Revolutionizing of the Revolution 421
Propaganda Decrees, though mere propaganda was hardly their purpose. More
will be said of the decree of December 15 in the next chapter. Its most immediate
purpose was to arrange for supply of the French armies in Belgium. French gener-
als in the field were therefore directed to seize the revenues of enemies of the Re-
public, that is to say, of the enemy governments, the noble and feudal classes, and
the church. The decree was explained in the Convention by Cambon, who was no
ideological hothead, but simply a revolutionary of the workhorse or practical type.
“We must,” he said, “declare ourselves to represent revolutionary power in the
countries we enter.” After a careful exposition of the practical circumstances he
launched the phrase in which international revolution and popular revolution, at
least in appearance, seemed to be joined: Guerre aux châteaux, paix aux chau-
mières!—war on the castles and manor houses, peace to the cottages and cabins.
The enemies of the Revolution were to pay for its triumph.
Whatever the intent, the war had in fact become ideological, with partisans on
each side urging an international effort to destroy the other. Within a week the
Abbé Grégoire and the Count de Fersen used the same word to explain what their
side must do—étouffer, or smother, its opponent. “When my neighbor keeps a nest
of vipers,” said the mild and humanitarian priest on November 27, “I have the
right to smother them lest I become their victim.” And the sensitive and refined
Swedish count, writing at Aachen on November 19, and observing that the Ger-
man Rhineland re- echoed with praise of French liberty and equality, observed that
unless the European powers banded together “to stop the evil by smothering it,
they would all be its victims.” He added that “there will then be no more kings or
nobility, and all countries will experience the horrors of which France is now the
victim, and to preserve an existence and a livelihood, we shall all have to turn into
Jacobins.”^30
Of this atmosphere of world upheaval, at the close of 1792, there is another
piece of evidence in which American readers should take a particular interest: the
career of Edmond Genet, always called Citizen Genet in American history, since
he so shocked the Federalists and pleased the democrats as French minister to the
United States for a few months in 1793.
It was in Russia that Genet first acted as an international firebrand, but the
earliest influence of this kind upon him had come rather from the American Rev-
olution. Of noble family, a brother of Mme. de Campan, one of Marie Antoinette’s
ladies in waiting, he had worked during the American war in the French Foreign
Office under his father, who was chief of the interpreters’ bureau. He knew six
languages at the age of fifteen. He assisted his father and Benjamin Franklin in
obtaining favorable publicity for the United States. As a youth he met such other
notables as John Adams, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, and Matthew Boulton. In
1788 he was sent to the French embassy at St. Petersburg. Here he strongly fa-
vored the French Revolution of 1789 and the new constitutional monarchy, as did
his superior the ambassador, the Count de Ségur. They both boldly defended
events in France from the aspersions of émigrés who turned up in Russia. In 1790
30 Gregoire in the Moniteur, November 27, 1792 (réimpression, XIV, 587); R. Klinckowström, II,
392.