The Machine of the Duc D'Orléans and the New Politics

Author(s): George Armstrong Kelly

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), pp. 667-684
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans and the New Politics

George Armstrong Kelly

Louis-Philippe Joseph, duc d'Orleans, later "Philippe-Egalite," is

still a riddle wrapped inside an enigma. The contours, or even the
persistency, of an "Orleanist conspiracy" have never been effec-
tively defined. D'Orleans has been more or less buried by the
social-quantitativeconcerns of modern historiography.Yet contem-
poraries of the French Revolution took him much more seriously
than we do, because they understood the making of history differ-
ently and because the presence of this colossal prince-plutocrat
could not be avoided. His 7,500,000 livres of annual rent staggered
the imagination;'his territorialapanage ran to the extent of three or
four of today's de'partements;2 he was the nominal leader of French
Freemasonry;3his Palais-Royal dominated Paris as Versailles domi-
nated France;4he had the temperamentand intermittenttalents of a
frondeur; and his ostentatious separation from the politics of the
court gave credibility to the notion of a "revolution from above"
where certain shrewd political bankers were investing.
Like so many privileged figures of the Old Regime, Philippe
d'Orleans was essentially a creature of his milieu and the lessons of
recalcitrance and opposition it taught. He stepped into the "new
politics" of 1789with seeming willingness, but without psychological
preparation.Where he had conjuredFronde, he encountered revolu-
tion; where he coyly disdained leadership, he found it seized by
persons with whom he might connive in his antechambersor hire at
1
This was his estimated income in 1787. By 1791 it had been drastically reduced to
4,300,000 livres, and the Duc d'Orl6ans was compelled to sign an agreement with his
numerous creditors. It consisted of forty-seven articles and rivaled the complexity of
the Constitution of France. See (anon.), "Etat de situation de M. Louis-Philippe-
Joseph, Prince fran9ois, et projet d'union qu'il propose a ses creanciers" (Paris
[1791]).
2 For an account of the d'Orleans apanage, see Beatrice F. Hyslop, L'Apanage de
Philippe-Egalite, dtic d'Orleans, 1785-1791 (Paris, 1965), pp. 29-47.
3 I have not gone into the vexing questions of the influence of Freemasonry on the

Revolution or the Duc d'Orleans's role in the Grand Orient in this paper. See, in
general, Gaston Martin, La Franc-MaConnerie dans la preparation de la Rgvolution
(Paris, 1926); and Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la Franc-Ma!onnerie fran!aise, vol.
1, La Ma!onnerie, e'cole de l'egalite', 1725-1799 (Paris, 1974).
4 On the Palais-Royal, see Hubert Morand, "Philippe-Egalite et la construction du
Palais-Royal," Le Correspondant 304 (1926): 290-93.
[Journal of Modern History 51 (December 1979): 667-6841
C) 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/79/5104-0044$01.51
668 George Armstrong Kelly
a distance-slum with but not sup with. Yet this immensely rich
prince and accomplished sensualist instinctively gave his total bless-
ing to the value of liberty, which for him basically meant liberty of
the person and lack of constraint. In this he agreed with Mirabeau
(often accused of being his temporary ally),S who had written
eloquently in defense of that "inalienableright of the human race."6
But Mirabeau had pounded on the stones of prisons many times;
d'Orleanshad known only the brief boredom of exile from Paris and
the court and a frustrated resentment at royal etiquette. D'Orleans
was an Anglomaniac,with a passion for horses, jockeys, and north-
ern forms of debauchery;he was an intimate of the Prince of Wales
and admired Charles James Fox and Whiggery.7 Later, in 1790,
when in unofficial exile in London, he would write: "My taste for
liberty had, for a long time, caused me to circulate among different
classes of society in Paris; there, my opinions were changed or
strengthened by healthy debate [le choc des opinions contraires].
The same impulse caused me to travel abroad . . . several times to
England, that womb of liberty. ."8 What he wanted from 1789
and the events leading up to it was precisely this: no longer would
any king, any church, any code of manners tell him, or kindred
spirits, how or where they must pass their time. As a contemporary
memoir quotes him: "When I wanted to go to England, several
times I was stopped [the first Prince of the Blood needed the
permission of his cousin the king to travel abroad]. I don't give a
damn what the Estates-Generalaccomplish, but I wanted to be there
at the moment when they took up the matter of individualliberty, so
as to give my vote to a law that would assure me . . . that whenever
I wanted to leave for London, Rome, or Peking, nothing could get in
my way. I couldn't care less about the rest."9 This is not elegant
political theory on a par with the Rights of Man, but it is important
to grasp where d'Orleans's model of liberalism lay and what were
some of the motivationsthat led him to chart a course in antiregime
politics. Yet the psychology goes somewhat deeper. D'Orleans
sensed that his own life had been largely squandered; he placed
great hopes in his posterity. This is why he took the wise precaution
of having his children educated to the new principles by the remark-
I Solid evidence is wanting; the hypothesis is discussed by the duc de Castries,
Mirabeau, oll lYchec du destin (Paris, 1960), p. 353.
6 [Gabriel-Honorede Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau],Des Lettres de cachet et des
prisons d'e'tat, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1782), 1:25.
7See E. S. Scudder, Prince of' the Blood (Leipzig, 1938), p. 89.
8Louis-Philippe-Joseph,"Expos6 de la conduite de M. le duc d'Orl6ansdans la
Revolution de France, redig6 par lui-meme a Londres" [London, 1790], p. 5.
9 Duc des Cars, MeWmoires, 2 vols. (Paris, 1890), 1:73.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orle'ans 669
able Madame de Genlis, his former mistress. As Louis-Philippe, later
king of the French (1830-48), recounts: "Madame de Genlis made
us into honest and virtuous republicans; nonetheless, her vanity
made her wish us to continue to be princes. It was hard to be both
at the same time."1?
For Philippe d'Orleans, the instinct of liberty and the impulse
toward Fronde went hand in hand. Earlier on, in 1771, as Duc de
Chartres, he had joined his father ("Louis le Gros" d'Orleans) and
four other princes in signing a "texte de protestation" against
Chancellor Maupeou's coup against the Parlement of Paris, suffering
the brief chastisement of banishment from the court.1" By the
mid-1780s France was running to its ruin. As president of the Third
Bureau of the two Assemblees des Notables of 1787 and 1788,
d'Orleans staked out a role of opposition against the policies of both
Calonne and Lomenie de Brienne in concert with the recalcitrant
Parlements and the rising Tiers. 12 It was a rather wayward and
peevish political dynamism stimulated by personal jealousy and the
ambitious strategy of his political counselors. But even if by proxy,
d'Orleans's intermittent absorption in the affairs of state was re-
quired if he were to have liberty legislated. Thus, he became
persuaded in 1787 to play at a new kind of politics, a Fronde out of
control. On November 19, 1787, the king, at the behest of his
ministers Brienne and Lamoignon, summoned a so-called seance
royale of the Court of Peers, where it was proposed to register an
edict imposing 120,000,000 livres of new taxation over the coming
five years. The ministry sought to frustrate the rights of debate and
remonstrance. Hereupon, d'Orleans rose to his feet and mouthed the
words (he was an ineffective speaker): "Sire, c'est illegal."'13 France
had reached a turning point. As Talleyrand later wrote of the event:
"The whole history of the monarchy had offered nothing like it.
With weapons in their hands, Princes of the Blood had resisted royal
authority; but no one before this had tried to place constitutional
limits on that authority. " 14 The episode made Philippe d'Orleans
wildly popular.
The assembly took the occasion to be a registration, entailing the
10 Louis-Philippe, Menoires, 1773-1793, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973), 1:25.
1' See Jean Egret, Loutis XV et l'opposition parlementaire (Paris, 1970), pp.
219-20.
12 See "Proces-verbal de l'Assembl6e des Notables, tenue a Versailles en l'ann6e
1787" (Paris, 1787), and the document for the successor assembly (Paris, 1789).
13 See Georges Lefebvre, The Comning of the French Reiolhtion, trans. R. R.
Palmer (Princeton, N.J., 1947), p. 27.
14 Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-P6rigord, Menoires dii prince de Talleyrand, ed.
Duc de Broglie, 5 vols. (Paris, 1891-92), 1:192-93.
670 George Armstrong Kelly
right of rejection and remonstrance;the king, angered by the pro-
ceedings, turned it into a lit de justice, exiling the duke and two
parlementaryconseillers the next day. The exile of the duke to his
estate of Villers-Cotterets (today a sanatorium) elicited immediate
parlementaryprotest. "Sire," declared the Parlement of Paris, "if
M. le duc d'Orleans is guilty, so are we all." Other parlements
followed with similar remonstrances;for example, Toulouse: "Sire,
your Parlement of Toulouse adds its voice to that of the whole
magistracy.The chief Prince of the Blood has been exiled from your
person. The astonished nation cannot see what his crime is. ...15
As for d'Orleans, his punishment was somewhat sweetened by an
eventual permission to visit Raincy, halfway to Paris, where he
could enjoy the company of the delicious Agnes de Buffon. But for
the nation, the crisis deepened. As Lefebvre writes: "The scope of
the debate grew wider. . . . On May 3 [1788], secretly warned that
force was to be used against it, [the Parlementof Paris] published a
declaration of the fundamental laws of the kingdom . . . that the
monarchywas hereditary;that the vote of taxes was a power of the
Estates-General;that Frenchmen could be judged only by ordinary
magistrates who were irremovable and could not be arrested or
detained arbitrarily;and finally that the customs and privileges of the
provinces were inviolable."116The exile of the Parlementof Paris to
Troyes, its triumphal return in September, the summoning of
Necker, and the convocation of an Estates-Generalfollowed swiftly
in the coming months, amid great agitation and high expectations.
From this time on, d'Orleans and his cohorts invented something
novel in the history of French politics: the massive use of wealth,
research, and propagandafor the purpose of forming public opinion
and swaying public policy. No doubt there are analogues among the
Romans and the eighteenth-centuryEnglish; but here we are almost
reminded of the Rockefellers and Kennedys. If we are to judge by
the evidence, d'Orleans never used his money or ideas with con-
summate creativity. But the fault does not defeat the model. After
the death of his father in 1785, Philippe could buy consultants and
scribblers as well as volatile and suggestible crowds, with orators to
influence and rouse them. The crowds became concentrated in the
duke's newly refurbishedenterprise, the Palais-Royal,with its prom-
enades and fountains, boutiques and caf6s, gamingtables and bordel-
los.'7 In achieving the Palais-Royal, the duke gave the public a taste
15 For
texts, see [Felix L.-D. Montjoie], Histoire de la conjuration de Loutis-
Philippe-Joseph d'Orlans, 4 vols. (Paris, 1796), 1:95-118, passim.
16 Lefebvre, p. 27.
1 See Morand (n. 4 above) and Amadee Britsch,
"Philippe-Egalite avant la Revolu-
tion," Revue des etudes historiques 70 (1904): 489-91.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orle'ans 671
of his life and his politics. Through his vast landholdings and his
agents (in Valois, Chartrais, Beaujolais, and elsewhere), the duke
could also influence opinion and local administration in the prov-
inces.
As for the "idea men," they moved in steady succession through
the Palais-Royal and the more secret conciliabules sometimes held in
the Duc de Lauzun's cottage in Montrouge. Already, by 1780, allied
with the mistress of "Louis le Gros," Madame de Montesson (later
his morganatic wife), the Ducrest family had taken charge of Phil-
ippe's political advisory service. The Marquis Ducrest, after 1785
chancellor of the Maison d'Orleans; Madame de Genlis, his sister;
her husband, the Marquis de Sillery; and her son-in-law, the Comte
de Valence (later a General), who deserted with Dumouriez and
Louis-Philippe on April 5, 1793, all made up this clique: they were
d'Orleans's chief political and financial counselors during most of the
1780s. Through them his contacts with the parlementary opposition
were cemented and maintained, and there may have been some
similar channels of influence through the Grand Orient. No doubt the
Ducrest entourage was aiming high. It seems that the Marquis
Ducrest engineered d'Orleans's bold act of 1787 that led to his
banishment; he had, according to his chief lieutenant, "une tete d'ou
les projets debordaient de toutes parts." 18 It was also from the
Palais-Royal, no doubt under the spiteful influence of Madame de
Genlis, that many of the scandalous libels against Marie Antoinette
emanated, especially following the "affair of the necklace"; little
sophistry on her part was needed to animate the hatred of d'Orleans
for his Austrian cousin.
It did take some exhortation from the Ducrests, however, to rouse
the duke to sustained political action. They wanted power, he
wanted intermittent revenge, in the spirit of his ancestors. Brissot,
who was at this time political secretary to Ducrest in the Maison
d'Orleans, described the duke's attitude: "The prince was rather
fond of conspiracies that lasted only twenty-four hours-any longer
and he grew frightened. 'He will never take the leadership of a
party,' Ducrest said to me one day, 'because he is afraid that he
won't have the opera and the girls on his side.' "19 Regarding his
widely imputed murderous designs on the throne, Mirabeau is later
reported to have said in his salty language: "He wants to, but can't;
he is a eunuch when it comes to crime."20

18
Emile Dard, Un Acteur cache du drame revolutionnaire: Choderlos de Laclos
(Paris, 1905), p. 146.
19 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Memoires, 1754-1793, 2 vols. (Paris, n.d.), 2:69.
20 Duc de Castries (n. 5 above), p. 377.
672 George Armstrong Kelly
In October 1788 the supremacy of the Ducrests had reached its
high-water mark and ebbed: Choderlos de Laclos, the author of the
Liaisons dangereuses, had entered the Palais-Royal.21 Ducrest, who,
either improvidently or acting under instructions, had affixed d'Or-
leans name to a proposal of his own for the reform of the realm and
carried the document as far as the court, was squelched by the
queen and ministry and lost credit with the duke.22 Madame de
Genlis was not so easily expendable as tutor of the princes; she
became locked in struggle with the new intruder for the soul of
Philippe d'Orleans; but, for the time being, she was forced to retreat
step by step. Her career was not helped by the circulation of
libelous poems. One of these, anonymous, refers to her supervision
of the d'Orleans children at Belle-Chasse:
Yesterday's mistress, chaste today,
Savage lover, then professor:
Genlis, hide your charms away
And become a strict assessor.
Yet always this lovely creature
Will use the gifts she had before;
One can take up as a preacher
Without resigning as a whore.23
Another stanza, authentically by Laclos, ordinarily a prose artist,
runs as follows
Get rid of your pen, my beauty:
The needle is your duty;
Set your papers burning,
For now you must know
How to spin and to sew
For the pay you are earning.24
The notorious Laclos (in reality, a mild and compassionate family
man) moved into the d'Orleans web of intrigue. Shortly, it was he
alone who was planning the political campaign on an unprecedented

21 See Dard, pp. 139-144. Accordingto Grace DalrympleElliott (Solis la Terreur:

Journal d'une amie de Philippe-Egalite, trans. Theodor de Wyzawa [Paris (1906)], p.
20), Laclos was introducedto d'Orleans by the Vicomte de Noailles.
22 The document in question is [Charles, marquisDucrest], "Memoirepr6sente au
roi par S.A.S. Mgr le duc d'Orleans" (n.p. [1788]).
23 "Aujourd'huiprude, hier galante; / Tour a tour folle et docteur: / Genlis, douce
gouvernante,/ Deviendra dur Gouverneur;/ Mais toujours femme charmante/ Saura
remplir son destin: / On peut bien etre p6dante / Sans cesser d'etre Catin" (in
[anon.], La Vie prive'e du duc de Chartres, aujourd'hui duc d'Orle'ans, par une Soci6te6
d'Amis du Prince [Paris, 1790], p. 74 [my translation]).
24 "Change donc, ma fille, / Ta plume en aiguille;/ Brule ton papier;/ Il faut te
resoudre/ A filer, a coudre, / C'est la ton metier" (quoted in Brissot, 2:11 [my
translation]).
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans 673
scale. As the French ambassadorto London La Luzerne somewhat
later described it, Laclos, as private secretary, had d'Orleans in his
grip "as much as one can possibly dominate such a fickle man."25
Was it Laclos or "la Genlis" who really created this phase of
"Orleanism?"26The preliminaryfindings are that, just as they tilted
against each other for the "soul" of the movement, they must share
the credit: Madame de Genlis, in educating the future king of the
French with that peculiar combination of republican sincerity and
princely habits; and Choderlos de Laclos, in vastly developing the
ideological and electoral machine that served the duke in his am-
biguous combats on the steps of the throne.27
The political machineryused by Laclos anteceded his own arrival
in the Palais-Royal. For as Brissot, who departed before Ducrest,
writes: "My work consisted of examining all the projects that the
prince could carry through with his immense fortune. We wanted to
attach the intellectuals to us, to patronize the arts and the learned
societies. Thus, we gave pensions to the farmerand provided aid for
new research. We created a load of philanthropicsocieties in the
apanage of the prince." "But," Brissot laments, "this good start
was not sustained. To prepare the Revolution, one needed good
morals, energetic pamphlets, everythingthat could tie the prince to a
people weary of despotism. And nothing more ever happened than
making plans in the middle of profligate dinners, served by lackeys
who were, for the most part, spies [of the court]."28Obviously, the
fashionable aristocratic liberals of the duke's entourage-Lauzun,
Noailles, Sillery, d'Aiguillon-who raced horses, gamed, and
wenched were not cut of the same cloth as the austere Brissot; for
him the ideas of the d'Orleans circle owed more to the memoirs of

25 Quotedin Andre Castelot, Le Prince rouge, Philippe-Egalite(Paris, 1950), p. 152.

26 "Created is used here for lack of a better word; I am referringto the July
revolution of 1830 and Louis-Philippe.There had been, of course, a well-defined
Orleanist countercurrentagainst the senior Bourbons dating from the regency of
Philippe d'Orleans (1715-23).
27 It would be useful to know more about Laclos's modus operandi during this

period, but, althoughhe survived the Terror,dying in 1803, he told no tales. We can
surmise the kind of work he was engaged in from later incidents, e.g., the virtual
certaintythat he used the duke's money to subsidize the pen of Marat(both were in
London at the same time) for d'Orleansand against Lafayette in 1790 (see, on this,
G6rardWalter, Marat [Paris, 1953], pp. 185-86), and his later machinationsin 1791
(after the king's flightto Varennes), when, as permanentsecretaryof the Jacobins,he
attemptedto rally the power of that society, perhapswith the approvalof Danton, to
the cause of an Orleanistregency (see Dard [n. 18 above], p. 308; F.-A. Aulard,ed.,
La Societe des Jacobins, 6 vols. [Paris, 1889-97], 3:17; and Brissot [n. 19 above]
2:282).
28 Brissot, 2:64.
674 George Armstrong Kelly
the Cardinalde Retz than to the philosophy of the century.29This
frivolity also unnerved Ducrest and was perhaps instrumentalin the
contretemps that caused his disgrace.
Laclos never had anything to do with the administrativeside of
the Maison d'Orleans; he was strictly a political mentor and
confidant. When ChancellorDucrest resigned on December 5, 1787,
he was replaced by an obscure naval Officer, Admiral de Latouche-
Treville, who had gained Philippe's admiration during a visit to
Rochefort, where Latouche's father commanded the garrison.30
Loyal and modest, Latouche directed the Conseil de la Maison and
acquitted himself well in difficult straits (Philippe's immense debts,
the loss of feudal dues and the apanage in 1791, etc.). He was also
frequently scalded by the anti-d'Orleans libelists and prosecuted
thereafter in 1793, when in fact he had only performed his profes-
sional duty. Needless to say, his political ideas were also liberal.
The records of the Maison d'Orleans which he and his council have
left reflect the financial tribulations already mentioned, but they
reveal no evidence of the duke's political uses of his fortune. A later
story tells us that Napoleon, on being presented with a bundle of
this evidence, a part of the secret documentation of the trial of
d'Orleans in late 1793, ordered his minister of the interior, the Duc
de Rovigo, to burn it.31
Enlarging on the work of Ducrest and Brissot, Laclos and his
adjutants drew up plans of government and reform, devised philan-
thropic works, issued libels, and prepared the campaign for the
Estates-General. If we add together the many (often unreliable)
accounts of the period, we learn that not only Brissot, but Barere,
Mirabeau, Sieyes, Desmoulins, Danton, Duport, Dumouriez, and
Marat all passed through the Orleanist receiving line. Later, the
Gironde and the Montagne would mutually accuse each other of
being bought. We will always, however, find the names of Mounier,
Lafayette, and Robespierre conspicuously absent: these men were
bitter enemies and not for hire. We may confine ourselves to
observing that Laclos sat in the Palais-Royal, turning the duke's
great resources to his profit; he scorned the liberal amateurs who
could play at conspiracy but not revolution. "His energy," a biog-
rapherwrites, "was like a charge of powder placed amid fragile and
inflammablematerial."32

29 Dard, p. 162.
30 Hyslop (n. 2 above), p. 201.
31 See Castelot, p. 264.
32 Dard, p. 155.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans 675
What is most intriguing about this sequence is not its dark,
conspiratorial character at all, but its revelation of a new politics
that we would judge normal. When Louis XVI invited all the
educated people of his realm to submit ideas for reform either
personally or corporately through the cahiers de doleances and
summoned the primary assemblies to choose deputies, it little oc-
curred to him that the court should form a "party" or attempt to
"manage" these elections.33 At the king's behest, his brother the
Comte d'Artois (later Charles X), who had toyed with the idea of
becoming a deputy of the nobility, withdrew. Not so d'Orleans.
From its harried perspective, the court regarded all "parties," all
organized electioneering as seditious. The suboming of the intel-
ligentsia, the hiring of propagandists, the investment in philanthropy,
ideas, and votes were disloyal acts. They breathed of an English
license that was offensive to Louis XVI (one of the few judgments
he shared with Lafayette). But Laclos, and behind him d'Orleans,
did not particularly care what Versailles thought; they were going to
have their plutocratic fling at organized national politics. The prince
did it for popularity and revenge; the valet did it for power and the
joy of the game: each, in his way, did it in the spirit of "liberalism."
The French game, as Laclos foresaw, would be on a new playing
field and would unleash massive frustrations bottled up for well over
a century.
In 1789, few thought of abolishing kingship, but it was not out of
the question to imagine displacing a king. French history had had its
share of family quarrels, with its regents, constables, and lieutenant
generals of the realm. The English had displaced their king in 1688
and had clarified the issue absolutely in 1714. Few cared to re-
member that they had also judicially decapitated a king in 1649. If
there were need for great changes in France which Louis XVI would
not or could not grant, a speculative regent was waiting in the wings
who appeared, increasingly, to take these reforms to heart. He was
known to be dissolute, frivolous, and unfocused (later royalist biog-
raphers would have more scathing epithets), whereas Louis XVI was
chaste, torpid, and indecisive: Was it a fair exchange? Gradually,
those who measured the two men thought not. But some had been
tempted by d'Orleans: If he had had either the elan of his ancestor
Henri IV or the virtues of his eldest son, he might have reached the
throne.
Did d'Orleans set his sights on the throne or the regency at this

33 See Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Memnoires d'un temoin de la RWvolution, 3 vols. (Paris,

1804), 1:52.
676 George Armstrong Kelly
moment? Louis-Philippe presents the whole notion of an Orleanist
conspiracy as a red herring. He sees his father, lovingly, as a weak
human being who neither wanted nor could have launched such an
operation. All Philippe wanted was Blackstone's vaunted "power of
locomotion," as well as "a shelter against the caprices and evil
designs of the court, and later against its prosecution and ven-
geance."34 He maintains further that nobody else wanted Orleanism
either: "It is precisely because no one wanted to place the Duc
d'Orleans on the throne that everyone was afraid of being accused of
it and that the accusation disturbed everyone's views and plans."35
This touching annal has a ring of honesty. But many others in 1789
thought differently. And nowhere, in all of his 800 pages, does
Louis-Philippe once introduce the name of Choderlos de Laclos.
This is a striking omission that renders a partial flavor to all his
other evidence.
On September 23, 1788, the Parlement of Paris corroborated the
view of the aristocracy that the Estates-General should be consti-
tuted according to the forms of 1614. Necker, the King's de facto
chief minister, had been ambiguous on this question, allowing for the
doubling of the Tiers, but leaving the more passionate matter of
voting by head up to the internal deliberations and concordances of
the Estates. This unmasking of the conservative character of the
revolte nobiliaire did as much as anything to drive the strategists of
the Tiers Etat toward thorough revolution. And after the second
Assemblee des Notables, a Meimoire des princes du sang, warning
the king against serious constitutional change, failed to receive the
signature not only of the Duc d'Orleans, but also of the Comte de
Provence (later Louis XVIII), who had his own ideas of Fronde.36
But unlike Provence, d'Orleans was mobilized for a go at "mod-
ern" politics; he had his machinery and brain trust in hand. The idea
of Brissot and Ducrest would be consummated by Laclos. Concern-
ing the winter of 1788-89, there is a congeries of royalist charges
against d'Orleans. Allegedly, with the aid of Brienne's edict for the
free exportation of grain (1787), he captured the grain market,
causing famine and unrest in France; he distributed vast amounts of
charity for seditious purposes; he bought up the lumpen-intelligentsia
and had their tracts and libels widely distributed; and, in a later
stage, his agents created panic in the countryside, leading to looting,
burning, and anarchy, and subverted the royal troops with bribes
and flattery. The reality seems less picturesque.
34 Louis-Philippe (n. 10 above), 1:103.
35 Ibid., 1:115.
36
See Hyslop, p. 248.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orle'ans 677
So far as the evidence can be reassembled, the charges against
d'Orleans are a tissue of half-truths.The Maison d'Orleansundoubt-
edly did speculate, in land and commodities, for the purpose of
maintainingthe duke's fortune and paying his extravagances;but he
did not instigate the French people to rebellion by deprivingthem of
bread: the harsh winter, crop failures, and an alarming ascent of
prices from 1785 on accounted for that. As for the charity, it may
have served the duke's political interests, but it was also the natural
bent of many rich aristocrats in a time of misery: Philippe's father,
"Louis le Gros," had also been philanthropic;so was his conserva-
tive father-in-law,the Duc de Penthievre. In any case, on December
20, 1788, the Journal de Paris published a letter written by the
Marquis de Limon to the cure of the Church of Saint-Eustache
announcing that the Duc d'Orleans would provide every day a
thousand livres of bread for the poor of the parish, that women in
childbirth would have free medical assistance, and that help and
shelter for the indigent would be furnished while the freezing
weather lasted.37An extraordinarykind of seditious act, unless one
grants that he had caused their hunger-or pregnancy-in the first
place!
Pamphleteersand writers were certainly subsidized by d'Orleans.
It is second nature in the new politics to assume that such talents
are at the hire of the ambitious. But printed libels were no new
practice, either for the Maison d'Orleans or for the court and its
competingcliques-or for other powerful sources of ambition. It was
the printingand disseminationof the remonstrancesof the sovereign
courts at the end of the reign of Louis XV that seemed more
scandalous than the fact that they had used aggressive language.
Shortly after the convocation of the Estates-General at Versailles,
Mirabeau, Barere, and others would successfully challenge press
censorship and usher in a period of unrestrictedlicense and fertility
that lasted until August 10, 1792.38 Yet the king, in summoningthe
Estates with their inevitable cahiers, had expressed the wish for a
communicationof public problems. In the aftermathof the Revolu-
tion, the Duc d'Orleans's foray into publishing and propaganda
would seem like a vile conspiracyto royalists, but it was not he alone
who contributedto the multiplicationof brochures. If he "bought"
talents, he did not need to invent their ideas for them: he also
bought the ideas.

37 Dard, p. 166.
38
See Claude Bellanger et al., Histoire g'nerale de la presse fran!aise, vol. 1, Des
Origines a 1814 (Paris, 1969), pp. 431-34.
678 George Armstrong Kelly
The charge that the Duc d'Orleans personally plotted and caused
insurrections in the countryside (either in concert or in parallel with
Mirabeau, Duport, Sieyes, etc.)-the so-called Grande Peur of
1789-has long been disproved. No doubt rumor played its part in
the wave of regional panics that produced brigandage and arson; no
doubt the arms that the peasants acquired were taken from some-
where: but no single personage, operating through his own agents,
could have substantially created these brushfires. Georges Lefebvre
has said the decisive word on this subject.39 On the question (again
an affair of 1789) of undermining the loyalty of the troops (especially
the Gardes Francaises), the evidence is much more complicated and
probably impossible to settle.
D'Orleans's main ambition at this point seems to have been to
influence the cahiers and the representation of the nobility in as
liberal a direction as possible. It seems that by November 1788 he
had broken his coalition with the backsliding parlementary forces,
whose view of French constitutionalism had been overtaken by
events. In this estimation he was joined by other powerful nobles,
including some of the gens de robe themselves. The agitation that
the duke promoted, either by the dispersion of agents throughout his
apanage or by printed matter, was a serious, not a petty, business,
especially as conceived by Laclos.
Much of the literature upholding the thesis of Orleanist conspiracy
is right in affirming that, with some notion of strategy, d'Orleans
attempted to organize for the elections and the meeting of the
Estates. But what is condemned as treasonable proceeds from the
refusal of these writers to acknowledge that the form and substance
of politics in France were changing during those months from
"closed" to "open." The duke wanted to influence the composition
of the Estates-General and the trend of their demands and policies.
So did a number of other aspirants. But the duke was extraordinarily
well placed in rank, visibility, and wealth to do this. Already
Sieyes's influential pamphlet had made the rights of the Tiers Etat
those of the nation, demanded a constitution created in the image
and interests of that nation that was not "ancient" but timeless, and
established (through natural rights arguments) the virtually unlimited
powers of a constituent assembly with its delegated primordial
strength.40

39 Georges Lefebvre, La Grande Peurs (Paris, 1932).

40 Of the hundreds of pamphlets of its time, Qu'est-ce quie le Tiers Etat? alone has
become a classic; it passed through three editions in 1789. For comment, see R.
Zapperi's introduction to his edition of the work (Geneva, 1970), pp. 7-117.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans 679
There are various accounts of how the duke's Instructions a ses
bailliages came into being; this pamphlet, presently to be analyzed,
passed through four editions, the first three being accompaniedby a
separate document called Deliberations a' prendre dans les As-
semblees de bailliages. In his apologia, written later from London,
the Duc d'Orleans cites these pamphlets as proof of his personal
concern for individual liberties and his determinationto see them
made a basis for the cahiers.41 Louis-Philippe, in his Memoires, is
silent about the activity of this period, except for mentioning the
convocation of the Estates-Generalon December 24, 1788. Our most
detailed source is Talleyrand,who informs us that Laclos persuaded
the duke to entrust him with the authorship of this document,
intended as a political manual for the agents of d'Orleans acting in
the primary assemblies of all the "bailiwicks" of his apanage.
According to Talleyrand,the philosophicalideas advanced by Laclos
were too transparentlyradical to satisfy his master; d'Orleans felt
obliged to seek a second editor. Sieyes was recommended to him;
they met at Lauzun's cottage in Montrouge, where, as the account
continues, the peremptory Sieyes redid the whole thing in a form
that d'Orleans accepted and had printed. Apparently, this was the
only meeting between d'Orleans and Seyes before the National
Assembly.42
Given the form of the work and the difference between its first
and second editions, it seems more likely that Laclos was largely
responsible for the Instructions and Sieyes for the De'liberations. At
least, this is what d'Orleans appears to be implyingwhen he writes:
"In attaching [to my Instructions] a work of our most powerful
publicist, I had two motives in mind: first, to express, in my
different bailliages, a uniform resolution that was my own; and
second, to give my agents definite guidance for unanticipated
cases. "43 Laclos's biographer surmises that the "excessiveness"
referred to by Talleyrand centers mainly around the article on
divorce contained in the Instructions, which was indeed advanced
for its time and wounding to the Duchesse d'Orleans and obliquely
humiliatingto the queen.44It is also possible that Madamede Genlis
saw some need for tempering the tract and was instrumental in
getting Seiyes.45 Whatever the authorship or editorship of these
41 Louis-Philippe-Joseph (n. 8 above), p. 6.
42
Talleyrand (n. 14 above), 1:209-10.
43 Louis-Philippe-Joseph, p. 6.
44 Dard (n. 18 above), p. 166. There is a work of
1789, attributed to the Duc
d'Orl6ans, called Traite philosophique, theologique et politique de la loi du divorce. It
is conceivable that Laclos wrote it.
45 Dard, p. 168.
680 George Armstrong Kelly
pamphlets,46 they were advertised as the duke's contribution to the
political thought and strategy of his time. I shall comment only on
the Instructions,47 for the De'liberations bear more on tactics than on
doctrine.
This document is cast in the form of seventeen articles, of which
the first, a kind of preamble about liberty, is divided under five
heads, mentioning conspicuously at the outset "the liberty to live
where one wishes, to go, to come, to stay where one wants, with no
impediment": the vital center of the duke's liberalism. The other
liberties are the right to fair arrest and trial; the right to regular
justice within twenty-four hours following exceptional cases of ar-
rest; the illegality of any interference with a citizen's liberty by
anyone but a duly appointed magistrate; and the legal punishment of
any violation of this precept. Article two demands complete liberty
of the press; article three, the complete confidentiality of correspon-
dence; article four, the absolute right of (bourgeois) property; article
five, the illegality of taxation except by consent of the Estates-
General. Article six provides for brevity of term and regular sum-
moning of the Estates-General and for their meeting in emergencies.
Article seven states that royal ministers will be accountable to the
Estates-General and for their official conduct; article eight foresees
the consolidation and single reckoning of the national debt; arti-
cle nine declares that the Estates-General will not grant new taxes
without proper public accounting; article ten envisages a general and
just form of public taxation. In article eleven, the Estates-General is
charged with a profound reform of civil and criminal proceedings.
Article twelve demands the institution of civil divorce "to avoid the
unhappiness and scandal of incompatible unions." Article thirteen
demands better and prompter execution of the laws; article fourteen
enjoins the Estates-General not to act until proper guarantees of
liberty have been established and the constitutional laws of the state
fixed. The remainder of the Instructions is more personal: article
fifteen directs the agents of d'Orleans not to raise unnecessary
obstacles in defense of his privileges in the editing of the cahiers,
especially those of the Tiers; article sixteen promotes the abolition of
certain historic privileges of the nobility but argues for the preserva-
tion of their hunting rights (not just for sport, but as a matter of

46
Britsch (n. 17 above), p. 493, suggests that they may have been the work of the
Marquis de Limon, then a member of the Conseil de la Maison d'Orleans. This seems
unlikely.
47 Instructions donnees par S.A.S. Monseignetir le diic d'Orleans
a ses represen-
tans aux bailliages (n.p., 1789), pp. 1-7, passim.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans 681
agriculture and conservation); and article seventeen directs the
agents to particulars further developed in the annexed De'liberations.
As compared with most of the general cahiers, the tone of the
Instructions is quite forward looking, though not deliberately pro-
vocative. It is monarchical, but it speaks of the "nation" and never
of royal majesty; its objectives are not to be "granted" but rightfully
obtained. The emphasis is on personal physical liberty and the right
to act as one desires: still contemporary in tone today. "Society" is
almost absent from the document. The divorce demand, though not
unique in the writings of the period, is very advanced; while most
liberals were combating the church with religious toleration (granted
to the Protestants in 1788 by Louis XVI after a long campaign by
Malesherbes) and a weakening of the temporal-spiritual connection,
the duke was desacralizing marriage. Whoever wrote them, the
Instructions are stamped with the duke's personality. Their concerns
were the issues closest to his political conviction and understanding.
The intention of the Instructions was not only to serve as a
theoretical guide for the agents of d'Orleans but also to focus a
propaganda effort to influence the fledgling political community. In
short, these principles formed a "model cahier" that could be
adapted to local conditions by unimaginative or inexperienced as-
semblies. It is estimated that at least 100,000 copies of this piece of
literature were circulated, usually with the attached Deliberations.48
It was by no means the only model cahier in the field. The leading
emergent politicians of the bourgeoisie were also very active in
putting across their views by this means: the effectiveness of
Thouret's model cahier in Normandy is often cited. The explicit
results achieved by the duke's propaganda are somewhat nebulous;
the extraordinary circulation is, nevertheless, striking. It was widely
distributed, not only throughout the duke's apanage and Paris, but
in other regions as well: in his research Henri See discovered copies
of it in the Senechaussee of Rennes.49 One writer tells us that "it
was one of the 'models' most widely adopted in the editing of the
cahiers";50 but this judgment may be excessive, since many of
d'Orleans's demands were a part of the general program of the
Tiers.5' Hyslop, who has closely studied the genesis and content of

48
Martin (n. 3 above), p. 156.
49 Ibid., p. 158.
50 Dard, p. 168.
51 The duke claims that his Instrutctions showed that he understood what the French
were thinking: "My ruling passion for liberty had tied my personal interest to the
public interest" (Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France, MS 2049).
682 George Armstrong Kelly
the cahiers, concedes the immense circulation of the Instructions but
is more skeptical about its direct influence. Indeed, the demand for
civil divorce and one or two of the less important issues of the
Instructions are rarely encountered in the general cahiers. But, with
this document, the duke specifically defined his political distance
from his royal cousin.52
There was not just the matter of the cahiers but also of elections.
The royal convocation permitted each noble to participate in the
assembly of his order wherever he held a property: d'Orleans could
therefore appear, or be represented, in twenty-nine assemblies. He
sent agents to all of them, but only four of these men were elected
deputies of the Second Estate. D'Orleans personally attended the
assembly of Paris intra-muros and weighed heavily on the bailliages
or Villers-Cotterets and Crepy-en-Valois, where he owned vast
properties: all three of these constituencies elected him.53
The Paris elections produced-with the exception of the Marquis
de Mirepoix-an almost complete representation of (nine) liberal
nobles. D'Orleans was close to the bottom of the elected list here
(with sixty-seven votes he tied Duport and Lepeletier de Saint-
Fargeau, both eminent parlementarians, and he had less than half the
votes of Clermont-Tonnerre, the front-runner).54 He chose to repre-
sent Crepy, because its cahier was most in conformity with his own
views. Other political friends of the duke were elected: Mazancourt
at Villers-Cotterets, Sillery at Rheims, Lauzun at Cahors, Latouche
at Montargis. To speak of the success of a "party," however, would
be totally false. Far from all liberal nobles were friends of d'Orleans
(some, like Lafayette, would be his bitterest enemies), and they
were still very much a minority in their order. As for mobilizing the
membership of the Tiers or the lesser clergy, it was a task beyond
d' Orleans' s means.
The Duc d'Orleans seems to have made no great political splash
between the elections and the plenary meeting of the Estates-
General on May 4, 1789. No doubt his advisers and clique were
active in-to use the word of that day-conciliabules. But we see no
plot; we have only veiled glimpses of ambitious designs. In the
ceremony at Versailles, the duke abandoned the train of the king,
taking his place among the other elected members of the order of the
nobility; this occasioned popular admiration. We have only disor-
dered records of the proceedings of the Chamber of Nobles before
52
Hyslop (n. 2 above), p. 249.
53 Ibid., p. 250.
54 Charles-Louis Chassin, ed., Les Elections et les cahiers de Paris en 1789, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1888), 3:276.
 The Machine of the Duc D'Orleans 683
the National Assembly was formed. It is doubtful that the tongue-
tied duke had much to say, when there were liberal orators in
abundance: Lafayette, Clermont-Tonnerre, Lally-Tollendal. On June
17, 1789, the Tiers declared itself, together with the absent orders
which were invited to join it, a "National Assembly," by a vote of
491 to 89. The resistance of the Jeu de Paume occurred on June 20.
On June 25, the Duc d'Orleans accompanied forty-six other liberal
members of the nobility to receive their credentials as representa-
tives of the nation. Two days later the principle of the reunion of the
three orders (minus, of course, many dissidents) was fait accompli.
The National Assembly adopted a kind of rotating procedure for
naming its presiding officer; the first had been Bailly, leading deputy
from Paris and doyen of the Tiers. It now-on July 3-seemed
conciliatory to pass the temporary presidency to another estate. The
logical candidate was d'Orleans, Prince of the Blood and ranking
noble of the assembly, who by conviction and example had shown
his willingness to follow the wishes of the nation. He was over-
whelmingly elected, with 553 votes out of 660. But he declined the
day after, and the Archbishop of Vienne was chosen in his place.55
Royalist historians considered the size of the vote as evidence of the
depth of the Orleanist plot.56 This is nonsense: d'Orleans did not win
the election because his colleagues wanted to place him on the
throne, or even admired him; they were simply performing deferen-
tially, while cautioning the court at the same time. Having had his
succes d'estime, d'Orleans refused because, in his words, "If I
thought I could do justice to the position . . . I would take it with
the greatest joy; but, messieurs, I would be unworthy of your
kindness if I accepted it, knowing how little fit for it I am."57 Ruse,
false modesty, humility, or avoidance of a diplomatically demanding
chore? There are probably all these elements in the duke's self-
effacement. They would predict his reaction in later episodes: his
implication in the dramatic events of October 5-6, 1789; his imbroglio
with Lafayette and indictment by the Chaitelet; the abortive thrust
for the regency in 1791, engineered by Laclos and thwarted by
Madame de Genlis, as well as by more powerful forces; the am-
biguities of his clumsy and fatal Jacobin affiliations. Philippe d'Or-
leans was, to say the least, a reluctant dragon, a person not cut to fit
the size of his persona, an inferior plotter. The fact remains, how-

55"Proces-verbal de l'Assemblee Nationale" (Paris and Versailles, 1789), 2:7-9.

56 E.g., [Montjoie] (n. 15 above), 2:10.
57 Quoted in Alissan de Chazet, Vie politique de Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orleans-
Egalite (Paris, 1832), p. 28.
684 George Armstrong Kelly
ever, that it was under his auspices that a " machine" vaguely
designed for the requirements of the new politics was created in
France. If he had given it green light instead of flashing red, the
Revolution might have evolved quite differently.