Revolutionizing of the Revolution 419
the charge of revolutionary activity at Lausanne, and a number of officers of Irish
birth or connections.
In Savoy, in the county of Nice, at the city of Mainz and in the towns of the
Austrian Netherlands, as the French arrived, local patriots came forward to ask
for French protection. They declared that they lived in fear of counter-
revolutionary reprisals. Their case came before the Convention, where hesitation
at premature action was expressed, but which enacted as a temporary measure,
pending further review of the question of occupied territories during the war, the
famous decree of November 19, 1792, “according aid and fraternity to all peoples
wishing to recover their liberty.” Lebrun, as foreign minister, tried to explain in
England and Switzerland that the decree had no application to neutrals. But
conservatives took the decree as a challenge, and to French sympathizers in all
countries it brought a thrill.
The idea of the sovereignty of the people, used in August to sweep out the gov-
ernment in France itself, was now used abroad for a similar purpose. Juridically, it
was the essence of the Revolution, since it denied the claims of governments over
their own populations. It also set up a new principle of international law. The idea
was that peoples could no longer be transferred by arrangements of governments
as set forth in treaties, or be subject to any government except by their own con-
sent. A year before, at Avignon, in defiance of the existing ruler, the Pope, the
population had been joined to France after a plebiscite. The same was now done in
Savoy, and was soon done in Belgium.
As always, however, the simple explanation of ideology, or revolutionary en-
thusiasm, or political theory must be kept in perspective and received with some
reservation. The Convention debated the annexation of Savoy on November 27.
The debate was perfectly rational. The Abbé Grégoire, who led it, reviewed the
arguments, pro and con, remarking that not all peoples were equally suited for
freedom or were developing at the same historical pace. He concluded, however,
that in time of war, if the French found a sentiment for union among an adjoin-
ing people of their own language and kindred they could not well ignore them,
or leave them as a source of strength for an enemy king who wished the ruin of
France. He added that Savoy had enough resources in its own wealth, population,
and church lands that might be resold, to finance its own share in the French
war- effort against the Counter- Revolution. The Convention then admitted Savoy
as an eighty- fourth department, Mont Blanc—the present French departments
of Savoie and Haute Savoie.
There were some enthusiasts, to be sure, for whom no Revolutionary emancipa-
tion seemed too far- fetched—notably Brissot, for whose long career as a pre-
Revolutionary intellectual the present moment came as a supreme climax. Locked
as we are, he said on November 26, in a death struggle with the “Germanic colos-
sus,” we “cannot be at ease until Europe, and all Europe, is in flames.” He de-
manded the Rhine frontier, and hoped through Miranda, and a Spaniard named
Marchena, to drive the Bourbons out of Spain. He had the idea also that Spanish
America could be liberated, if Miranda recruited some 6,000 mulattoes in Haiti
(to whom the Revolution had given civil rights) and reinforced them with volun-