Georg Forster (1754â1794), a German Jacobin who helped establish a republic in Mainz and who went to Paris in 1792, wrote to his wife that âI must eat, live, and dress like a sans-culotte, and whatever is left over is dead and useless ⊠In this revolution in thought lies the power of the republic.â1
That revolution in thought encompassed foreign relations and extended to the French representatives abroad from 1789 to brumaire 1799, when a significant shift in the revolutionary dynamic occurred. Our book examines how that revolution in thought influenced the French revolutionaries sent abroad, negotiations, and thus the possibility of peace. Other French revolutionary studies have focused on the army, the navy, and even the engineering corps. None have examined the diplomatic corps and the creation of a new theater of power. We ask specifically how these diplomats responded to the demands of ideological conformity and to the challenges posed by contingency. These men were hardly puppets of revolutionary discourse but were independent actors who could and often did sabotage the governmentâs agenda. This work underscores the importance of the creation of a new symbolic deployment and how rituals helped forge a revolutionary community. The French Revolution defied the international order just as the eschatalogical expectations of the French changed the nature of war. The French challenged the assumptions that had guided the European international order; they emphasized the importance of ritual and gesture not just as declarations or reflections of ideology but as tools in the reconstruction of diplomacy. That challenge and that vision echo throughout the diplomatic correspondence.
These dedicated revolutionaries could have argued, just as Trotsky did later, that we âdo not belong to the diplomatic school. We ought rather to be considered as soldiers of the revolution.â2 The French revolutionaries saw themselves as soldiers fighting for a cause and thought they were not bound by the constraints of traditional diplomacy. In their fervor they discarded all diplomatic conventions and rejected the system as a whole. To do otherwise would have compromised the Revolution itself. The dictates of revolutionary ideology molded both the private and public face of republican France. Revolutionaries attempted to transform the public sphere by radically altering the insignia, dress , and rhetoric so inextricably associated with the ancien rĂ©gime. The noble code of conduct had to be displaced and replaced by a revolutionary one3: one âtheater of powerâ erected on the ruins of another.4 Not surprisingly, Burke saw the revolutionary challenge as âacting on the moral theatre of the world.â5 The diplomatic corps thus transformed helped to precipitate war, prolong the conflict, and ultimately trigger the collapse of the republic.
The early revolutionary governments, although preoccupied with domestic concerns, had to perforce deal with diplomatic issues. The years from 1789 to 1792 witnessed a struggle over control of the diplomatic system with a few and as time went on even fewer diplomats of the old order still in place. When the Nootka Sound Controversy erupted in the spring of 1790, the Assembly abandoned the pacte de famille with Spain and in effect the European alliance system.6 The abortive and aborted flight of the royal family to Varennes in the spring of 1791 changed the nature of the international arena, as did the declaration of war in the spring of 1792. At that same time, the Girondin ascendancy brought the imposition of more rigorous standards of ideological conformity to the diplomatic corps. The overthrow of the king and the constitution in August 1792 led many foreign governments to withdraw their representatives and to expel French diplomats. The kingâs execution in January 1793 created âan abyss that separated France from the rest of the worldâ7 and isolated the revolutionary regime even further. The regicidal government and the Terror of 1793â1794 repulsed many and led more powers to expel French diplomats and the French to sever relations with most of Europe. In the autumn of 1794 the tournant diplomatique of the Thermidoreans was institutionalized by the reform of the Commission des Relations extĂ©rieures. The decree of 7 fructidor , an III (24 August 1794) transferred the commissionâs political powers to the Committee of Public Safety . That committee was henceforth to reestablish ties with foreign governments and the commission to focus on commercial and cultural ties. Reciprocal interests, particularly commercial ones, would help recreate a diplomatic dialogue between agents of the republic and those of the kings. Martin argues that the Thermidoreans adopted a policy of cultural and diplomatic reconstruction in order to achieve a durable peace. Diplomacy thus served both as a political instrument and as a cultural vehicle.8 The Thermidoreans moved away from the revolutionary diplomacy of the Terror to a ârepublicanâ diplomacy; they blamed the isolation of France from the rest of Europe on the âexaggerated bellicosityâ and âfrenzied propagandaâ of the extremists. Through diplomacy France could reclaim her role in Europe.9 These Thermidorean hopes of a rapprochement among peoples were undermined by the Directoryâs vision of French hegemony and of a glorious peace. The years of the Directory from 1795 to 1799 with its politique de bascule witnessed swings in both foreign and domestic policies. From 1789 to 1799, governments of whatever faction often responded to contingency (witness the agitation in Avignon ) and military imperatives that overrode theoretical concerns. As the political sands shifted, so too did diplomacy, often seismically. Nonetheless, the determination to destroy the old diplomacy and replace it with a revolutionary one persisted and survived. The underlying themeâa rejection of the international order associated with the old regimeâremained. Like a constant melody in polyphonic music with its various themes and changes in both tempo and meter, it retained a basic unity.
Steeped in the code of the ancien rĂ©gime, the revolutionaries sought to replace it with another. The elaborate and punctilious, not to say litigious, attention to form and style that had characterized the ancien rĂ©gime was echoed in the new. The revolutionaries could not concede this important representational ground and were then forced to adopt an alternative symbolic and visual system. As MacLeish argued in a later time and a later place: âA new world is not the same thing as a new land. A new land may be discovered. A new world must be created by the mind.â10 Those sent abroad were entangled in that symbolic deployment so integral to the revolutionary imagination and the revolutionary faith. Such men were to be revolutionaries, in Saint-Justâs words, with âardent heartsâ and, in Maratâs , with âwarmt...