The Grub Street Style of Revolution: J.-P. Brissot, Police Spy

Brissot's life seems a parable of his time: as one authority put it, "II est, des sa jeunesse, l'image complete de toutes les aspirations d'une generation."' This picture of the complete prerevolutionary man comes from Brissot's memoirs, where he appears steeping himself in Rousseau; publishing denunciations of decrepit institutions; forming secret revolutionary cabals; comparing insurrections with radicals of Geneva, the Low Countries, England, and the United States; reading; writing; plotting; living and breathing for the fourteenth of July. But a man seen from his memoirs looks different than when viewed from account books or police reports. A new examination of Brissot's career, based on less partial sources than the memoirs, may add some shadows and some flesh tones to the traditional portraits of him. It is undertaken, not in the voyeuristic spirit of revealing the nakedness of the man behind the memoirs, but in order to understand the making of a revolutionary and the era he is believed to typify. Brissot's prerevolutionary career seems most vulnerable to inspection at its most critical point, the two months he spent in the Bastille during the summer of 1784. It must have seemed to Brissot, as he contemplated the world from a window in the Bastille, that the evil powers of the Ancien Regime had united to crush him. Seven years earlier, he had set out to make himself, the thirteenth child of a tavern keeper in Chartres, into a respectable citizen of the "republic of letters," whose capitol lay in Paris. He had published thousands of pages on the appropriate subjects-the fallacies of St. Paul, the absurdities of the French legal system, the glories and weaknesses of the British constitution-and had taken the appropriately encyclopedic view of things, as could be seen by the very titles of his Correspondance universelle sur ce qui interesse le bonheur de l'homme et de la socie'te' and De la ve'rite' ou me'ditations sur les moyens de parvenir a la ve'rite dans toutes les connaissances humaines. He had made the conventional philosophic pilgrimages to the Switzerland of Rousseau and the England of Voltaire and Montesquieu. He had appealed for support to Voltaire and D'Alembert. He had competed in the essay contests sponsored by various academies and had