority.

Michelet recounts having been on a pilgrimage to the Jeu de Paume room to demand accountability.

What have we done with the promise of 1789 that we haven't set that promise a little too high for it to be kept?

Tallandier editions Tallandier

Seven days - June 17-23, 1789 - France enters a revolution by Emmanuel de Waresquiel, Tallandier, 480 p., € 22.90.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2021-02-12

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