"What Is the Law If Not the Expression of the Rights of Man and Reason?" The Champ de Mars Massacre and the Language of Law

JANINE M. LANZA

On July 17, 1791, a crowd of Parisians gathered at the Champ de Mars, in the western part of the city, for the third time in as many days to make clear to the National Assembly their position on the question of the king's constitutional standing. They carried with them a petition that demanded, in unequivocal terms, the suspension of the king, pending his trial on charges of betraying the French nation and the Revolution. According to the testimony of several witnesses, the day began on a tumultuous note when two men were found hiding in some bushes. Members of the crowd attacked the two men and killed them. Condemned as spies by the crowd, they were defended as innocent bystanders by the National Assembly. As soon as the Assembly heard about the killings, they dispatched the National Guard, under the command of General Lafayette, to disperse the petitioners and restore order. When the troops arrived at the Champ de Mars, a number of those present threw stones at them. The tense troops reacted by firing on the crowd, and Bailly, the mayor of Paris, took the opportunity to declare martial law in an attempt to restore order in an increasingly volatile city. Before the day ended fifty people were dead and a dozen others gravely injured.1 In addition to the physical harm inflicted, suspicion and distrust of the Assembly and the Commune ran high among the Parisian populace. In response to the violence and the adversarial attitude of the people, the Assembly repressed leftist organizations and sought to dissociate itself from the opinions expressed by the petitioners on the Champ de Mars and their literary and political supporters.	1
Eventually the Champ de Mars massacre, in conjunction with the events that followed, did presage the Revolution's move in a new political direction. Both the Jacobin and Cordeliers political clubs worked with the sections, the administrative units of Paris, to plan demonstrations and write the petition that was ultimately signed at the Champ de Mars. In contrast to earlier uprisings, which were unplanned, spontaneous happenings, the gathering at the Champ de Mars was mapped out in advance and given shape by the members of these clubs. The Jacobin Club's members, in particular, gave voice to the perceptions and opinions of ordinary Parisians in the numerous petitions they drafted. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that historians see this day and its aftermath primarily as a chapter in the rise of the power of the Parisian political clubs, a rise that formed part of a more general political shift.2 Nonetheless, historians must be aware of other implications of this revolutionary journée. For while this event may have helped to steer the Revolution on a new, leftist course, it also marked the moment when many Parisians, along with their political allies in the Cordeliers and Jacobin clubs, expressed a loss of faith and trust in their monarch and began to question the suitability of a monarchical political system, constitutional or otherwise. The words of the petition, in demanding that the king be brought to trial and prevented from exercising power in the interim, demonstrate as much. In expressing a fraying of the bond between king and subject, the occurrences on the Champ de Mars helped to lay the groundwork for the monarch's future trial and execution. Those who gathered on the Champ de Mars believed (rightly) that Louis had tried to leave France by his own volition and not as the victim of a kidnapping attempt as the National Assembly tried to claim. They also stated the belief that the king was formally accountable to the people for his behavior and actions. Louis XVI's condemnation nineteen months later brought to fruition the demands of these petitioners that he be tried and punished for his attempt to abandon and betray the Revolution. What is of particular interest is that the petitions circulated on this day, as well as later accounts of this uprising, did not use the language of affect and emotion to express a loss of faith and the desire for a change in the political system. Instead the language of the law and sovereignty expressed this change in their allegiance. The petition did not express remorse or bewilderment over the king's behavior. It did not mourn the loss of a national leader. Instead it asserted the illegality of his actions and the necessity for his punishment.	2
As an event of major importance, conflicting myths and heated rhetoric surrounded the telling of the Champ de Mars massacre. Many contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, in the capital and in the provinces, offered accounts and interpretations of that day, either condemning the participants or justifying their version of what had happened. One of the more striking features of that discussion is the frequency with which the idea of the law was invoked. The law, and the question of who had broken it on the day of the Champ de Mars massacre, formed one of the main points of contestation. In this context, the law was invoked not as a set of codified strictures and norms, as written or customary rule. Rather, the concept of the law was used by the people who had participated in this event, either directly on the field or indirectly in print, to signify and describe a kind of natural, rational order that should guide the modeling of the new revolutionary state and to assert their belief that the law should function as a dialectic between those granted political authority and those who were to comply with that authority.3 Such an understanding contrasted sharply with the juristic discourse of the Old Regime. Prior to the Revolution, when France was nominally governed by an absolute monarch, there was no formal reciprocal element in law giving. The king's word was law.4 During the Revolution, the law became a site of activity, a locus of discourse and contestation for rival groups, a creation not of one privileged person or group of people, but of the Nation.5	3
It can often be difficult to perceive how an abstract concept such as the law moves from the level of the court or the government to the level of the people and how that notion changes as a consequence. In this analysis we see that much of the rhetoric following the Champ de Mars massacre demonstrated the way in which the people of Paris understood and used the concept and language of law as a tool to define sovereignty and to fight for political power at this pivotal moment in the Revolution, as well as to justify their ongoing active participation in its events. Rather than discuss the political changes and realignments that followed the massacre, as other historians have done, I examine the discourse that described it, focusing on the meaning it had for participants and spectators, particularly with respect to the issues of the executive power of the government, the location of sovereignty, and the authority to make laws in the nation. This approach avoids reading meaning into this journée based on subsequent events. But it also elucidates a crucial point in France's transformation from a monarchy to a republic, accomplished not solely by force but also by the use of a certain kind of language. Both the National Assembly and the petitioners justified their actions of that day in two ways: First by claiming to be the sole repository of sovereignty in the French state, and second by condemning the actions of their rivals as illegal. Once each side defined itself as the sole legitimate source of law, it did not need to compromise with its adversaries.	4
The concepts of representation, discourse, and political culture that have replaced social class and economic determinism as fundamental concepts in French Revolutionary studies provide an analytic framework for teasing out the meaning of this journée. Central to such an approach is François Furet's Penser la Révolution française, which proposed a non-Marxist, discursive interpretation of the Revolution and argued that its primary accomplishment was the rise of a new political culture, achieved by the political symbols and language created by those who participated in it.6 This article looks at the language used to relate the events of the Champ de Mars. It examines it both in the context of the discursive field of this era and the competitition for legitimacy and the right to speak for the people that comprised such a critical part of the early Revolutionary period. In addition, it places the language in the context of the political positions and perceptions of those involved in this uprising. I use a close analysis of a single incident in the Revolution to understand the dynamic of language and its use by different people in varied social and political positions. In contrast to Furet's more sweeping approach, I focus on the employment of a specific kind of language in a constrained setting to understand the uses of certain discursive concepts during the Revolution.7	5
Many historians have noted the importance of the concept of the law at this time. Lynn Hunt calls the law one of several "key words [that] served as revolutionary incantations [and] bespoke nothing less than adherence to the revolutionary community."8 Furet also focuses his attention on certain key discursive concepts, most notably the notions of sovereignty and legitimacy. Regarding the French Revolution as a kind of holistic text, Hunt and Furet analyze these words in terms of the rhetorical structure of this event. While they use distinct techniques and reach different conclusions, both historians emphasize the rhetorical aspects of the revolutionary era.9 In Lynn Hunt's words:	6
[P]olitical language was not merely an expression of an ideological position that was determined by underlying social or political interests. The language itself helped shape the perception of interests and hence the development of ideologies. In other words, revolutionary political discourse was rhetorical; it was a means of persuasion, a way of reconstituting the social and political world.10
Thus, it was not simply the actors' choice of words that created the ideal revolutionary world; just as important were the linguistic framework and rhetorical assumptions within which those words were embedded. Placing emphasis on the generative power of language, the Revolution can be considered primarily as a semiological event.
Rather than considering the law as a vast "keyword" for the Revolution, I examine the debate and contestation over that concept in a specific revolutionary context.11 The law was an idea that engendered a great deal of debate and struggle, and not only within the confines of the National Assembly.12 In examining how the "law" became a nexus of confrontation, I employ the concept of linguistic fields or markets, as developed in the works of Pierre Bourdieu.13 For Bourdieu, the structure of language and choices of words are subordinate to the relations of power and interests that prevail among speakers. But Bourdieu's "interests" are not mechanical or transparent economic and social considerations. There is no formula, unlike in a programatically Marxist approach, that can predict how an individual or group will behave based on social position. Rather, drawing upon the metaphors of the marketplace and exchange, Bourdieu insists that language cannot be understood without constant reference to its broad and shifting social context.	7
Linguistic exchange represents a constant jockeying for position with each party to the conversation engaging in "symbolic interactions, . . . relations of symbolic power in which the power relations between speakers or their respective groups are actualized."14 As such, words uttered cannot be understood simply within the framework of rhetorical structures or narrative plots. They must also be measured against subjective understandings, the social positions and knowledge, the habitus to use Bourdieu's terminology, of those employing language.15 Meaning is produced by the relationship between the individual and the larger social world and is not limited to an understanding of rhetorical and linguistic structures. Nor can it be understood in the top-down logic that Furet applies to language. In Furet's understanding of revolutionary rhetoric, official words, words spoken by representatives in the National Assembly, expressed the mentality of the French as they moved toward Terror. But within Bourdieu's framework language is more grounded in relations and the specific understandings of the individuals using words. Discourse cannot be defined though an official utterance but through everyday use.16 According to this approach to the revolutionary context, then, the varied inflections of individual speakers were more meaningful than those of official Paris. The different understandings and positions of these speakers had a profound impact on their use and choice of words, as well as on their interpretation of speech.	8
This observation serves as a useful starting point for examining the Champ de Mars massacre that took place on July 17, 1791, and the varied explanations, written after the fact, that sought to take account of the violence there. All parties engaged in this debate used certain key terms to forward their positions. The notions of representation, sovereignty, and the law figured prominently in many accounts of the Champ de Mars massacre. But certainly, these terms did not carry the same valence for all who used them, whether they were speaking in the Assembly or on the field itself. Sovereignty meant something to the journalist Jean-Paul Marat that it did not mean to elected representatives in the National Assembly. Orators and journalists sought enhanced power for themselves and their allies by the ways they dissected this massacre. They hoped to discredit other parties and present themselves as the authentic voice of the people, a valuable claim to make during the revolutionary period. However, explicit interests did not exhaust the meaning of this rhetoric. The unanticipated and unexpected also come into play in such linguistic exchanges.17 Written accounts of the massacre argued positions that were not transparent to those using the words and were not clearly connected to forwarding interests. They were a means to appropriate and create political culture but not necessarily with a foreordained outcome in mind or according to a certain revolutionary rhetoric.	9
My analysis examines these accounts with the aim of understanding what speakers meant when they invoked the law and, ultimately, why the idea of law was such a meaningful concept. The choice of law as the node of conflict was not inevitable. So why did those fighting over the king's and the people's place in society use the law as their means of deciding this critical question? I believe that analyzing the language of competing parties will answer this question and, more broadly, show the power of the concept of law in specific usage rather than as an overarching key word.	10
The year 1791 was pivotal for the Revolution because it brought to the fore more radical inclinations among the populace and a move toward the period of the Terror. However, more abstractly, 1791 was key because it was the moment when several elements of revolutionary language were clarified. The first French constitution took effect in 1791, thus cementing certain notions in the political lexicon. For example, the constitution defined the role of legislators, a political concept that would have a great deal of influence on subsequent Republics and on attitudes toward political representation. In terms of the law and the new revolutionary language that expressed it, 1791 was also a critical moment. According to Jacques Guilhaumou, it was the point when "the linguistic conscience was clarifying a necessary equivalence between words and objects (choses)."18 The rhetoric and actions surrounding the Champ de Mars uprising were key to this debate over giving meaning and concrete qualities to the words of the law.	11
The Champ de Mars massacre and its repercussions can only be understood within two distinct contexts: the first was the legal debate taking place in the Assembly over the king's status after his flight and capture at Varennes. Beyond that immediate crisis, there remained a struggle over the definition of sovereignty and whether representatives could legitimately act out that sovereignty for the people. This latter question had been under debate since the Assembly's inception in July 1789. It was to frame a response to both the immediate and long-term questions that petitioners gathered on the Champ de Mars.	12
The immediate crisis was unleashed on June 21, 1791, when Louis XVI and his family attempted to escape from France and join the émigré troops massed over the German border. Louis planned to march back to Paris at the head of this army to suppress the Revolution and restore himself as absolute monarch. The royal family was apprehended about twenty-Five kilometers from the Franco-German border and brought back to Paris by messengers deputized by the National Assembly. Louis XVI had never wholeheartedly supported the demands of the Revolution, even before his flight from Paris, but the institution of the monarchy had not been seriously questioned within the Assembly up to that point, not even by radicals.19 Louis had apparently reconciled his own views with those of the Constituent Assembly in October 1789, when he finally accepted the August decrees abolishing the feudal regime in France.20 This acceptance did not definitively alter his position as king since only the completed constitution could delineate the formal powers of each branch of government. But it did tacitly express a weakening of the absolute monarchy and a rapprochement with the ideals of the Revolution of 1789. When Louis fled in 1791, he unambiguously demonstrated his opposition to the new regime and his unreliability as head of this government. As such, it was increasingly difficult to support him as sovereign since his actions showed that he did not endorse the principles or the accomplishments of the Revolution. The Assembly consequently faced the difficult task of deciding the king's fate in the new revolutionary world.	13
Immediately following the king's forced return to Paris, the Assembly seemed resolute on brokering a deal with him within their chamber, resisting calls to allow the people to speak on this matter. The moderates in the legislative body were most determined to bring the incident to a quiet and inconclusive end, thereby maintaining the monarchy and some measure of stability. Perhaps more significantly this strategy would retain for the National Assembly control over Louis's situation. This faction seemed prepared to make a deal with the king that would see him unpunished and simply "leave the King suspended from his functions, until the Constitution was finished."21 Such a move would put the ultimate decision about the monarch's position on hold for some time, thus allowing the memory of the king's flight to fade and hot Parisian tempers to cool. In addition, the legislative body had almost finished the constitution by this time.22 Any formal change in the king's position would force a complete reworking of that document, a task no one wished to undertake. Accordingly, the Assembly formally suspended Louis from all duties on June 25, 1791, the day after he arrived back in Paris, but they did not depose him.23 The radical members of the Assembly, including most notably Robespierre, Pétion, and Grégoire, opposed this course of action and pushed unceasingly for more severe retribution. They argued that by fleeing Paris the king had shown his opposition to the Revolution, thereby forfeiting the inviolability the interim constitution accorded him. Thus the Assembly should judge him as a traitor. As Grégoire expressed it, "the inviolability of the King . . . cannot be stretched to support the power of a guilty monarch."24	14
Members of Paris's radical clubs, and in time many other Parisians, showed their willingness to help the Assembly decide what to do with the king after his flight, and ultimately they showed that their sympathies lay with those representatives furthest to the left. The document they signed, "a legal petition" in the words of one of the participants, declared the king liable for his actions and subject to trial.25 In brief, far from simply hoping to see the king's power as executive diminished, the supporters of this petition wished him to be removed entirely from any official position and then punished for attempting to emigrate. In addition, according to several newspapers, the petition pointedly took up the question of the source of sovereignty, asserting that any decision made unilaterally by the Assembly on the matter of the king's fate would not be valid, but that the people of France needed to make their voices heard through a general referendum.26	15
A draft petition circulated on July 16, the day before the massacre, began with the statement: "[t]he undersigned Frenchmen, members of the sovereign people, considering that in matters relative to the safety of the people it has a right to express its will to enlighten and guide its mandatories" put forth this declaration.27 The petition went on to specify, in a manner that recalls a lawyer's argument before a court of law, the ways in which Louis XVI had perjured himself before the French nation, deserted his responsibilities as head of state, and harmed the Revolution and his people by attempting to flee the country. After arguing Louis's guilt, the document ended with the solution proposed by the Jacobin writers, expressing the will of the members of their club and, more generally, of the radical segment of the populace of Paris. The supporters of this petition "[f]ormally and particularly demand that the National Assembly receive, in the name of the nation, the abdication made on 21 June by Louis XVI of the crown delegated to him, and provide for his replacement by constitutional means . . . the undersigned will never recognize Louis XVI as their king, unless the majority of the nation expresses a desire contrary to that of the present petition."28 While this version of the petition was rejected by vote in the Jacobin Club meeting, it contains language that anticipates later accounts of the event. It is interesting to note that despite its forceful tone and specific demands, this petition never calls for the abolition of the monarchy in France but simply Louis's replacement. This document expressed clearly the idea that the people were sovereign and considered their representatives in the National Assembly as conduits for transforming the will of the majority into legislation. The language of this petition went further to assert that, unless the Assembly respected the people's wishes, they would resist the unsupported decisions of that body until it fulfilled its responsibilities. What could change the minds of those who supported this language was not an act of legislation but an expression of will by the majority of their fellow citizens. The role of the Assembly is unclear here, defined primarily in the negative. Its only specific function seems to be as a mechanism for enacting the will of the people. Thus representatives should receive the king's abdication but should not dictate its terms. Presumably because the National Assembly did not encompass the source of sovereignty, it was limited to this constrained role.	16
The petition that the gathered crowd signed on July 17 contained the same sentiments as the earlier version, but its language was softer and more conciliatory. By eschewing some of the more dogmatic statements of earlier drafts, this version was meant to be more palatable to the legislature. It began with a compliment for the hard work and dedication that the National Assembly had devoted to its tasks. Then it briefly summarized Louis' transgressions: "[a]n enormous crime was committed; Louis XVI Fled; he ignominiously abandoned his post; the empire was on the brink of anarchy."29 This petition went on to assert the primacy of the will of the people over that of the members of the Assembly but replaced the word "demand" with "request": "[t]he people of this capital urgently request you to make no pronouncement on the fate of the guilty party without having heard the expression of the wishes of the 83 other departments."30 While this language made the same demands as the prior petition, it did so in a manner not intended to challenge the authority of the Assembly, but rather to remind its members that the people should be the dominant partners in making law and rendering judgment. It allowed that the National Assembly would be the mechanism for formulating a response on Louis's fate but in accordance with the wishes expressed by the people. Such a role was limited and constrained but not entirely passive.	17
The petition accordingly chided members of the legislature for forgetting their duty when they pronounced Louis XVI innocent. Its language exclaimed "this was not the will of the people, and we had thought that your greatest glory, even your duty, consisted in being the agents of the public will."31 This approach flattered the Assembly, even while gently chastising its members for being absentminded, but it did not make accusations as did the language of the earlier petition. Regardless of the tone or tack each document took, both asserted that the writers of the petitions and those six thousand people who subsequently signed the final version believed that sovereignty, and the power to decide, if not formulate, the law resided unequivocally with the people and not with those who sat in the National Assembly.32 The words that these people endorsed with their names expressed a belief in their power to make law. In later accounts of the event, this was the issue that surfaced in writing after writing. The events of the Champ de Mars not only helped to make a more republican and more participatory vision of the Revolution victorious in the long term. They also demonstrated that the people of Paris were aware of the power of the law and law making and believed that they should retain these powers for themselves. Furthermore, those who spoke for the people understood that impulse and used the language of law to express popular sentiment. However, in formulating their position on the king and the motivations of those gathered on the Champ de Mars, the members of the National Assembly vehemently resisted such a passive role for themselves.	18
Beyond the straightforward question of who had the right to judge the king, several other thorny constitutional issues surfaced at this time as different groups explained and justified their behavior at the Champ de Mars. In his tract What is the Third Estate? the abbé Sièyes anticipated the problem that the question over sovereignty would present even before the opening salvos of the Revolution. Consequently, in the summer of 1789, Sièyes began to propose practical solutions to the problems of converting France from a putative absolute monarchy to a nation with a defined constitution created by popular will. Sièyes's most influential intellectual interlocutor was Jean Jacques Rousseau, and in many respects the abbé's reasoning begins with the premises of Rousseau's Social Contract. However, Rousseau's ideas were but a starting point, as Sièyes "took from the Contrat social a question fundamental to a new political space, that of modern democracy, and he provided his own answers to that question, clarifying in the process certain dilemmas inherent in Rousseau's theses."33 Specifically, Sièyes created his own political theory of the democratic state that came to provide an important response to some of the concepts Rousseau had presented in Social Contract. The issue where Sièyes diverges significantly from Rousseau, and the one that is most important for thinking about the Champ de Mars, regards sovereignty and the appropriateness of representation in a state based on democratic principles.	19
One of the problems that troubled the National Assembly when it was drawing up the practical blueprint for the new government was that of representation. This issue was vexing in part because Rousseau, source of many of the Assembly's ideas, condemns the principle of representation.34 Rousseau states unequivocally that "sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be alienated; it consists essentially of the general will and will cannot be represented. . . . Any law that the people personally (le peuple en personne) has not ratified is invalid; it is not a law."35 Such a position posed a problem for the representatives sitting in the National Assembly. At worst, they were entirely unnecessary and impotent; at best, they were mouthpieces for the general will with power over the language in which the nation's desires were expressed, if not over the ideas. This ambiguity manifested itself in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, drawn up in 1789, which was in part responsible for setting up the conflict that emerged in 1791. Article three defines sovereignty as follows: "[t]he source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not explicitly proceed from it."36 The key element of this definition is its precision; there is no question about the role of the general will in creating a sovereign entity. What is not so clear is the mechanism for its exercise. Similarly, when articulating how sovereignty might function for governance, in this case for creating law, the Declaration is explicit on the question of how the general will relates to law but less so on the issue of the practical functioning of that will. Article six of the Declaration states that "[t]he law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to participate personally, or through their representatives, in its formation."37	20
This articulation of the legitimate source of law, which could be either a gathering of representatives or the sovereign people themselves, placed these two groups in conflict over who had the right to judge the king. Those people who came to the Champ de Mars to sign the petition were trying to deliver a message to the National Assembly: namely, that they were the sole repository of law and justice; therefore they should make this crucial decision. By their actions, these people revealed their misgivings about the place of representation and the distinctions Sièyes had drawn in explaining the role of the nation in conferring authority on representatives. And that the National Assembly used force against those gathered on the field demonstrated, as far as the people were concerned, its belief that it was the only legal source of sovereignty, by virtue of its position as the elected representative body of the nation. This reasoning, in the eyes of many Parisians, cast the Assembly as tyrannical, a body that denied the people their role as the only legitimate source of the general will and of law.	21
Despite the Assembly's desire to follow the path Rousseau had sketched out for the regeneration of the State and the liberation of its people, that body found it impossible to put such a plan into practical action. As virtually every commentator on Rousseau's political thought has pointed out, what might work in the small city-state of Geneva could not work in the large and diverse kingdom of France. As such, the Assembly needed to find a way to compromise in the practice of governing while hewing to the principles of liberty laid out by Rousseau. There were three ways the Assembly attempted to shape a policy that would fit these constraints. First, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen Finessed how sovereignty could be exercised, thus leaving open the possibility of both direct and representative legislation. Second, the Assembly tolerated, and at certain moments even encouraged, popular journées where the people of the capital came into the streets to express their opinions and wishes about the exercise of power. From the beginning of the Revolution, the gathered people was seen as an adjunct to the deputies in the National Assembly.38 Third, the abbé Sièyes constructed a way whereby the nation could maintain its monopoly over its sovereignty, but the Assembly could engage in the practical work of governing. Sièyes argued that "[a]lthough the community never shed its right to will, which formed 'its inalienable property,' it could nonetheless 'commit the exercise of it.'. . . A larger and more spread out community had necessarily to exercise its sovereignty by 'a representative common will.'"39 By creating a distinction between the theoretical and the practical exercise of sovereignty, the Assembly, following Sièyes's lead, integrated representation into a government based on the will of the people. Thus, while the National Assembly chose to act within the framework created by Sièyes, a certain tension within the conceptualization of sovereignty remained. It would be exploited and questioned by all those who spoke out on the king's fate.	22
Royalist supporters of the king offered an argument that also questioned the National Assembly's suitability as a legislative body. Given their allegiance to the king, this is not at all surprising. What is unexpected, however, is the way they couched their opposition to this institution of the Revolution. Here we see in its use of the concepts of law and sovereignty how the royalist cause had adapted itself, and indeed was even influenced by, revolutionary ideas. Their criticism of the Assembly's and the people's positions centered on two issues. First, they claimed that France was naturally inclined toward a government with a strong monarchy and would fail to prosper if the country did not act in accordance with that political law of nature. For example, one royalist newspaper, in discussing the king's flight, warned that "the innovators [les novateurs] will lose all; they know well that France can be nothing but a Monarchy, that republican forms are impossible in France; they wish to rule but they cannot [rule] but by anarchy." The piece continued with a warning to all supporters of the Revolution: "Do not be more savvy than nature and the law."40 Their position condemned deposing the king as illegal and futile since it was not in accordance with France's natural order.	23
The reasoning is surprising because this royalist newspaper did not argue from the expected position that France's monarch ruled through divine right and that thus his sovereignty was indivisible and above scrutiny.41 Instead, it made the argument at an even more basic level but one that would certainly be received more sympathetically in this political climate. Here, the nature of sovereignty did not depend upon the claims of an individual, or even that individual's divine sanction. It rested with the configuration of natural law, which for France meant monarchical rule. This line of reasoning suggests that even the often rigid royalist position had been influenced by ideas of natural law and certain currents of revolutionary thought, and that royalists believed such an argument was more forceful in this climate than one that brandished divine right and God's approbation as the basis for governing. Such a position could be more persuasive in the revolutionary milieu since it did not argue in support of a despotic ruler who could do as he pleased by virtue of his birth and an inscrutable divine support, but rather in accordance with what was reasonable and consonant with France's inherent political nature, which no political movement could hope to remold.42	24
Second, certain royalist publications argued that the king should not be punished for his behavior because he had not committed a crime. The Gazette de Paris, in commenting on the commotion of July 17, wrote that "the King is inviolable, point of law; the King's departure was not an offense in the eyes of the law, no basis for charges."43 This statement is remarkable because it bases the king's status on the clauses of the draft constitution and the laws promulgated by the National Assembly, a body Louis recognized only grudgingly. Furthermore, in this statement, the king's supporters show themselves to be more forthcoming about his actions than the Assembly itself had been. The Gazette admits that Louis had fled; it did not concoct a lie about an attempted kidnapping. But it does not acknowledge Louis's behavior as a serious challenge to the Revolution. And by invoking the protection that the Assembly had afforded the executive power, this newspaper places Louis in the position where he could continue to function as the executive power in the new constitutional monarchy that the Assembly had sketched out in its constitution.	25
Showing even greater accomodation to the ideas of the Revolution, another royalist paper published an excerpt purported to be from a petition signed by one hundred citizens in support of the king.44 The petition was addressed to the National Assembly and asked "we beg of you not to rule on anything until the wish of all the communes of the kingdom has manifested itself. Be fearful of crowning the perfidious atrocities of our enemies, and do not forget that any decree that is not contained within the limits of the powers confided in you is thereby useless. Signed, the people. (Followed by 100 signatures.)"45 This was a response to the king's enemies presented in a revolutionary form, the popular petition, and expressed in its language. The request that the eighty-three departments decide upon the king's fate mimics exactly the language of the Jacobin petition of July 17. In the prior day's edition this journal explained that the National Assembly had named the king to his position of power because "you [the Assembly] recognized that it was necessary for that executive power to be placed in the hands of an individual."46 The implication that sovereignty resides with the people is startling. Such a statement admits that the king did not hold all sovereign power but shared its exercise with the Assembly (as the legislative body) and the people (as the source of legitimacy). This position runs counter to the Old Regime theory of undivided sovereignty, embodied by the king and exercised by him alone.	26
These statements reflect a revolutionary sensibility even more clearly than the argument based on France's natural political disposition. Here the L'Ami des Vieillards seemingly recognizes the authority of both the National Assembly and the people in so far as they could confer legitimate power on the king. It couches the king's status as a necessity for France, as decided here not by an abstract code but by the king's former subjects (now citizens). Beyond the implications of admitting that the king's power could be determined by secular political authorities, this assertion surprises because it also implies that sovereign power was divisible. The basis of the constitution, which defined separated executive, legislative, and judicial powers, defied the basis of a divine right monarchy. Traditionally, the power of the king was indivisible and determined by no one but himself. This rhetoric reflects an abandonment of that position and clear accomodation with the changes wrought by the Revolution. Further, in this debate over the king's role, the right to sovereign power was linked to the power to make and define law. The royalists made the same connections as did the people assembled on the Champ de Mars.	27
In some ways, the National Assembly's position was more imperious than the royalist defense of the king. The supposed more moderate, centrist members of the National Assembly defended the legality of their actions with a simple argument: they claimed that as elected representatives of the general will, they were the sole and rightful source of all law. By this logic, the Assembly was the source of all law and therefore could not, by definition, act in an illegal manner. If that body approved of a course of action, then it was lawful. A pamphlet defending the actions of this body exhorted the people "to rally around the National Assembly which loves you. Your happiness is in our hands. It is born of our wisdom, and of your obedience to our laws."47 Here the Assembly offered benevolent and wise rule to a submissive people, but threatened those who did not submit with severe consequences. The Assembly elaborated, describing the danger of non-submission in powerful language: "it is finally time that the law exercise absolute power. . . . The moment has come when those who, in the circumstances, would only seek out individual vengeance, must become victims of the law."48 These threats implied that the Assembly wanted to render the law, as the expression of their sovereign authority, absolutely powerful and use it as a weapon against those who disagreed with its decision on the king and, by extension, on their concept of governance. More chilling was the statement that those who acted as individuals would be punished. Such an interpretation of personal acts of disobedience could effectively stifle any opposition to the actions or decisions of the legislative body. Accordingly, this language contained within it the implication that the Assembly, as the makers of law, could not violate the law they created.	28
It is also remarkable that although the Assembly was an elected body, empowered and created by the people, the language used here sounds decidedly paternalistic. In this pronouncement the National Assembly resembles a father persuading his children or, more salient in this context, a king making a proclamation to his subjects. The paradigm of paternal rule, while rejected by supporters of the Revolution who preferred to embrace a fraternal model of power, remained a powerful metaphor for describing the relation of ruled to ruler in revolutionary France, one the Assembly seemingly could not forsake. In its worldview, the people were the recipients of law, with the law conceived of as prescription and punishment. Their notion of law did not include a dialectical relationship between the people and those who governed. And it certainly did not include any creative role for the people, beyond electing their representatives who then had complete freedom to act as they thought best. The National Assembly neutralized the people as a legitimate partner in creating law not only by its orders to the National Guard on the day of the Champ de Mars massacre, but also by the reasoning that placed it in sole possession of sovereignty.	29
Even speakers in the Assembly, who might be expected to show more prudence in their assertions, echoed the themes of this anonymous pamphlet. One deputy explained that "[a]ll true friends of the Constitution will rally around the National Assembly, as to a sole beacon which might guide them. It is by the will of the people that you represent them, and they must know to respect this legitimately established power."49 The language here is not as strong or as paternalistic as that of the "Grand récit." However, it echoes the same hierarchy established there: the National Assembly takes precedence over the people in representing the will of the entire nation. It also reinforces the notion that once obtained, the power to make law was one that the Assembly would not relinquish, even to those who ostensibly granted them their power in the first place.	30
While it is not difficult to uncover the views of the Assembly on the issue of sovereignty, unearthing the views of ordinary people presents a greater challenge. Save for the interrogations of those arrested on the Champ de Mars, whose words were largely dictated to them by the questions the police posed, there are no eyewitness accounts of that day. Of the newspapers that commented on the events of July 17, few could claim to speak in the voice of the people. Even so, it is not impossible to treat the voice of the press as reflecting to some extent that of the people. Jack Censer, in his study of the radical press in the early Revolution, argues that the massive increase in the number of periodicals issued in late 1789 and later in early 1791 "reflected both a rising popular interest in daily news and national politics and a growing number of people who wanted to publicize their own opinions."50 However, the majority of radical papers (69 percent) that appeared in the capital between 1789 and 1791 disappeared within three months of being established, a measure of the difficulties of sustaining such publications and perhaps also of the fickleness of public opinion.51 Thus, while the radical press might have been a manifestation of the people's will, it could be ephemeral.	31
Of the publications that endured, the most vocal and widely read was L'Ami du Peuple, published by Jean-Paul Marat, a radical journalist and politician. Marat's paper professed to speak for the Parisian menu peuple, and to support that claim Marat opened the columns of his journal to groups of workers from time to time. For instance, on June 12, at the height of a movement in the capital for higher wages for workers, "a violently worded letter, purporting to represent the views of 560 building workers engaged on the construction of the church of Sainte-Geneviève, appeared in L'Ami du Peuple."52 At the time of the March to Versailles in October 1789, Marat also used the rostrum his paper provided to voice the opinion, much discussed in the streets of the city, that bread was too costly and the king too distant from his people. This link between the opinions of Marat and those of ordinary Parisians was cemented when he became an outspoken member of the Jacobin Club, a hero of the sans-culottes, and a radical leader of the National Convention in 1793. Marat was one of the few radical journalists who passionately advocated the use of popular violence when it appeared that the Assembly was not heeding the people's wishes. In addition, Marat believed that the people should regularly attend the Assembly's meetings and place direct pressure on that body when necessary.53 Given Marat's views, it is not surprising to find that his formulation of the people's place in making the law questioned the role the Assembly had carved out for itself, much as the petition circulating on the Champ de Mars, supported by six thousand signatures, had done.	32
In the days following this gathering, Marat devoted most of his columns to what he saw as the crimes Bailly and the National Assembly had committed. He consistently defended the Parisians who had gathered to sign their petition and supported their request for the trial of the king. Marat was able to strike to the heart of the question when he asked:	33
What is the Law? It is the expression of the general will, according to the rights of Man and reason. Thus it is not the will of five or six hundred individuals out of twenty-four million, who are able to SHAPE THE GENERAL WILL. What rights do our representatives have? Do I wish to tell them their duty? It is to propose the Law to twenty-four million individuals, to receive their votes, of which the majority must make the Law.54
This passage offered an eloquent defense of popular sovereignty and a cogent expression of populist legal theory. In this instance, Marat allowed that representation had a purpose, although not the one the National Assembly had defined for itself. He believed that representatives should serve strictly as the apparatus through which the individual members of the nation, as an aggregate, could give written form to their legislative will. In this vision, the representative body ought not to impose its desires on the members of the nation; rather they were to serve as a mechanism, a means, of expression. The verbs Marat chose to express the relationships among the law, the general will, and the Assembly reveal his position. The Assembly was to propose and receive. Neither verb communicates an ability to make a decision about the law. It was the people who made, who performed, the decisive work of lawmaking. This conception of the Assembly's role inverted the schema that the legislative body had devised for itself. For Marat, the Assembly should be the receivers of law and should have no part in the creative or decisive process. That role was the people's alone. Marat would recreate revolutionary France as the mirror image of what came before. Rather than making the people subservient to the king's will, in the new France those serving in the government would be subordinate to the all-powerful general will. The rights of the government would be defined and constrained, not those of the people. In practical terms, what this meant to Marat was that the National Assembly had no right to make decisions about the king, even provisionally, without first consulting the citizenry. And once the nation had made its wishes clear, the legislature would have no choice but to follow that course of action. Contravening the will of the people would represent a grave betrayal by the nation's elected representatives, one that the people would be justified in punishing. The Assembly further compounded its abuse of power by violently suppressing the voice of the people. The assemblage at the Champ de Mars, Marat argued, was peaceful in intent and represented a perfectly legal expression of the general will. It also showed the explicit desire of the people themselves to exercise their legitimate power to make law, and the Assembly could not rightfully ignore that impulse.
Neither the royalists, the National Assembly, nor the people defended their positions vis à vis the king by addressing his actions per se. Little ink was spilled debating Louis's behavior apart from the constitutional issues it provoked. The Assembly flirted with the idea of planting a rumor that the king had been kidnapped, but it quickly became obvious that such a story would be greeted with complete derision. Even the royalists, as we have seen, did not try to rationalize Louis's flight. Rather, all sides invoked a theory of law and sovereignty to support their positions. Both the royalists and Marat accused the Assembly of transgressing the natural basis of the French state: for one side that basis was a strong and quasi-independent monarchy, for the other it was the supreme and inalienable sovereignty of the entire people. Furthermore, according to Marat, on July 16 and 17 the legislative body was not only guilty of murdering innocent civilians, but also of subverting and obstructing the political process set up by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and supported by the events of the Revolution.	34
The Assembly also invoked the law in its defense. It claimed, as the legally elected representative body of the nation, to be the true source of all law and subsequently all laws. Accordingly, the intervention of the National Guard at the Champ de Mars was necessary since the people assembled there were attempting to usurp the power of the national, legal, elected Assembly of representatives. When presented in these terms, the question became one of sovereignty and whether it resided in the people or their elected representatives. And the answer to the question of the law depended entirely on the answer to the question of sovereignty.	35
That this analysis of the events on the Champ de Mars has focused on the question of legality may surprise those acquainted with the history of the French Revolution, since this day is most often remembered for its violence. And certainly all of the texts cited here included commentary on the killing of citizens on the orders of their government. But in each of these accounts the authors did not report the deaths to highlight their brutality or lament the loss of life. The same lack of emotion that characterized the debate over the king's betrayal is evidenced in the discussion of civilian casualties. It seems that the deaths offered another rhetorical device an author could employ to judge the larger question of law and sovereignty. In other words, readers were asked to weigh the deaths as part of this larger question rather than consider in isolation whether it was wrong for people to be killed in the first place. Writers concerned themselves with the political positions of the petitioners versus the National Guard, which was seen as a direct extension of the legislative body. The discussion of violence served the discussion of legality; it was not an issue of contention in its own right. Each text made an argument about which group was sovereign, which group had the force of law on its side, and then used the number and manner of the deaths on the Champ de Mars to bolster that argument. The victims were mourned not necessarily because they lost their lives; only their actions were mourned when they did not fight for a legitimate cause.	36
For example, Marat discussed the philosophical issues of sovereignty and the law at great length and then only briefly mentioned the actions of the National Guard. When he did so he stressed not the violence and loss of life, but the soldiers' transgression of the law and of the rights of citizens. Likewise, a pamphlet printed by the National Assembly argued that "the Mayor published the Martial law, and asked the citizens to withdraw three times; the insults, the stones thrown at the National Guard, were the response to these words of peace. So they opened fire."55 Neither of these accounts dwells upon the immediate context of the gunfire or the personal tragedy that resulted. Nor do they stop to consider the legitimacy of violence authorized by a government against its own citizens under any circumstances. The accounts subsumed those concerns to the larger discussion of the legal stakes each side fought over that day.	37
This treatment of the National Guard's shooting, which at times bordered on the casual, stemmed, First, from the extreme importance of the legal questions that this event threw into public discussion and, second, from general perceptions about the character of the victims. The latter issue was as complicated as the former since so many conflicting accounts appeared at the time. The National Assembly published tales of heroes who saved their comrades from the fury of the savage mob, and of a precocious child of ten who avenged his father's death by killing at least seven "brigands." However, these stories cropped up in pamphlets written several months after the event and appear to be attempts by the revolutionary government to appropriate the violence that took place on the Champ de Mars and mythologize it to their advantage. At that time the Assembly believed that it had succeeded in suppressing its radical enemies and was unabashed about its contempt for those who tried to use direct action to influence its acts. Their attitude toward these actors also paralleled their vision of the law—those who attempted to interfere in this aspect of government were to be demonized. As such, their deaths were of little concern.	38
In examining the pervasiveness of legal language, some of the most striking accounts of this journée appeared in provincial newspapers. These newspapers depended primarily on two sources of information for events in Paris: they received eyewitness accounts from one or more sources they cultivated in the capital, or they wrote their stories based on the accounts circulated in Parisian newspapers themselves.56 In either case, news would necessarily be several days old before it was disseminated in these publications. Although they were often compelled to take their information directly from Parisian journalists, they did not imitate their tone. The inflection of these provincial accounts was more moderate and less involved in the debate over sovereignty than those current in Paris. The distance that separated these cities from Paris, as well as the fact that no one in the provinces could hope to influence the Assembly through direct action, rendered their reports calmer and more detached. These different treatments also mirror the growing rift, both political and cultural, that was developing between the capital and the rest of France during the Revolution. It is true that the provinces contained many supporters of the National Assembly and dedicated members of local Jacobin clubs. However, those signs of unity were also undercut by sources of tension. For example, the Révolutions de Paris, a radical journal, argued that the people of Paris were more reasonable than those in the provinces and thus entitled to a more extensive political role than their country cousins.57 Furthermore, this rift would eventually explode in two distinct strands of violence: the Vendée revolts and the Federalist revolts. Yet even in 1791 the rest of France was not content slavishly to follow the lead of the Parisians. They created their own, moderate, political interpretation of the Champ de Mars massacre.	39
Both Le Courier de Provence and La Feuille Villageoise of Saint Roch offered similar explanations of this event, although these newspapers were at different ends of France. Both reported that the petitioners were lawfully assembled, peaceful and unarmed, when a group of observers from the National Assembly arrived to assess the situation. These observers found no fault with the petitioners' actions and made a favorable report to send to the Assembly. However, before they could dispatch that report, the mayor and the National Guard arrived at the Champ de Mars, summoned there by a report of violence. When the petitioners saw the mayor carrying the drapeau rouge, the signal that he was coming to declare martial law, the crowd dispersed peacefully, according to both provincial newspaper accounts. However, a group of brigands had followed the National Guard to the Champ de Mars, intending to stir up trouble. They instigated a confrontation that the National Guard ended by defending themselves with lethal force. But as these two provincial newspapers recounted it, there was no reason for concern over this violence since all citizens, all honest people, had gone home when the mayor declared martial law.58 These accounts avoided making distinctions among those assembled on the field that day. To make the attempt would have meant getting involved in the debate over law and sovereignty that was raging in Paris. Instead, their narrative explains that all citizens had left the field before the troubles began and only delinquents, outcasts, remained behind. They transformed the issue on the Champ de Mars from a debate over who had the right to speak to the problem of keeping order in a large and volatile city.	40
This version of events did not confront the Assembly, the National Guard, the mayor, or the crowd with difficult questions about the outcome of the Champ de Mars massacre. What is most striking is the lack of debate about the law, the issue most prominent in the discussion of this event in the capital. Neither the problems of legality and sovereignty, nor the issue of violence by a citizen militia against fellow citizens appeared in either of these provincial accounts. Perhaps those writing in the provinces believed that they and their readers could have no direct influence on the making of law and exercising of sovereignty. They were far from the central seat of power and had less chance of influencing politics than did those people living in Paris. These provincial newspapers seemed aware of their distance from the political center of the nation and thus did not discuss how they might influence decisions of the Assembly. They offered instead a sanitized account, meant to warn the people and the government of the disruptive potential of the counter-Revolutionary and criminal elements harassing the patriotic National Guard. But these provincial papers did support the right of Parisians, and the French in general, to speak to their government in peaceful demonstrations, as long as they ultimately acquiesed to the power of the government to disperse the protestors. These newspapers did not condemn the assembled and proactive citizens, who had the right to participate in revolutionary politics, but only those violent and disruptive agitators who upset the orderly expression of the people's will. Such a position avoided many difficult political issues, questioning neither the position of the National Guard nor an active citizenry.	41
In September 1791, as Paris continued to deal with the fallout from the Champ de Mars crisis, Louis XVI Finally accepted the constitution in order to help restore order to the nation. Under that regime, Louis held the political office of king and in that capacity was described as the "First public official in the nation."59 However, Louis held that position as a hereditary office, was accountable to no one for his actions, and was deemed inviolable. Although the constitution had sought to set up a fairly limited constitutional monarchy, Louis continued to enjoy considerable latitude in his authority. Despite his clear ambivalence toward the aims of the Revolution, the Assembly defined his role generously and continued to allow him to exercise power. What brought Louis to trial was not the ill-will of those who wrote the constitution. It was the mistrust that continued to prevail between Louis and the French people, established after his flight to Varennes and hardened by his refusal to take responsibility for this behavior and the Assembly's reluctance to hold him accountable.	42
Contemporary accounts of the Champ de Mars journée confronted the issues of popular sovereignty and the basis for the law's legitimacy much more urgently than they confronted the question of violence by the government against its own citizens in a nominally representative egalitarian nation. In all of these accounts the concept of law was fluid and contested and could therefore be used by various factions to justify the actions of any group of participants. Strikingly, the most important rhetorical struggles centered on the question of who had the right to speak for the people and create the law, not on an examination of the violence committed by all sides, nor on the actions of the king, whose flight and treasonous intentions had instigated this crisis.	43
Other themes important to the Revolution emerged in the aftermath of the Champ de Mars. In opinions about the culpability of the king, and about the role of the people themselves in lawmaking, it is clear that Parisians differed from provincials. The split between the quasi-independent commune of Paris and the rest of France, which would become wider and more problematic later in the Revolution, began to appear over the issue of the king. While Paris was obviously hostile to Louis, many provincials were not so certain in their opinions. But when the Parisian National Guard, under the authority of the Paris Commune, imprisoned the king, their actions "made clear, if it had not been before, that Paris had assumed leadership of the Revolution."60 The absence of legal language that was so prominent in the capital suggests another fundamental difference in the provincial versus the central conceptions of the Revolution, at least as that sensibility was expressed in newsprint. For the provinces, a peaceful and orderly government was more desirable than the right to rule and make law. Here we have a specific example of the differences historians have remarked upon numerous times.	44
This examination of the language used to discuss law raises a related question of what kind of political culture was developing at this point in the Revolution. Disagreement and contestation did not produce a move toward compromise and consensus.61 After the riot at the Champ de Mars, political clubs were suppressed and forced to hide their activities for some time, a number of leftist politicians chose self-exile, and the National Assembly attempted to assert their authority more firmly over the people of Paris. These actions suggest that the Assembly did not come to terms with their critics but chose instead to repress them and their message. They did not open up the question of the king's status for debate. Rather they passed a constitution that retained him as the executive power of a constitutional monarchy and tried to ignore cries for his abdication. It is difficult, given the outcome of this episode, to see how disagreement led to any fruitful compromise. Instead, it appeared to lead to repression and an attempt at creating a false unity behind the National Assembly. Such a reading of these events recalls François Furet's assessment of the warped nature of revolutionary language: "Society and the State were fused in the discourse of the people's will; and the ultimate manifestations of that obsession with legitimacy were the Terror and the war, both of which were inherent in the ever-escalating rhetoric of the various groups competing for the exclusive right to embody the democratic principle."62 Lynn Hunt echoes this assessment of revolutionary language as a mechanism for crowding out dissension and uncovering plots rather than for fostering sincere debate.63	45
In light of the vehement language used to describe the Champ de Mars, is this the conclusion to which our evidence leads? To some extent, the answer is yes. The tone of the debate, and the government reprisal that followed, certainly seemed to foreshadow a situation where linguistic dissension would be discouraged and even punished. Yet, I believe that if we return to some of the concerns central to Bourdieu's notion of habitus, we can see the development of a more nuanced political landscape. We need not interpret this period of the Revolution as leading toward a coerced homogenization and polarization of political speech and, ultimately, repression. The printed debates over the Champ de Mars demonstrate the expression of a lively and varied political culture at all levels of French society in this period. Despite official ideals of a forceably unified political terrain, the field of political culture was more diverse, more unruly, and more opinionated than the National Assembly cared to acknowledge. While the ideal may have been a transparent, unified nation where brothers spoke the same fraternal language, speech in the streets belied such a neat characterization.64 It was not simply new rhetorical and linguistic forms that shaped revolutionary language and ideals. Social and political positions led revolutionary actors to use language in ways that were shaped by other factors as well.	46
Most important, 1791 was a pivotal moment in the negotiations between the government and France's citizens over who ruled the nation and who had the right to speak in its name. This struggle began even before the Revolution, when the people of France expressed their grievances to their king with the calling of the Estates-General. It is in this context that we can ask why the law became so important in this debate.	47
Part of the struggle of the Revolution was over the right to govern, clearly symbolized by the right to make law. Under the Old Regime only the king's word was considered law. All others were nominally shut out of the process of governance because they could not participate in this most important element of ruling. If the French were to rule themselves, one of the major aspects of that liberation would be the right to create legislation. The Champ de Mars crisis raised this issue because the king's departure created a power vacuum, opening up the possibility that the making of law might be reassigned in his absence. After the king's flight an atmosphere of empowerment and possibility opened up; it was a moment when it seemed that the people might be able to speak on the most urgent matters facing the nation. But the people saw the specter of yet another elite, unresponsive government when the Assembly denied them a voice in lawmaking. This moment of ferment and dispute opened up the possiblity both rhetorically and in action that the making of law might become a more broadly based activity. To save the Revolution from reverting to the forms of the Old Regime monarchy, the people of Paris believed that they needed to claim the right to make law and to assert that this basis of structuring and controlling a government was within their power.	48
Janine M. Lanza is an assistant professor of history at Appalachian State University. She thanks Jeffry L. Bortz, H. Adrian Cho, Steven L. Kaplan, and Neva J. Specht, as well as the anonymous readers for Law and History Review, for their comments and suggestions on this article. All translations are the author's unless otherwise noted. Notes 1 Albert Mathiez, Le club des Cordeliers pendant la crise de Varennes et le massacre du Champ de Mars (Paris: H. Champion, 1910), 148–49. Both George Rudé in The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) and Michel Vovelle in La chute de la monarchie, 1787–1792 (Paris: Seuil, 1972) use these figures. 2 See in particular the introduction to Mathiez, Le club des Cordeliers. For a recent treatment of the Champ de Mars massacre that eschews a socially deterministic approach, see David Andress, "The Denial of Social Conflict in the French Revolution: Discourses around the Champ de Mars Massacre, 17 July 1791," French Historical Studies 22 (1999): 183–209. 3 For a discussion of the reciprocal nature of the language of the political, see Jacques Guilhaumou, La langue politique et la Révolution française. De l'événement à la raison linguistique (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989), 25. For another consideration of the rhetorical aspects of the concept of the law during the Revolution, see Michel Troper, "Sur l'usage des concepts juridiques en histoire," Annales ESC 47 (1992): 1176–78. 4 Certainly theory and practice diverged at points on this issue. For an explication of the traditional conception of the king as lawgiver, see Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), especially chap. 13. Keith Baker discusses a moment of crisis in the absolutist model of rule that occurred shortly after Louis XVI's coronation, one that he interprets as foreshadowing certain questions that would be asked during the Revolution. See Baker's "French Political Thought at the Accession of Louis XVI," in his Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially 114–16. For an interesting consideration of the limits of royal juridical authority, particularly with respect to property, see Thomas E. Kaiser, "Property, Sovereignty, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Tradition of French Jurisprudence," in The French Idea of Freedom. The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 300–39. Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), emphasizes the practical difficulties of maintaining the unity of the law in the last decades of the Old Regime, thus questioning the symbolic unity of king and law. 5 For a theoretical consideration of the process of legal change, see "Introduction" in History and Power in the Study of the Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. June Starr and Jane F. Collier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1–28. See also Sally Falk-Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge, 1978). 6 Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), published in English as Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also the forum on François Furet's interpretation of the French Revolution in French Historical Studies 16 (1990): 766–802. 7 See, for example, Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 130, for a comprehensive vision of Revolutionary language. For another reading of Furet that emphasizes the totalizing aspect of language in his analysis, see Lynn Hunt's review essay in History and Theory 20 (1981): 313–23. 8 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 21. 9 These two books, while they share certain notions about the study of the French Revolution, certainly differ on many points as well. While this is not the venue for a sustained comparison of these two authors' approaches, I would like to touch on a few basic points. Both authors reject the idea that the Revolution should be regarded as a mechanism that brought about certain long-term outcomes (such as the advancement of capitalism). They both also explicitly examine the political culture and political process of the Revolution. However, the two books do differ in tone and purpose as well as their positions on the Terror. Hunt's work includes a sociological study of politicians under the Revolution, while Furet's work pays much less attention to the sociological context of politics. Furet's analysis rests much more explicitly on the notion of the "plot" as one of the driving forces of the Revolution, while Hunt does not emphasize this rhetorical device. 10 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 25. 11 Mona Ozouf takes a similar approach to the concept of "Terror" in her article "War and Terror in French Revolutionary Discourse (1792–1794)," Journal of Modern History 56 (1984): 579–97. However, Ozouf emphasizes the diachronic dimensions of this language by examining the use of the term "terror" by the National Assembly/Convention (as reflected in Le Moniteur Universel) over two years. She traces a transformation in the meaning of this word but does not examine its use at a specific moment in different contexts and by different groups. 12 On the importance of the concept of law during the Revolution, see Bronislaw Baczko, "The Social Contract of the French: Sieyès and Rousseau," Journal of Modern History 60, supplement (September 1988): S98–S125; Pierre Duclos, La notion de constitution dans l'oeuvre de l'Assemblée constituante de 1789 (Paris: Dalloz, 1932); J. K. Wright, "National Sovereignty and the General Will: The Political Program of the Declaration of Rights," in The French Idea of Freedom, 199–233; Philippe Raynaud, "La déclaration des droits de l'homme," in The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas, vol. 2 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 139–49, as well as the primary sources to which these pieces refer. 13 Bourdieu uses the analytic concepts of fields (champs) and markets in many of his works. For his observations on language, see the collection of his essays published as Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). In his analysis of revolutionary language and its relationship to events, Jacques Guilhaumou uses a similar, although less concretely grounded, approach to the uses of language. See his La langue politique. 14 Bourdieu, Language, 37. 15 Habitus and field are ways to describe the subjective and the social, respectively, although one of Bourdieu's projects is to efface the opposition between these two categories of understanding. Field expresses the "social topology" of the material world and the relations among its various elements. See Bourdieu, "Réproduction Inédite. La dimension symbolique de la domination économique," Étude rurales 113/114 [1989]: 15–36. Habitus is the way in which individuals relate to and understand the social world and navigate its topology. It is a set of assumptions, norms, and practices that the individual uses to function in the social world. Part of habitus is a conscious use of strategies to produce certain outcomes in social contexts while part of it is unconscious norms that have been engendered in the individual to ensure social reproduction. Habitus refers to the ways in which individuals relate to and function in the social world, either by explicit reference to social norms and rules or by instinctively drawing upon individual knowledge. See Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), especially bk. 1, chap. 3. 16 Bourdieu, Language, 46–49. 17 This is not to imply that either Hunt or Furet argue that some kind of master plan or scheme structured revolutionary language. However, Bourdieu's theoretical framework shows more clearly how uncertainty and individual understandings enter into the use of language. 18 Guilhaumou, La langue politique, 23. 19 See Jack Censer, Prelude to Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 57, where he quotes Desmoulins explaining that the aristocrats are the enemies of both the king and the people. See also Jeremy Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 48. 20 Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from Its Origins to 1793, trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 133. 21 Le Moniteur Universel (18 July 1791), 4. 22 The Constitution was formally ratified on September 21, 1791. 23 Marcel Reinhard, La chute de la royauté, 10 août 1791 (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 129. 24 L'Ami du Peuple (18 July 1791), 3. 25 "Extrait de la procédure et informations relatives aux événemens [sic] du Champs de la Fédération" (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée Nationale, 1791), 5. 26 L'Ami du People (18 July 1791), 7. 27 F. V. A. Aulard, La société des Jacobins. Recueil de documents pour l'histoire du club des Jacobins de Paris (Paris: 1889–1897), 3:19–20. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Philippe Buchez and Prosper Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française (Paris, 1833–1838), 11:114. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 115. 32 The question of how many people signed the petition is vexing. It cannot be easily answered since the original petition burned in the Hôtel de Ville fire of 1871 that destroyed so many documents on the history of Paris. However, the contents of the petition, as well as the number of signatures, is known from the work of Phillipe Buchez and Prosper Roux, who saw the document before its destruction. They estimated, from this and other sources, that 50,000 people gathered on the Champ de Mars and 6,000 people signed the petition before the violence broke out. Albert Mathiez, after reviewing all available evidence, supports this figure, and it is the one that later historians of this event use. 33 Baczko, "Sièyes and Rousseau," S100. 34 In addition to Baczko's article, see on this point Jean Roels, Le concept de représentation politique au dix-huitième siècle français (Louvain and Paris: Éditions Nauwelaerts, 1969). Roels also discusses Sièyes's political thought. More recently, Marcel Gauchet discusses the issue of sovereignty and representation in his La Révolution des pouvoirs. La souveraineté, le peuple et la représentation, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Unlike Baczko and Roels, who emphasize political theories, Gauchet discusses these questions within the changing context of the Revolution and in the sphere of public opinion. 35 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), 306. 36 Translated by Keith Michael Baker in Baker, ed., The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 392–93. 37 Ibid. 38 Crowd action influenced the momentum of the Assembly. The July 14 attack on the Bastille is often seen as saving the deputies of the Third Estate from the king's troops, thereby enabling them to proceed in reforming the government. The legitimacy of crowd action was a familiar fixture of the Old Regime. See Colin Lucas, "The Crowd and Politics between Ancien Régime and Revolution in France," Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 421–57. 39 Baczko, "Sièyes and Rousseau," S103. 40 L'Ami des Vieillards (18 July 1791), 41. 41 This philosophy was certainly waning by the end of the Old Regime, but to some extent the extreme threat posed to the monarchy by the Revolution breathed new life into an idea that lent some certainty in a constantly changing environment. See, for example, the writings of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald, two advocates of a return to the fusion between religion and monarchy. Jeremy Popkin discusses royalist publications in his The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). See also William James Murray, The Right-Wing Press in the French Revolution, 1789–92 (London: Boydell Press, 1986) and the classic Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804, trans. Salvatore Attanasio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). 42 Natural law is a complex concept that this essay cannot fully explore. In this context, the writer is trying to make reference to the basic political nature of France, based on both criteria of rationality and the country's history. For a discussion of natural law that looks at the term in a historical context, see the introduction to Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 43 Gazette de Paris (19 July 1791), 1. 44 I have found no evidence that such a petition existed. It appears to be a rhetorical device created by the newspaper to forward its position rather than a popularly generated document in support of Louis. 45 L'Ami des Vieillards (19 July 1791), 65 46 Ibid. (18 July 1791), 52. 47 "Grand récit de ce qui s'est passé hier au Champ de Mars" (Paris: Imprimerie de l'Assemblée Nationale, 1791), 6. 48 "Grand récit," 7. Emphasis in original. 49 Le Moniteur Universel, no. 200 (19 July 1791). 50 Censer, Prelude to Power, 9. 51 Ibid. 52 Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution, 85. 53 Censer, Prelude to Power, 64–65. 54 L'Ami du Peuple (19 July 1791), 2. Emphasis in original. In this passage Marat makes use of Rousseau's concept of the general will. The relationship between Rousseau's political and social ideas and the ideas and actions of politicians during the French Revolution is complex and has been the subject of much scholarly investigation. For a brief introduction to the issue, see Maurice Cranston, "The Sovereignty of the Nation," in The Political Culture of the French Revolution, 97–104. 55 "Grand récit," 5. 56 René Gérard, Un journal de Province sous la Révolution: Le "Journal de Marseille" de Ferréol Beaugeard (1781–1797) (Paris: Société des Études Robespierristes, 1964), 55–59. 57 Censer, Prelude to Power, 48. 58 Le Courier de Provence (Avignon: 21 July 1791), 3–5; La Feuille Villageoise (Saint-Roch: 28 July 1791), 326–28. 59 Lefebvre, The French Revolution, 152. 60 David Jordan, The King's Trial: The French Revolution v. Louis XVI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 41. 61 On the notion of "interests" and their place in the political culture of the French Revolution, see William Scott, "The Pursuit of 'Interests' in the French Revolution: A Preliminary Survey," French Historical Studies 19 (Spring 1996): 811–51. 62 Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 77. My emphasis. 63 Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 39–46. 64 For this reference to the momentum of the French Revolution as drawing on the metaphor of fraternity, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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