One [Desmoulins] looks for examples in the history of tyrants because he refuses to take them from the history of the people or to draw them from the genius of threatened freedom. In Rome, when the consul discovered the conjuration and put it down immediately by killing Catiline’s accomplices, he was accused to have violated the rules (violer les formes)… By whom? The ambitious Caesar, who wanted to swell his own party with the horde of the conspirators, by Piso, Claudius, and all the bad citizens, who feared for themselves the virtue of a true Roman and the harshness of laws. (553)
Desmoulins and Robespierre agree about the aim of revolutionary action (freedom), the traditional means to establish, stabilise or save a republic (civic virtue), but dramatically diverge at this juncture as to the appropriate means for waging war against freedom’s foes. And they give utterance to this disagreement with the same weapon: Roman republican examples.
4.9 Conclusion
This chapter has explored republican-minded uses of Roman examples and references during eighteenth-century France. Its main purpose has been to show that while being most certainly a rallying cry, Roman republican virtue is first and foremost brandished as the means to achieve freedom, understood as non-submission to arbitrary power and conceived of as the prime political, or even the highest human, good. This result is hardly surprising when seen in the light of the wider understanding of the early-modern republican tradition, yet it sharply differs from the commonly accepted view that references to ancient Rome were, basically, either a nostalgic way to groan with the loss of a political Eden, or a utopian way to contemplate recasting degenerated modern mankind in an ancient republican mould. To dismiss this objection, it has been necessary to enter into close readings of some crucial texts, forsaking the kind of overarching survey whose highly abstract nature makes it too remote from the real intellectual preoccupations of a given author in a given text. The approach adopted here, like every approach, has its drawbacks: it does not provide the overview we think is needed, in order to delve more into particulars. Nevertheless, some examples discussed here – such as the use of Roman republican thought to expose a fiercely individualist account of the function of government – which may appear surprising as far as the dominant scholarly trend is concerned and which have emerged from the alternative approach adopted here, clearly demonstrate that the overview, with its neat distinctions and elegant characterisations, should never be taken for granted when entering into particulars, and should always yield to what these detailed accounts provide.
NOTES
1 1 See Talleyrand 1791: 110, for a similar point, and Robespierre 1799: 230–231.
2 2 Grell 1995 provides a detailed account of the various uses of Greek and Roman culture and sources, and an impressive bibliography of the translations, editions and studies on Roman sources. One should note that the vast majority of scholarship, duly following the eighteenth-century reality (e.g. Diderot 1766: 666; Rousseau 1782: 1.9; Volney 1799), does not specifically distinguish Roman from Greek political cultures. This makes it more difficult, though without preventing one from trying, to isolate specifically Roman republican uses and references.
3 3 Mably 1758: 126–127 and 1751 applies this method to Roman history. In a defence of abbé Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of the two Indias (Raynal 1781) to which he has collaborated, Diderot (1781: 640) regrets that historians traditionally do not ‘drag the civil and religious tyrants along by their hair’ and candidly claims: ‘the book I love and that kings and courtiers hate is that which awakens the Brutuses’.
4 4 This sentence is put on the title page of Saige 1775.
5 5 Rousseau 1762: 3.9 n., 123-4; see Mably 1758: 119 (a work rightly described as a ‘script for a French revolution’ (Baker 1990: Chapter 4)); and Mandar and Needham 1790: 97.
6 6 See Giargia 2008: 50–57; and Hamel 2014 on Rousseau’s debt to Sidney’s Roman republicanism and Hamel 2019 for the importance of Sidney’s mediation for understanding eighteenth-century republicanism. This raises an important issue for this chapter: dedicated to France, it cannot be tackled in a narrow national context. Ideas circulate: as shown by Hammersley (2005, 2010), most of the major works of seventeenth-century English republicans, who have long been shown to revive Roman republican thinking (e.g. Fink 1945; Pocock 2003 (1975); Skinner 1998), permeated eighteenth-century French political culture via translations and republication at the dawn (Mirabeau/Milton 1788), in the middle (Needham/Mandar 1790), or at the height (Sidney 1793), of the Revolution (Hammersley 2010: 205–207 provides a detailed bibliography; see Chapter 3 on English republicanism).
FURTHER READING
Most eighteenth-century scholars do not specifically isolate Roman from Greek sources. The monumental work of Grell 1995 is arguably the best starting point to understand the pervasive presence of ancient (and specifically Roman) sources and ideas, but also to find one’s bearings in this field – although Grell’s general interpretive framework should not be taken for granted. For a useful summary of the diversity of domains where the ‘goût de l’antique’ expresses itself, see Bouineau 1986: 15–31. See Trabulsi 2009: Chapter 8, however, for the convincing claim that eighteenth-century France’s version of antiquity is more Roman than Greek and more political than anything else (see more specifically Trabulsi 2009: 219–223, for some key Roman references during the Revolution). For a brief comparative overview of the presence of the Roman Republic in the two major revolutions of the late eighteenth century, see Pii 1997. Sellers 2014 offers a useful starting point for Montesquieu’s Rome, one of the most authoritative voices in eighteenth-century France, while Launay 1972 provides a reading of Rousseau’s (largely neglected) early Roman republicanism.
REFERENCES
1 d’Alembert, J.-B.L.R. 1753a. ‘Essai sur la société des gens de lettres & et les grands, sur la réputation, sur les mécènes & sur les récompenses littéraires.’ In d’Alembert, ed. 1763, Mélanges de literature, d’histoire et de philosophie. vol. 1. Amsterdam, 325–412.
2 d’Alembert, J.-B.L.R. 1753b. ‘Essai de traduction de quelques morceaux choisis de Tacite.’ In d’Alembert, ed. 1763, Mélanges de literature, d’histoire et de philosophie.