414 Chapter XVII
been secretly at work since 1790.^18 What historians have somewhat uncritically
called the two Propaganda Decrees of 1792 became for Robison a kind of climax
and main argument of his book.
Nevertheless, there was no such Society of the Propaganda. Not only was there
no such organization, but the whole thing was an invention of the counter-
revolution, going back to a document fabricated by the Comte d’Antraigues, and
designed to persuade the European governments to intervene in France against
the Revolution.^19
The “foreign” revolutionaries, in short, were not at all the victims or targets of
any secret propaganda conducted by the French government, or by any organized
association operating with its knowledge or its official or financial support. Their
problem, on the contrary, was to get the French government to take them seri-
ously. At most, there were ad hoc or temporary arrangements: thus Dumouriez,
when foreign minister in 1792, had a secret fund for use in Belgium after the war
began, or generals in the field might have talks with local collaborators, or the
French government might send out a spy on a special mission, as it sent William
Jackson to Ireland in 1794.
On the other hand, the “international” revolutionaries could readily share in
many “French” ideas. They could count on a certain cosmopolitanism of the eigh-
teenth century. Social and class relationships, and problems of church and state,
had a certain resemblance throughout much of Europe. In many places, as in Bel-
gium and Italy, governments rested on no basis of national loyalty or cohesion, and
in other places, such as the Rhineland, Central Europe, and even the Dutch prov-
inces, national loyalty as a political sentiment was unformed. French was the inter-
national language. Its literature had long been internationally read. The journalists
of the French Revolution had a ready- made international audience among edu-
cated people. The relatively staid Moniteur, with its reports of debates in the French
assembly or Jacobin Club, had an international circulation, despite attempts to
keep it out. The radical journalist Carra, a very secondary figure in the French
Revolution, became a name dreaded in Russia and South America when copies of
his paper were discovered in those countries.
The Masonic lodges also provided a kind of international network of like-
minded people. Their existence facilitated the circulation of ideas. But the lodges
took no orders from any headquarters, their members never acted as a group, and
18 W. Cobbett, History of the American Jacobins Commonly Denominated Democrats (Philadelphia,
1796), 7; J. Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried
on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies (Edinburgh, 1797), but see the
New York edition, 1798, 317–23.
19 J. Feldmann, “Le ‘discours de Duport’ et la propagande révolutionnaire en Suisse,” in AHRF,
No. 138 (1955), 55–58; and id., Propaganda und Diplomatie, eine Studie über die Beziehungen Frankreichs
zu den eidgenössischen Orten vom Beginn der fr. Rev. bis zum sturz der Girondisten (Zurich, 1957). To the
statement that the word “propaganda” was used exclusively by conservatives I know at present of only
one exception, the ultra- revolutionary “Propaganda” suppressed by Saint- Just in Alsace in 1794. (See
my Twelve Who Ruled: the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution [Princeton, 1941], 187–
190.) It would not be unreasonable as a hypothesis to suppose that this ultra- revolutionary “propa-
ganda” was somehow related in its origin to counter- revolutionary activity, somewhat in the manner
suspected by Robespierre; see below, pp. 420–21.