French Revolution launched a whole new era in French and European politics. This tempestuous and vivid political time has its most famous episodes and characters, known almost worldwide: the storming of the Bastille, the beheading of King Louis XVI with the no less famous guillotine, Robespierre…
What is maybe less well-know is that, from its very beginning to its end (that I would make coincide with Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1799 for this article1), French Revolution’s actors had been impregnated with Ancient Roma’s culture.
As we will see, throughout all this historical period, most of the politicians couldn’t help themselves comparing what was happening to France to what happened to Roma in ancient time. Without having the time or the willingness necessary for being exhaustive, I will pick up some episodes that show how much Ancient Rome’s “model” counted in what could be depicted as the most important time of French politic. For fulfilling this, I will concentrate my work on political speeches as well as institutional changes.
Catilina invited to the birth of French national sovereignty.
The 5th May 1789, Louis XVI summoned “les états généraux” [general states]. The latter were an old structure, very rarely used2. It gathered the representatives of the three orders that use to make up french society at that time: Clergy, Nobility, and Third-State, namely all the people who did not belong to any of the two former orders3. It was aimed to provide the State with legitimacy to take particular decisions, such as rise of taxation or declaration of war in a context of a political or financial crisis. In 1789, the State coffers were empty, and Louis XVI needed an agreement on a financial aspect.
As the representatives of the three orders had met in Versailles; the monarch quickly found out that these états-généraux were not going to turn out the way he would have thought. Indeed, in the few weeks that followed the summons, the King had to assist dumbfounded at a political rebellion of the representatives of the Third-State, which self-proclaimed them as National Assembly. Henceforth, they would be the representatives of the whole country, which meant de facto that the two others orders were obsolete and dedicated to vanish.
The 23th June 1789, Louis XVI sent an emissary to communicate to the so-called National Assembly his order: the representatives of the Third-State should return to their previous sits, and turn back to negotiations with the two other orders. This confrontation between the emissary and the National Assembly led to one of the most famous and important speech in the whole French history. It was made by le Marquis de Mirabeau, eminent representative of the Third-State.
He delivered this speech in a very tense atmosphere. If the emissary was alone in front of them, there were soldiers waiting outside of the building. The objective of Mirabeau was thus double: on one hand he had to convince the emissary (and through him the King) that the National assembly was henceforth a given, but on the other hand he also had to reassure his own colleagues, in order to prevent them from giving up their bold move. Suddenly, in the middle of his speech appeared this sentence:
« A military force surrounds the assembly! Where are the enemies of the nation? Is Catiline at our gates? »
In one sentence, Mirabeau had made himself the heir of Cicero. Why is it so clever?
Cicero’s political work has echoed through the ages by the Catiline Orations, among other masterpieces. The Catiline Orations are a series of speeches addressed to the Senate regarding the following case: Catiline was a Roman Senator plotting to overthrow the Roman Republic and the aristocratic Senate. Elected as a Consul in 63 BC, Cicero was aware of this, and tried to convince the Senate to act on purpose. This latter was first quite reticent and suspicious in front of Cicero’s allegations. However, after days of debate, Cicero finally obtained the death sentence for Catiline, and therefore saved the Republic.
Thus, by invocating Catiline in his speech, Mirabeau put himself as the savior of the National Assembly, understating to his colleagues that they should follow his advice as the Roman Senate had followed Cicero’s advice. Besides, the struggle of the representatives of the Third-State for acquiring more rights to people living under the grip of Nobility and Clergy was echoing Cicero’s life, as he was the first Consul without any noble or ancient lineage.
What is important to be reminded there is that the reference to Ancient Rome during French revolution is not about pure rhetoric. We have to keep in mind that many of the revolutionaries’ leaders (Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Saint-Just) had a juridical formation and career. As it happens, going back to this time, French law was still really impregnated by Roman law. Ancient Roma’s culture use to shape their mind.
Fact is that French Revolution had started a gigantic breakthrough in politics, institutions, customs… It was dissolving all the traditional framework of the French society. Thus, Ancient Roma quickly became the most important reference point for the Revolutionaries. They used Ancient Roma’s history as legal precedent for justifying their attitudes or actions; looking for the legitimacy they could not find any more in other frameworks. Let’s see this need of a legal precedent in another of the main debate that had run through French revolution.
Monarchy, Republic and General interest
In 1792, situation got even worst for the King. After his failed attempt to flee from France, Louis XVI had lost the confidence of most of the French leaders. The political debate had shifted from constitutional monarchy to a true Republic…requiring the death of the man sitting on the throne? Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the youngest deputy and closest ally of Robespierre4, was strongly advocating for the death condemnation of Louis XVI. The one who will be dubbed by later writers as “the Archangel of Terror” had a strong opinion on this subject. According to him, the fault of Louis XVI was merely his reign, sufficient reason for punishing him to death. However, how to condemn a King without any constitutional or legal framework for doing it? In his very first speech of the 13th November 1792, he is stating:
“One day men will be astonished by the fact that humanity in the eighteenth century was less advanced than in the time of Caesar. Then a tyrant was slain in the midst of the Senate with no formalities but thirty blows of a dagger and with no other law save the liberty of Rome”
And later in the same speech:
“I repeat: a king cannot be judged according to the laws of the land or rather, the law of policy. (…) There was nothing in the laws of Numa by which to judge Tarquin”
Here, Saint-Just ambiguously played with two famous Brutus in Ancient Roma’s history, without naming them: the Brutus that overthrew Tarquin, the last Etruscan King, and the Brutus that daggered Caesar. The former was the King that made the Romans so reticent, hateful toward monarchy5, the latter a powerful man who was suspected to be on the path of restoring a monarchy. Thus, both Brutus used illegal means in order to establish or to save the Republic.
It was not the only time that Saint-Just drew inspiration from Ancient Roma to justify the resort to violence. Indeed, the French Revolution progressively led its own children to tear each other into pieces. Thus, after the “Montagnards” had definitely ruled out the “Girondins” from power in 17936, by conducting them to the guillotine, the struggle started to emerge among the “Montagnards” themselves.
It was indeed time for Robespierre and Danton, the two main leaders of the Montagne’s party, to put a mortal end to their internecine and always growing rivalry. Saint-Just, strongly supporting Robespierre, had to explain to the deputies and the public opinion the sacrifice of such a popular leader as Danton on the altar of the revolutionary cause.
In his speech addressed to the National Convention the 31st March 1794, Saint-Just began by comparing Marat, a French revolutionary assassinated in his bath the previous year, with Regulus:
“Sacred love of homeland dragged Regulus into Carthage, and settle Marat in the Pantheon, victim of his devotion”
Marat got assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a native of Vandee Region who hated the Jacobins.
Regulus was appointed consul in 256 BC. During the First Punic war, he was made prisoner by the Carthaginians. These latter offered him to navigate to Rome, in order to convince the Roman Senate to stop the war. They made him promise to come back to Carthage in the case he would fail.
However, once in Rome, Regulus advocated for the continuation of the war, pointing out the weaknesses of the Carthaginians and urging the Senate to pursue the efforts. He did not break his promise though: he turned back to Carthage, where he was sentenced to a painful death. He is thus stayed in memory as an allegory of sacrifice, general interest and honor. Once again, Saint-Just put death as a necessary mean for the Revolution. He made his point clearer further in his speech:
“No matter that time has led some vanities to scaffold, cemetery or nothingness, so long as Freedom remains. (…) The mark of freedom and genius cannot be deleted from the universe. (…) World is empty since the Romans; but their memory fulfills it and predicts the name of freedom”
Saint-Just was here pointing out the need for severity. No matter how many people died, all the good brought by the Revolution will stay eternally, as the one brought by the Roman Empire. As it occurred, while Robespierre was gaining more and more power through the Committee of Public Safety (the executive organ during the Terror), he was almost merging with the concept of Revolution, representing it on his own. Consequently, at the zenith of the Terror’s times, any criticism of his policy could challenge the Revolution itself.
Thus, Saint-Just implied that we should not be reticent to sacrifice another person, for instance Danton, on the behalf of general interest. General interest which was, according to him, to preserve the Revolution from all its opponents.
Ancient Rome shaping the new French institution
As early as 1792, once the war had begun against the Austria-Hungarian Empire and Prussia, and so with a country which was in danger of invasion, Marat was advocating for a temporary military dictatorship to deal with the emergency. Of course, dictatorship should not be taken in the modern sense it has acquired. Marat was not asking for a dictatorship like Mussolini’s one, but for a triumvirate, drawing inspiration from the successful precedent of Crassus, Pompey, and Jules Caesar.
It is quite ironical to note how Robespierre feared this dangerous alliance of militarism and growing executive power before the dawn of war. Indeed, in his famous speech of the 18th December 1791, where he attempted to oppose to the declaration of war, he warned:
“In Rome, when the people, tired by the tyranny and pride of the patricians, asked for rights, the Senate would declare a war, and the people would forget their rights to fly under the banners of the patricians. After, Caesar and Pompey would start wars to take command on legions, and would use them to enslave their homeland.”
He then added this astonishing prophetic sentence:
“In troubled periods of history, generals often became the arbiters of the fate of their countries”.
It is exactly what happened in 1799. A France weakened by a costly, difficult war and the corrupted regime of the “Directoire” widely opened his arms to the savior Napoleon Bonaparte, already crowned with glory from the Italian and Egyptian campaign. The Coup of 18 Brumaire7 ended in a triumvirate regime, with an executive power inequitably shared between Bonaparte, Cambacérès and Lebrun8. Even their civil ranks were then conscious copies of the Roman model (“consuls”).
Later, in 1802, Bonaparte organized a plebiscite for acquiring the title and power of “Consul for life”, reviving the Jules Caesar’s tour de force. However, the parallelism with Ancient Rome’s history will be definitely achieved in 1804, when Napoleon was proclaimed imperator by another plebiscite. The very fact that the Romans had transformed their Republic into an Empire has probably made it easier for Napoleon to do so in France.
From then on, whether it was about architecture (consider l’Arc de Triomphe and its antic splendor), symbolic (the eagle banner) or military organization, with a french army organized on the model of the Roman one, Ancient Roma’s influence took an obvious and a more than ever important part in the reconstruction of the French identity, at least during the whole Imperial period.
I hope I have achieved to demonstrate in this article how strong were the ties between Ancient Roma and French Revolution. By showing how were used these references in some turning-point and most important debate of the French Revolution (birth of national sovereignty, death of the King, war, institutional debate), I wanted to offer an overview of the potential impact of it.
Of course, we have to be completely aware that I have only treated one aspect of this influence, and in a partial way. Complete books could be written about the influence of the Ancient Roma in the paintings, the architecture, or the literature of this time for instance. Besides, the english Great Revolution of the XVIIe century is also a reference point very used in the political life of this time.
However, I thought particularly interesting the way the french revolutionaries had to immerge themselves in antic framework to find solutions to their contemporary problems, comparing characters and situations to Ancient Rome. It seems like they had to dress in antic costumes to be confident on what they were doing, as if they were afraid of going too far in their tabula rasa’s doctrine.
This permanent implementation of the Ancient Rome in the French Revolution’s process will be finely analyzed by Benjamin Constant, in one of the fundamental texts of modern liberalism. Indeed, in The Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns (1819), the orator is explaining that because of this focus on ancient time, the revolutionaries could not match the expectations of the people, and thus unavoidably ended with the chaos and bloodshed we have known.
What about today? Is there any influence from Ancient Rome left in the political life of France? Surely! Sadly, it is getting rarer, as both elite and public opinion are more and more disconnected to this antic culture9. However, you sometimes get a more or less accurate try. Thus, in the end of august 2014, Arnaud Montebourg, who was then in charge of the mysterious “Economy Regeneration” Minister, announced his resignation. He declared to the press: “I will follow the example of Cincinnatus, who preferred to resign from power to go back to his fields and ploughs”.
Maybe more tellingly, it is relevant to note that the article 16 of the French Constitution guarantee a far wider range of powers than usually to the President in case of “exceptional times”. Besides, the only time it has been used in the whole Vème République history was by a General10. We could almost imagine Marat smiling in his tomb… Here is the dictatorship you asked for!
di Fabio Grieco
