Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782-1788)
Keywords: Adrien Duport
Charles Alexandre de Calonne
Jean-Louis Carra
Etienne Clavière
Jean-Jacques Duval d'Eprémesnil
Jean-Pierre Lenoir
Guillaume Kornmann
Jacques-Pierre Brissot
French history
Lafayette
Nicolas Bergasse
Gallo-American Society
Parlement of Paris
Kornmann Group
mesmerism
finance
Antoine-Joseph Gorsas
religious mysticism
pamphlets
Cult of America
propaganda

This is a study of the character of radical propaganda, an attempt to define the spirit of the radical publications on the eve of the Revolution, not a catalogue of pamphlets, categorizing themes and sub-themes. It deals with the political importance of the propaganda, but essentially it seeks to study the propaganda in itself - its organization, its techniques and its style. It suggests that during the seven years before the Revolution, radical pamphlets were intimately connected with contemporary fads, polemics and personal quarrels that initially had little relation to politics. The pamphlets had an ideological bias but contained little sophisticated discussion of political ideas; they communicated their authors' moral fervor and hatred of the established order of society and the men who dominated it; they were intensely personal documents, not exegeses of the Contrat Social or De l'esprit des lois, and therefore this thesis attempts to show their relation to the personal experience of their authors. It concentrates on the most important group of writers of the Pre-revolution and shows the common interests, ideas and loyalties that united them during the period 1782-1787 and influenced their publications of the next two years.
The first half of the thesis is therefore biographical in its approach. This approach was also determined by the nature of the original material found during the research, which consisted mainly of papers of individuals who were active in the Pre-revolution: Clavière, Bergasse, Lenoir, Calonne and others. Clavière's papers were found to be the richest. They were used by J. Bouchary in his thorough study of Clavière's financial activities, but there is a great deal in these to interest the historian who is not primarily interested in finance. They are the main source of information about Clavière's attempts to found a utopian colony and about the true purpose of the pamphlets he published under Mirabeau's name. This thesis does not pretend to be the first revelation of the financial motives of the Mirabeau pamphlets, but it seeks to provide the first full account of their place in the radical propaganda of the time. Clavière's papers, supplemented by the rich archives of the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, and the papers of Lavater and Lenoir, also provided material for a reinterpretation of Brissot's career in the 1780's. Eloise Ellery, in her excellent biography of Brissot, showed a healthy distrust of his memoirs, but this material was not available to her, and it reveals the central fact of his activities on the eve of the Revolution: his poverty. He staggered under a burden of debt that was the main result of his ambitious projects to win a reputaiton for himself as a man of letters. Although he was truly a radical idealist, he was almost certainly driven by his poverty to spy for the police; such is the testimony of Lenoir's manuscripts at Orléans, which corroborate the charges, usually dismissed as calumnies, by Marat and others. Another side of Brissot's character, his occult mysticism, is revealed by his correspondence with Lavater and his mesmerist pamphlet, Un mot à l'oreille des académiciens de Paris, which was believed to have been lost.
It was originally hoped to produce studies of Carra and Gorsas like that of Brissot, but it has proved impossible to find anything more than a few references to their lost papers in the Archives Nationales. The Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris contains a collection of Gorsas' workes, which throws light on his obscure career as a pre-revolutionary pamphleteer, and Lenoir's papers contain contemporary police reports on his and his associates. The present writer is indebted to Monsieur J. Coëffin and his family for their hospitality and help in the consultation of Nicholas Bergasse's papers in their château in Villiers, Loir et Cher. Although the papers provided information on the political aspect of Bergasse's mesmerist theories and on his relations with Brissot, they were rather disappointing. Lenoir's papers, however, proved useful at many points in the thesis, although they were mostly written after 1789 and so tend to be colored by Lenoir's hatred of the Revolution. The journal of the bookseller S.-P. Hardy in the manuscripts of the é provided invaluable information on the circulation, reception and sometimes the printing of pamphlets. In fact the thesis may rely too heavily on Hardy's journal, particularly for 1788. which the Mémoires secrets do not cover, but there did not seem to be a comparable source, even for evaluating Parisian public opinion. The other main sources were the pamphlet collections in the British Museum, Bibliothèque and Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. An attempt has been made to read all the pamphlets in these collections for the years 1787 and 1788, but a few of those mentioned by Hardy have not been found. Kornmann's papers in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Strasbourg might have enriched the thesis, but the library wrote that they mainly contained information on his financial activities until 1782, so it was not thought worthwhile to travel there.
The original material used to document the thesis would seem to constitute its main claim to originality, but it leaves it open to an important criticism: is it not really about radical propagandists rather than radical propaganda? The answer is that the two are inseparable and that a neglect of biographical information has misled the few who have studied the propaganda in detail. If one simply takes the dominant interpretation of the period, the "Révolte nobilaire" thesis, and applies it to a few hundred pamphlets, one can easily reach the absurd conclusion that Brissot and Gorsas were reactionaries. Their personal experience shows the true ingredients of their radicalism: their hatred of "les Grands", the people who dominated the top places in society where they were refused admission, and their conviction that they had to mobilize public opinion in support of the parlements, in spite of their aristocratic character, in order to force the convocation of the Estates General. The former attitude also influenced their style, which the thesis attempts to analyse in relation to their political message. The style of the radical pamphleteers reveals their mentality, their earnestness, their tendency to moralize, their romantic sentimentalism and their violent, intransigent political convictions. But it must be confessed that the thesis has abused the biographical approach in some parts, like section 3 of chapter V, which are not immediately relevant to the propaganda. It may lack balance, over-emphasizing the importance of Brissot, who was in America during the most critical months of 1788, and neglecting the importance of writers like Linguet and Condorcet, who adopted an opposing stand to that of Brissot and his friends. It stresses the effectiveness of Calonne as a mythological villain of radical pamphlets, particularly after his fall, but this emphasis seems justifiable; for the pamphlets usually dealt with personalities who symbolized government corruption, and the importance of Calonne's service as such a symbol has been neglected, particularly by historians who present him as an enlightened reformer.
Calonne and especially Brienne were enlightened administrators but not in the eyes of most of their contemporaries. This thesis attempts to reconstruct this contemporary view as it was influenced by radical propaganda. It shows that few of the pamphlet attacks on the ministers analyzed their complex programs and many denigrated their characters by crude, violent declamations that, in effect, discredited reforms like the land tax, which might have benefited the people. The pamphleteers popularized the mythology of despotism by denouncing lettres de cachet and other supposed abuses of power that had little effect on most people. Historians like Funck-Brentano may be correct in arguing that the government was really moderate at this time, but it is important to show that radical propagandists were quite successful in convincing Frenchmen that thousands of innocent victims huddled miserably in cachots for having inflamed the despotic passions of a minister. Moreover the prisons that were mythological for most Frenchmen had been terribly real for Brissot, Carra, Gorsas and many other writers, and this consideration also suggests the importance of the biographical approach. The Bastille may have been nearly empty, but it was a powerful symbol, effectively exploited by pamphleteers who dealt in symbols, declamation and distortions of political realities. They were highly successful in dominating public opinion, which exerted an influence on events that has been unappreciated in relation to the weak, irresolute rule of Louis XVI.
The thesis attempts to develop this interprettion of the political importance of radical propaganda with reference to the scientific, financial and literary history of the period. It may seem weak on some ponts of these specialized fields, but it is hoped that it assimilates them successfully in its main attempt to contribute to an understanding of the last years of the Ancien Regime: its analysis of the character of radical propaganda in relation to the men who created it.