Conspiracy obsession in a time of revolution: French elites and the origins of the terror, 1789-1792

American Historical Review

Volumn 105, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 691-712

  Tackett, Timothy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33748122098     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2651806     Document Type: Review

References (170)

1. See Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises: Première série (1787-1799), Jérôme Mavidal, et al., eds., 99 vols. (Paris, 1867-1995), 44: 33-43 (hereafter, AP).
2. See also Michael Hochedlinger, "'La cause de tous les maux de la France': Die 'Austrophobie' im revolutionären Frankreich und der Sturz des Königstums, 1789-1792," Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 24, no. 2 (1997): 73-120;
3. and Thomas E. Kaiser, "Who's Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia, and the Queen," French History, forthcoming.
4. The accusations were also well timed to divert attention from the "Brissotins," who controlled the ministry and who had led the nation into its frustrating war situation. See especially H. A. Goetz-Bernstein, La diplomatie de la Gironde: Jacques-Pierre Brissot (Paris, 1912), 49, 57-58, 74-79.
5. Pierre-Victor Malouet and A. F. Bertrand de Moleville, two supposed participants in the "Committee," both avowed that it never existed: Antoine-François Bertrand de Moleville, Histoire de la Révolution de France pendant les dernières années du règne de Louis XVI, 10 vols. (Paris, 1801-02), 8: 8-9, 36-37. Goetz-Bernstein thought that it did exist as a small coterie around the Habsburg queen, Marie-Antoinette, who regularly sent French war plans to the Austrian court: Goetz-Bernstein, 215-17.
6. See, for example, the letters of Antoine Rabusson-Lamothe, "Lettres sur l'Assemblée législative," Francisque Mège, ed., Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Clermont-Ferrand 11 (1869): 346-47, 349-50;
7. of Sylvain Codet: Archives départementales de l'Ille-et-Vilaine, L 294 (2), May 30 (written "April 30" by error); of Georges Couthon, Correspondance de Georges Couthon, Francisque Mège, ed. (Paris, 1872), 143, 146-47; and of Blaise Cavellier and Romain-Nicolas Malassis: Archives Communales de Brest, Series D, uncatalogued, May 26.
8. AP, 44: 189-96, 274.
9. Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror during the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 81.
10. Compare Mona Ozouf, "'Jacobins': Fortune et infortune d'un mot," in L'école de la France: Essais sur la Révolution, l'utopie et l'enseignement (Paris, 1984), 82.
11. Thucydides, Benjamin Jowett, trans., 2d edn., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1900), 1: 242.
12. Bernard A. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chaps. 3-4.
13. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, 2 vols. (New York, 1935), 2: 66-69, 77-78, 344;
14. also Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London, 1996), 629, 642.
15. F. Beck and W. Godin, The Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (New York, 1951), esp. 221-25;
16. also Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times; Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 190-217.
17. Reiterated accusations of foreign conspiracy were also voiced in the Soviet Union during the great war scare of 1927: Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), 216-24, 264-67.
18. Tai Sung An, Mao Tse-Tung's Cultural Revolution (Indianapolis, 1972), 1-4;
19. Thomas W. Robinson, ed., The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), esp. 51, 95-96.
20. It may be, however, that in the Chinese Cultural Revolution opposition was perceived to arise less from plots and conspiracies than from class and the class struggle in general: see, for example, Hong Yung Lee, Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study (Berkeley, 1978), 41-63.
21. For example, Alphonse Aulard, Histoire politique de la Révolution française, 5th edn. (Paris, 1913), esp. 357-66;
22. Albert Mathiez, La Révolution française, 3 vols. (Paris, 1922), 3: chap. 8;
23. Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1962-64), 2: 64-76.
24. Crane Brinton never mentions the issue in either The Jacobins (New York, 1930)
25. or The Anatomy of Revolution, rev. edn. (New York, 1952).
26. Robert R. Palmer is more probing, but he devotes only a paragraph to the question: Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, N.J., 1941), 64.
27. Among nineteenth-century historians, see especially Edgar Quinet, La révolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1865), 1: 187-89.
28. The only book I have found entirely devoted to the issue is Jacques Duhamel, Essai du rôle des éléments paranoïaques dans la génèse des idées révolutionnaires (Paris, 1929),
29. but it is poorly documented and disappointing. On the related question of denunciations, see Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately, eds., Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago, 1996).
30. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981), 53.
31. See also Furet's article "The Terror," in Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, Arthur Goldhammer, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. 137-38.
32. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 39.
33. Colin Lucas, "The Theory and Practice of Denunciation in the French Revolution," in Fitzpatrick and Gellately, Accusatory Practices, 23. Lucas characterizes Furet's point of view, without subscribing to it himself.
34. Furet, Interpreting the Revolution, 54.
35. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 39-44.
36. Among other historians supporting positions similar to those of Furet and Hunt, see Ozouf, "'Jacobin,'" 82;
37. Norman Hampson, Prelude to Terror: The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus (Oxford, 1988), 61-62;
38. G. T. Cubitt, "Denouncing Conspiracy in the French Revolution," Renaissance and Modern Studies 33 (1989): 145-46;
39. Lucien Jaume, Le discours Jacobin et la démocratie (Paris, 1989), esp. part 2, chap. 2;
40. and Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 241-47.
41. See esp. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, Joan White, trans. (New York, 1973);
42. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959);
43. and Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, Remy Inglis Hall, trans. (Garden City, N.Y., 1972).
44. For an overview of the "First Terror," which includes the August 10 storming of the Tuileries Palace and the September Massacres, see Georges Lefebvre: La Révolution française: La première terreur (Paris, 1952).
45. Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (1982): 401-41;
46. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 1965), 3-40.
47. See also Bailyn, Ideological Origins, chaps. 3-4;
48. and David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971).
49. Wood, "Conspiracy," 407, 409, 411. Wood also links the "paranoid style" to the wide assumption among Anglo-American elites of deceit and dissembling within political circles.
50. Steven L. Kaplan, The Famine Plot Persuasion in Eighteenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1982), 1-2, 62. Kaplan argues that certain elements of the educated elites might also adhere to the "famine plot persuasion."
51. Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris, Claudia Mieville, trans. (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. chap. 4;
52. Lefebvre, Great Fear, esp. part 2.
53. e siècles: Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978);
54. and René Girard, The Scapegoat, Yvonne Freccero, trans. (Baltimore, 1986).
55. "American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language" (ARTFL), a database housed at the University of Chicago and accessible through the World Wide Web: http://humanities. uchicago.edu/ARTFL/. The sample contained 434 works published during this period. The analysis is based on the occurrence of the word conspiration (singular or plural). The word appeared 258 times, in about one in seven (62) of the sample works, written by 37 different authors.
56. Thirteen of the 258 occurrences appeared to entail a belief in the existence of contemporary conspiracies. These were used in the texts of five different authors. One of the latter was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed his conviction that there was a general conspiracy of philosophes aligned against him personally.
57. Voltaire, Essai sur l'histoire générale (Geneva, 1756), 143, 337;
58. E. J. F. Barbier, Chronique de la Régence, Tome 7 (1761; Paris, 1866), 410.
59. In 1757, the Jansenist and Gallican press even insinuated that the Jesuits had supported Robert-François Damiens' assassination attempt against Louis XV: Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750-1770 (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 65-80.
60. See also Geoffrey Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1993).
61. Augustin Barruel, Les Helviennes, ou Lettres provinciales philosophiques (Amsterdam, 1781).
62. Amos Hofman, "The Origins of the Theory of the Philosophe Conspiracy," French History 2 (1988): 152-72.
63. See also J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (London, 1972), 140-41;
64. Darrin M. McMahon, "The Counter-Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France," Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 77-112;
65. and Barruel's Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du jacobinisme, 4 vols. (London, 1797-98).
66. A total of 182 (71 percent) of the 258 occurrences referred to the historical past. In most of the remaining cases, the word was used metaphorically or in a literary context - as in the plots of plays or novels. See, for example, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Du théâtre (Paris, 1773), 49.
67. See also Yves-Marie Bercé and Elena Fasano Guarini, eds., Complots et conjurations dans l'Europe moderne (Rome, 1996), 1-5 (Bercé's introduction).
68. Compare John D. Woodbridge, Revolt in Prerevolutionary France: The Prince de Conti's Conspiracy against Louis XV, 1755-1757 (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
69. Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, Gonzague Truc, ed. (1748; Paris, 1967), 122-23.
70. Gordon Wood identifies similar trends in the Anglo-American world, linking them above all to writers of the Scottish Enlightenment. But he feels that they had a broad effect on the population only after the outbreak of the French Revolution: Wood, "Conspiracy," 430-32.
71. The Jansenist Robert de Saint-Vincent: Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution, A Study in the History of Libertarianism: France, 1770-1774 (Baton Rouge, La., 1985), 45.
72. See, for example, Guy-Jean-Baptiste Target, Lettres d'un homme à un autre homme sur les affaires du temps (n.p., [1771]).
73. 39 of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, as listed in the Catalogue de l'histoire de France. See also Shanti Singham, "'A Conspiracy of Twenty Million Frenchmen': Public Opinion, Patriotism, and the Assault on Absolutism during the Maupeou Years, 1770-1775" (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1991), 21-23, 99-100;
74. and "The Correspondance secrète: Forging Patriotic Public Opinion during the Maupeou Years," Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques 18, no. 2 (1992): 65-100;
75. and Dale Van Kley, "The Religious Origins of the Patriot and Ministerial Parties in Pre-Revolutionary France: Controversy over the Chancellor's Constitutional Coup, 1771-1775," Historical Reflections, same issue, 17-63.
76. On this sample of pamphlet literature, see Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790) (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 101.
77. Robespierre warned of the insidious "plotting of the enemies of the people" in the Estates of Artois: A la nation artésienne, sur la nécessité de réformer les Etats d'Artois (n.p., 1788), 4, 83.
78. See also Maximilien Robespierre, Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués (Arras, 1789).
79. Conclusion based on an extensive reading of the "general cahiers," those drawn up at the final stage of the electoral process for the Estates General and intended to be sent with the deputies directly to Versailles.
80. Wood, "Conspiracy," 410. Wood also linked these trends with the peculiar forms of moral philosophy that arose in the Anglo-American Enlightenment and that sought to find a place for free will in a mechanistic causal universe by identifying "causes in human affairs with the motives, mind, or will of individuals"; p. 416. It is difficult to discern equivalent trends in the French Enlightenment.
81. Bercé and Guarini, Complots et conjurations, 4-5.
82. As based on the AP. I examined selected debates on topics that seemed most likely to lend themselves to conspiratorial interpretations, such as those dealing with popular unrest, emigrants, refractory clergy, international threats, and war. These were identified, first, from the observations of the deputies in their correspondence: see below note 41; and, second, from the cumulative indexes to the AP: vol. 34 (the Constituent Assembly) and vol. 51 (the Legislative Assembly).
83. F.-A. Aulard, ed., La Société des Jacobins: Recueil de documents pour l'histoire du club des Jacobins de Paris, 6 vols. (Paris, 1889-97). Unfortunately, Aulard found only sketchy records for the first months of the club's existence. Initially, the Jacobins consisted exclusively of National Assembly deputies. Over time, increasing numbers of non-deputies were admitted.
84. I have examined a total of 1,460 letters for seven deputies written during the Constituent Assembly (about 50 per month for the twenty-nine-month duration) and 443 for seven deputies or delegations of deputies written during the first ten months of the Legislative Assembly (about 44 per month for ten months). These specific sets of correspondence were chosen as being among the most continuous and complete series available for the respective bodies. Unfortunately, relatively few letters seem to be preserved for August and September 1792, presumably because of the general chaos of the period. Sources for the Constituent Assembly: François-René-Pierre Ménard de La Groye, Correspondance (1789-1791), Florence Mirouse, ed. (Le Mans, 1989);
85. Pierre-François and Marie-Angélique Lepoutre, Député-paysan et fermière de Flandre en 1789: La correspondance des Lepoutre, Jean-Pierre Jessenne and Edna Hindie Lemay, eds. (Lille, 1998);
86. ème sér., vols. 17-23 (1901-07);
87. Jean-François Gaultier de Biauzat, Gaultier de Biauzat, député du Tiers état aux Etats généraux de 1789: Sa vie et sa correspondance, Francisque Mège, ed., 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand, 1890),
88. and Bibliothèque Municipale de Clermont-Ferrand, mss. 788-89; and Jean-André Périsse Du Luc, ms. letters to Jean-Baptiste Willermoz: Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, ms. F.G. 5430. Sources for the Legislative Assembly: Rabusson-Lamothe, "Lettres"; François-Yves Roubaud, "Lettres de François-Yves Roubaud," Edmond Poupé, ed., Bulletin de la Société d'études scientifiques et archéologiques de Draguignan 36 (1926-27): 3-218;
89. Couthon, Correspondance;
90. Pierre Dubreuil-Chambardel, Lettres parisiennes d'un révolutionnaire poitevin, Marie-Luce Llorca, ed. (Tours, 1994);
91. e série, 9-10 (1938-39): 115-41;
92. D. Tempier, ed., "Correspondance des députés des Côtes-du-Nord à l'Assemblée législative" (written by five different deputies, although half were penned by Jean-Louis Bagot), Société d'émulation des Côtes-du-Nord, Bulletins et mémoires 28 (1890): 61-169;
93. and ms. letters of the Legislative deputies of Ille-et-Vilaine (six different deputies, although two - Sylvain Codet and François-Alexandre Tardiveau - wrote well over half of them): Archives Départementales de l'Ille-et-Vilaine, L 294. On the use of deputy letters as a source, see Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 8-13.
94. The sample of Constituent deputies averaged 49.7 years of age in 1789, compared to 46.4 for the body as a whole; while the Legislative deputies averaged 38.6 compared to 38.4 for the whole. There were four lawyers, three judges, three wealthy farmers, two doctors, a bookseller, and a former military officer. Seven came from north of the Loire, seven from south of the Loire, residing in communities that included large towns (Lyons), medium-sized towns (Le Mans, Clermont-Ferrand [three], Grenoble, Rennes, Saint-Brieuc, Mayenne, and Grasse), and small towns or villages (Gourdon, Linselle, Bourgignon, and Avon). A total of five are known to have been Jacobins, four were probably Feuillants, and five were apparently nonaligned. Two of the deputies (the Constituent deputy Gaultier and the Legislative deputy Couthon) were major players in their assemblies, while most of the others were minor players or back-benchers. Note that for the purpose of these statistics I have used only the deputies from Ille-et-Vilaine and Côtes-du-Nord who largely dominated their delegation's correspondence: respectively, Codet and Bagot.
95. I have enumerated all occurrences of a stated belief in the existence of plots or conspiracies (conspirations, complots, intrigues, conjurations, manoeuvres, cabales, trames, brigues, etc.). Overall, such references occurred in 4 percent of the Constituent deputies' letters and 14 percent of the Legislative deputies' letters. I have excluded those deputy reports of conspiracy beliefs held by others that are rejected as unsubstantiated or of dubious authenticity. An earlier overview of conspiracy interpretations in deputy correspondence was based on an impressionistic assessment of selected letters of the Constituent deputies only: see Timothy Tackett, "The Constituent Assembly and the Terror," in Keith Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Vol. 4, The Terror (Oxford, 1994), 46-49.
96. AP, 8: 135-37. See also the report by Necker on July 4 and the bureau reports on July 6, 1789:
97. AP, 8: 183, 194-98.
98. Compare, however, the speech by Barère: AP, 8: 137.
99. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 131-32, 135-36.
100. Pierre Caron, "La tentative de contrerévolution de juin-juillet 1789," Revue d'histoire moderne 7 (1906-07): 5-34, 649-78.
101. Ménard, Correspondance, 55. Mirabeau's speech was on July 8.
102. Gaultier, Correspondance, 2: 175;
103. Gantheret, private collection, July 26. Georges Lefebvre cites a report in early June of fears among the popular classes of a conspiracy of the clergy and the nobility. But widespread fears of an "aristocratic plot" seem to have arisen only in early July and, above all, after the fall of the Bastille: Lefebvre, Great Fear, 59-61.
104. Compare the explosion of plot accusations beginning in July in newspapers and brochures: Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, Charlotte Mandell, trans. (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 217-33.
105. Lefebvre, Great Fear, pt. 3.
106. AP, 8: 293-95.
107. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 271.
108. AP, 11: 652-58, 665-73, 676-82.
109. Laurent-François Legendre, August 31, 1791, Archives Municipales de Brest, series D, uncatalogued.
110. Gaultier de Biauzat, Bibliothèque Municipale de Clermont-Ferrand, ms. 788, December 23, 1790.
111. Durand to his cousin, May 23, 1790, Archives Municipales de Cahors.
112. Adrien-Cyprien Duquesnoy, Journal d'Adrien Duquesnoy, Robert de Crèvecoeur, ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1894), 1: 458-59;
113. Adrien-Cyprien Duquesnoy, Journal d'Adrien Duquesnoy, 2: 290, 301.
114. See Aulard, Société des Jacobins, especially 1: xxviii-xxxiii (Règlement of the Jacobins).
115. Aulard, Société des Jacobins, for example, 1: 283-86, 294. Some 40,000 Parisians were said to have demonstrated near the Assembly during the debates on the Nancy Affair; Legendre, letter of September 3, 1790.
116. Aulard, Société des Jacobins, 1: 324, 390, 422, 431, 437, 448.
117. Ménard, Correspondance, 246.
118. See also Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 254-55.
119. Gérard Walter, Histoire des Jacobins (Paris, 1946), 53-55;
120. Albert Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers pendant la crise de Varennes (Paris, 1910), 8-9;
121. Isabelle Bourdin, Les sociétés populaires à Paris pendant la Révolution (Paris, 1937), 53, 58, 155-57, 175-76, 199.
122. Jack Richard Censer, Prelude to Power: The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791 (Baltimore, 1976), 96-97.
123. Walter, Histoire des Jacobins, 97-99;
124. Aulard, Société des Jacobins, 2: 468. This oath is not mentioned in the Règlement of February 1790.
125. See, for example, the letters by Lepoutre, Correspondance, 487; and Gantheret, private collection, June 24, 1791.
126. See also Jean Dreyfus, "Le manifeste royal du 20 juin 1791," La Révolution française 54 (1908): 5-22.
127. The conclusions here are based on an extensive reading of documents in the Archives Nationales, D XXIX bis 35-38; and C 124-31. The king and queen had been discussing the possibility of flight since the fall of 1790. On the king's self-conscious efforts to mislead and lull the revolutionaries into thinking he supported their cause, see, for example, Axel Von Fersen to Baron de Breteuil, April 2, 1791, R. M. de Klinckowström, ed., Le comte de Fersen et la cour de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1877), 1: 97-98.
128. See, for example, Marc-Alexis Vadier - a radical Jacobin and future member of the Committee of General Security - to his constituency in the département of Ariège, early June, Gaston Arnaud, Histoire de la Révolution dans le département de l'Ariège, 1789-1795 (Toulouse, 1904), 241.
129. The best study is Charles J. Mitchell, The French Legislative Assembly of 1791 (Leiden, 1988).
130. There were 2.2 references per month in the letters of the Constituent deputies and 6.0 per month in those of the Legislative deputies.
131. AP, 35: 361.
132. Compare Lucas, "Denunciation," 24.
133. The new Surveillance Committee was formally created on November 25, with ten of the first twelve members chosen from the left: AP, 35: 370.
134. AP, 23: 566-75.
135. Only the radical Jacobin Prieur [de la Marne] had alluded to the conspiracy theme: AP, 23: 569.
136. AP, 34: 402-03, 541, 711-12. The bill was vetoed by Louis XVI.
137. AP, 35: 145.
138. AP, 37: 412-13;
139. and AP, 39: 427.
140. Brissot had suggested the existence of an "Austrian Committee" in January: see his newspaper, Patriote français, January 29, 1792.
141. See Timothy Tackett, "Les députés de l'Assemblée législative, 1791-1792," in Pour la Révolution française: En hommage à Claude Mazauric (Rouen, 1998), 139-44.
142. Tackett, "Les députés de l'Assemblée législative," 142-43.
143. According to Gensonné, some 200 deputies were attending the Jacobin Club by October 15: Goetz-Bernstein, La diplomatie, 46.
144. Several generations of historians have mistakenly credited the Feuillants with 264 deputies. On the early de facto polarization of the Legislative Assembly, see Charles J. Mitchell, "Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791," French Historical Studies 13 (1983-84): 356-89.
145. See also the suggestions in François Furet, "Les Girondins et la guerre: Les débuts de l'Assemblée législative," in Furet and Mona Ozouf, eds., La Gironde et les Girondins (Paris, 1991), 191.
146. Figures based on an analysis of the newspaper Journal des débats de la Société des amis de la Constitution séante aux Jacobins de Paris, July 17-September 30, 1791;
147. and, for the Feuillants, on Augustin Challamel, Les clubs contre-révolutionnaires (Paris, 1895), 286-93. Since a large number of conservatives ceased attending the sessions in the last months of the Constitutent, the proportion of Feuillant deputies among those actually participating was even greater, probably a majority.
148. Some 60 percent had been administrators and another 18 percent magistrates of various sorts: Tackett, "Les députés de l'Assemblée législative," 141.
149. On the attitudes of administrators toward Constituent policies on emigrants, see the speech by the Jacobin Vernier in February 1791: AP, 23: 573.
150. On the refractories, see Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 275-82.
151. See, for example, Jeffrey W. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, La., 1990);
152. and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Lydia Cochrane, trans. (Durham, N.C., 1991), chap. 6.
153. John Markoff, "Images of the King at the Beginning of the Revolution," in Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doléances of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 369-76.
154. Spontaneous Te Deum services were held throughout the kingdom to give thanks for the king's recovery: see, for example, Archives Nationales, C 124-31; Marie de Roux, La révolution à Poitiers et dans la Vienne (Paris, 1910), 442-43;
155. Eugène Dubois, Histoire de la Révolution dans l'Ain: Tome I, La Constituante (1789-1791) (Bourg-en-Bresse, 1931), 330;
156. Marcel Bruneau, Les débuts de la Révolution dans les départements du Cher et de l'Indre (Paris, 1902), 164;
157. Arnaud, Histoire de la Révolution dans le département de l'Ariège, 241.
158. Even the principal radical newspapers had continued a positive - or at least noncommittal - treatment of the king, through the early months of 1791: Censer, Prelude to Power, 112-15.
159. On the psychological impact of Varennes, see notably Paolo Viola, Il trono vuoto: La transizione della sovranità nella rivoluzione francese (Turin, 1989).
160. Rabusson-Lamothe, "Lettres," 231, 264.
161. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary, 64-65, 110-13, 182, 190, 308-09.
162. See, notably, Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America (New York, 1991), 4-23;
163. and David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles (New York, 1965), 55-88.
164. For more traditional Freudian approaches - which I have found little useful for the present study - see Yehuda Fried and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis (Boston, 1976);
165. and John Farrell, Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion (New York, 1996).
166. For social psychological approaches to conspiracy interpretations, see Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici, eds., Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy (New York, 1987).
167. Compare Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change, 2d edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1982).
168. Much of the recent theorizing about revolutions has focused on the initial breakdown - particularly in structural terms - of the various "Old Regimes" and has had little to say about the process of those revolutions once they had begun. See, for example, Nikki Keddie, ed., Debating Revolutions (New York, 1995);
169. and John Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions (London, 1996).
170. The comparative study of the revolutionary process by Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, N.J., 2000), appeared too late to be integrated into this article. Among other themes, Mayer stresses the dialectical interaction between revolution and counterrevolution in the emergence of revolutionary violence and conspiracy fears.