Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (48 page)

royal correspondence with other European heads of state; and, for a time,

the politicians seemingly poised to derive maximum advantage from that

circumstance were Brissot’s coterie of warmongers.82

To make this last point is another way of saying that geopolitical issues,

which had favored all “Jacobins” indiscriminately in the final year of the

Constituent Assembly, advantaged Brissot’s circle of “Jacobins” in the last

months of the succeeding Legislative Assembly and gave some prospect of

benefiting them as well in the radical Convention to come. But if Brissot

had been shrewd enough to play upon the patriotic heartstrings of his

fellow legislators in furthering his own political agenda in 1791–92, he

was not sufficiently prescient to see in the war a phenomenon whose un-

precedented manpower and matériel needs would require ever more cen-

tralization of governmental powers and a concomitant democratization

of politics at Paris and in the provinces. In the end, the question of war,

which had come to dominate all other matters in the Legislative Assembly,

would do so as well in the Convention – and it would swallow up the

Brissotins, the “Girondists,” in 1793 as it had engulfed the Feuillants the

year before.

81 See C. J. Mitchell, “Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791,”
French
Historical Studies
13 (1984): 356–89; and
The French Legislative Assembly of 1791
, passim.

82 Refer, on these issues, to Hardman,
Louis XVI
, passim; Rudé,
The Crowd in the French
Revolution
, passim; and Mitchell, “Political Divisions within the Legislative Assembly,”

pp. 356–89.

196

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

Clearly, the war was on the minds of most citizens who, in augmented

numbers,83 convened in departmental assemblies in September 1792 to

elect delegates to the recently decreed National Convention. This preoc-

cupation manifested itself in several ways. For one thing, nearly half of

the electoral bodies went beyond their official duties to lend support to

the war effort. These supportive efforts included: mounting subscription

campaigns to help finance the cost of outfitting and equipping volunteers

and maintaining their families while they were on military duty; furnishing

horses, provisions, and transport services to the army; conducting inven-

tories of local reserves of ammunition for the artillery; and even assisting

emissaries from Paris in coordinating strategies of military defense for

entire departments.84 That, in addition, so many of the electors unhesi-

tatingly rejected openly royalist candidates for Convention seats, and in

some cases insisted as well upon purging royalists from local administra-

tive and judicial posts, testified indirectly to the widespread anxiety and

indignation over the danger to which the king’s duplicity had exposed his

subjects.85 Finally, it is revealing in this connection that most electors were

disinclined to condemn the Parisians for the killings which had occurred in

the capital’s jails just a few days before. Five of the six electoral assemblies

that, we know, had heard of this event had also just learned of the fall of

Verdun to the Prussians; significantly, not one of them bothered at this time

to discuss the September massacres. Attitudes might change later on as the

fear of invasion faded, and as the extent of the carnage at Paris was fully

revealed; for the time being, however, a “sympathetic understanding of the

situation which had produced the massacres” was more in evidence.86

Initially, Brissot and his allies from the Gironde appeared well posi-

tioned to profit in the Convention from such patriotic concerns, shared as

they were by electors and elected alike. Had they not been among the first

to clamor in the preceding legislature for war against the historic Habsburg

foe? Had not their man Dumouriez, first in the ministry of foreign affairs

and then in an army command, promised laurels for revolutionary France?

And in fact did not the victories at Valmy and Jemappes, however incom-

plete they might be in some technical respects, reverse the tide of military

fortune in France’s favor as the campaigning season of 1792 wound down?

The Girondists, buoyed by these events, felt sufficiently secure in late 1792

83 The
absolute
number of voters nationwide probably registered an increase over 1789–91, although, given the recent increase in the pool of eligible voters, the
percentage
of the latter exercising the franchise was on the decrease. This matter is closely reviewed in Crook,
Elections in the French Revolution
, pp. 79–101.

84 Alison Patrick,
The Men of the First French Republic
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 173.

85 Ibid., pp. 172–75.

86 Ibid., p. 169.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

197

and early 1793 to battle the emergent “Montagnard” faction of Jacobins in

the Convention on a number of fronts, ranging from responsibility for the

September massacres to the king’s trial and punishment to the respective

roles to be assigned to Parisians and to provincials in the affairs of the new

Republic.

All of this might have gone on inconclusively, and certainly never have

acquired a new pitch of murderous intensity, had it not been for the dra-

matic reversal in military fortunes that (we have already seen) placed the

entire Revolution in jeopardy the following spring and summer. The ad-

dition of the Dutch, the Spanish, and above all the British to the list of

France’s enemies surely had not been foreseen by Brissot and his partisans

in 1792. Even less anticipated, and more immediately dangerous to them,

was the treason in April 1793 of their champion Dumouriez. In the harsh

light of these developments, the political infighting between the Girondists

and “Montagnard” Jacobins in the Convention gradually took on the

characteristics of mortal combat.

Whether or not the traditional scholarly division of the Convention

into leftist “Jacobins” (the “Mountain”), a centrist “Plain” or “Marsh,”

and rightist “Girondists” or “Girondins” still serves useful analytical pur-

poses has recently occasioned much debate.87 Yet even in questioning

some aspects of the traditional schema, a trio of Americans recently reaf-

firmed the notion of a “factional struggle that began in the Legislative

Assembly in 1792 and would end with the liquidation of the Jacobins’ ene-

mies after June 1793 and with the persecution of Jacobins by the surviving

Girondists after July 1794.”88 Indeed, it would seem difficult now to deny

that representatives in the Convention identified
at that time
as “Jacobins”

combatted deputies labeled “Girondists.” Moreover, the Jacobins appear

to have gradually won over enough deputies to have constituted a fairly

reliable majority in France’s ruling assembly during 1793–94. And retro-

spective analysis suggests that it was above all their concentration upon

the country’s imperative need for security that opened the way for the

Jacobins’ ascendancy in the Convention.

Leading Jacobins were quick to grasp the gravity of the situation – and

to sense that mastering it would require an embrace of truly “popular” pol-

itics. In March 1793, Jeanbon St.-André, on mission in Lot and Dordogne,

had written: “If we expect the multitude to help us to safeguard the

Revolution it is very necessary indeed to keep them alive.” In recollections

87 See, along with Patrick’s study: M. J. Sydenham,
The Girondins
(London: Athlone Press, 1961); Gary Kates,
The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Anne Hildreth, and Alan B. Spitzer, “Was There a Girondist Faction in the National Convention, 1792–1793?”

French Historical Studies
15 (1988): 519–36.

88 Lewis-Beck, Hildreth, and Spitzer, p. 536.

198

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

penned after the event, Baudot was even more direct: “Only the masses

could hurl back the foreign horde. Therefore we had to inspire them to

support us by giving them a real interest in our success.”89 And in fact the

Jacobins’ ability to woo centrists away from any affiliation with Brissot’s

coterie of politicians in the spring of 1793 was rooted in the realism of such

insights, which on all occasions assumed the interrelatedness of domestic

and geostrategic issues. The Jacobins perceived, for instance, that both

the British naval blockade and the outbreak of civil war in the West had

jeopardized the distribution of food. They understood by the same to-

ken that, if Dumouriez’s treason had shaken public confidence in the pa-

per currency, so had the hoarding of food, by aggravating shortages and

thereby inflating prices expressed in
assignats
. Apart from worrying about

their immediate political status in the Convention, the Jacobins had also to

worry about saving revolutionary France; and they realized that achieving

the latter objective meant addressing the many causes of domestic discon-

tent.90 Hence, apparently, the Jacobin deputies’ accelerated campaign in

April and May 1793 to reach an understanding with popular Parisian in-

terests on economic and political matters, even as they were battling their

Girondist foes and seeking new alliances with uncommitted representatives

in the legislature.

Analyzing the terms of parliamentary debate during these decisive

months ultimately enables us to understand why the Jacobins prevailed

over their Girondist opponents in the struggle for paramount influence

in the Convention, and thus in the revolutionary state-at-war. In those

debates, two questions – one purely domestic and the other transcend-

ing domestic considerations – interacted continually. The first question

was: how to maintain the Convention’s independence from radical pres-

sure groups in Paris? The second question was: how to go about the main

business of securing the Republic? The Girondists, to their ruin, placed too

much emphasis upon the first question and not enough upon the second.

They could not see, as the Jacobins and their allies could, that first the

Republic must be salvaged by winning the war, and that doing so required

that the provinces (at least temporarily) be subordinated to the capital –

including, crucially, its patriotic male and female artisans and shopkeep-

ers (
sans-culottes
and
sans-jupons
). To identify with
provinc¸iaux
at Lyon and Marseilles and Bordeaux who opposed the encroachment of national

upon local government, and to condemn accordingly the “anarchy” of the

Parisians, was to undercut the war effort upon which all else depended, and

yet this was what Brissot and his confederates did in the spring of 1793. The

inevitable response of the more pragmatic Jacobin deputies came with the

89 Citations from Sydenham,
The Girondins
, pp. 167–68.

90 Ibid.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

199

journées
of 31 May–2 June: the mass demonstrations by means of which a

tactical alliance of Jacobin politicians and Parisian
sans-culottes
secured the expulsion of twenty-nine prominent Girondists from the Convention.91

The events of 31 May–2 June 1793, however reluctantly endorsed by many

of the lawmakers, had the desired and essential effect of purging from the

legislature a faction of politicians no longer able to govern but still capable

of making governing well-nigh impossible for others. The Parisian insur-

rection, it has been fairly concluded, “broke the parliamentary deadlock in

favor of a group of men who not only had better claims to govern than the

Girondins, but had in fact been doing most of the work of government for

some time.”92

Painstaking research into the origins of the members of the Convention

has done much to invalidate whatever remained of the old Marxist postula-

tion of major socioeconomic differences between Girondists and Jacobins.

Experience of public life and the assumption of responsibility in the

Revolution, rather than wealth or social standing, provided the key to vari-

ations in political attitudes in this body; and the Jacobins, it turns out, had

“experience” and “assumption of responsibility” to burn. They comprised

a large proportion of ex-Legislative Assemblymen in the Convention;

indeed, their record of participation in debates, committee work, and ad-

ministrative/political labors in the provinces during 1791–92 made that

period (in one historian’s words) “a nursery of the politicians of the

Terror.”93 Then, again, while the debate over the king’s fate in December

1792–January 1793 was characterized in part by Girondist arguments for

clemency that revealed scant political (or geopolitical) realism, Robespierre

and his allies knew that they had to appeal to the revolutionary idealism

of plebeian citizens whose activism was fueling the Republic’s efforts to