Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (49 page)

survive.94 Jacobin sensitivity to the needs of the
sans-culottes
– activists already spurned by the Girondist orators – made such a strategy as logical

as it was necessary.95

Moreover, it is clear in hindsight that even some legislators not closely

leagued with Robespierre endorsed the execution of Louis XVI in January

1793, and the willingness of some of them to collaborate on committees

like that of Public Safety paralleled the more general willingness of deputies

91 On these critical
journées
, see Rudé,
The Crowd in the French Revolution
, pp. 120–25; and Morris Slavin,
The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

92 Patrick,
The Men of the First French Republic
, p. 135.

93 Ibid., pp. 299–300.

94 Ibid., p. 72.

95 On the debate over the king’s fate, see also David P. Jordan,
The King’s Trial
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); and Michael Walzer, ed.,
Regicide and Revolution:
Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

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Reinterpreting the French Revolution

to share the burdens of the Terror in the Convention’s sessions.96 The

absence from Paris of some Jacobins toiling as
représentants en mission

in the provinces prior to 31 May–2 June may have temporarily allowed

the Girondists to prevail on some nonessential issues until then. But the

Jacobins would be in charge after 2 June 1793, and would continue to do

a disproportionate share of the state’s administrative work in committees

and “on mission” even as they participated (as their other duties allowed)

in parliamentary deliberations.

Any doubts we might harbor about the centrality of French secu-

rity needs to the downfall of the Girondists and to the success of their

Jacobin antagonists necessarily dissolve in light of the subsequent arraign-

ment of the former by the latter. An official, Jacobin-inspired “Address

to the French People” proclaimed that the vanquished Girondists had

“neglected the public welfare and exposed the state to the danger of foreign

conquest.”97 Then came the formal indictment of the proscribed Girondist

leaders, read out by Amar on the floor of the Convention on 3 October

1793, and it faithfully mirrored the revolutionaries’ preoccupation with

the threat posed to France. Brissot and his cronies, so Amar charged, had

plotted to deliver France to the Prussians in the summer of 1792, conspired

at the end of 1792 to conceal proofs of the king’s “treachery,” deliber-

ately expanded the war and thus courted disaster the following spring

even as they anticipated Dumouriez’s treason in Belgium and the revolt

in the Vendée, and – finally – advocated “federalism” and incited rebellion

throughout the imperiled country.98 In all of this, it is fairly obvious, we see,

not so much the spokesmen for a set of “class” interests or for one specific

discourse of “popular sovereignty,” but rather the angry and frightened

avatars of the French sense of national security – and national greatness.

It is important, too, to stress that Jacobins all over France were as

eager as the “Montagnard” politicians in the Convention to fuse inter-

national and domestic issues, take on the many duties of governance, and

broaden their bases of popular support. In fact, most of the provincial

Jacobin clubs were clamoring for war well in advance of some of the politi-

cians in the capital: Michael Kennedy, for example, has found that 141 of

154 clubs he sampled over the period from 1 December 1791 to 20 April

1792 “demanded offensive war” prior to the latter date.99 More significant,

however, was their conscious fusing of geostrategic and internal issues.

Examples of this are rife. Bouzonville’s Jacobins warned Louis XVI, “Either

quit the throne or sustain the independence and sovereignty of the nation.”

Montauban’s Jacobins advised the Legislative Assembly in June 1792 to use

96 Patrick,
The Men of the First French Republic
, p. 302.

97 As cited in Sydenham,
The Girondins
, p. 22.

98 Ibid., pp. 26–27.

99 Michael L. Kennedy,
The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 129–31.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

201

“all constitutional powers available to it” to combat the enemies of

the fatherland. “If these are not enough . . . indicate to the country how to

form a new representative assembly with great powers and short duration.”

From Le Mans came a pronunciamento to the “Patriots of the Empire” ad-

juring them to “rise up and teach Louis XVI that it is up to the nation to

provide for its defense and demand reparations for anything that strikes

at the social compact.” Queried the militants at Besanc¸on: “What is to be

done when the king, to recover his despotism, arms all the powers of the

earth against the nation?” Again and again, we see in the pronouncements

of the provincial societies a foretaste of what was to come in the Jacobin

rhetoric of the Convention: the automatic conjoining of international and

domestic – especially constitutional – affairs.100

And these Jacobins, too, like their more famous counterparts at Paris,

made some effort at “social outreach” even as war-related circumstances

forced them to take on more and more of the daily tasks of governance.

Although, it seems, respectable bourgeois continued to wield the greatest

amount of influence in the clubs even under the Terror, there is also some

reason to believe that this influence was shifting downward
within
the

middle class. The “moyenne” and “haute” bourgeoisie – doctors, lawyers,

teachers, priests, wholesale merchants, investors, government officials –

accounted for somewhat less of the membership after September 1791;

shopkeepers more or less held their own; but craftsmen and small trades-

men and even urban wage earners registered noticeable gains in the overall

membership, if not in leadership positions. And with somewhat greater so-

cial inclusiveness came the assumption of greater local power. On the one

hand, the number of Jacobins ensconced in local office had reached a new

high by early 1793. On the other hand, the clubs themselves were being

transformed, by gradual stages, into agencies of the government.101 The

former process owed something to the fact that representatives on mission

in 1793–94, irritated by the lethargy or open hostility of departmental and

district authorities and other local notables who had often embraced the

Girondist cause, reacted by purging local officials and replacing them with

Jacobins and
sans-culottes
outside the clubs.102 Thus, the key to the Jacobin ascendancy, in provincial France as in the country’s ruling assembly, lay in

a willingness to subordinate all other objectives to that of securing victory

in foreign and civil warfare.

Foreign and civil warfare – and, where the latter phenomenon threatened

or actually broke out in 1793, pitting
chouans
in the West or “federalist”

100 Ibid., pp. 252–63, for these (and other) pronouncements by Jacobins in the provinces.

101 Ibid., pp. 34–42, for changes in the personnel and functions of the provincial Jacobin societies.

102 Many examples are furnished in Hampson,
A Social History of the French Revolution
, pp. 209–10. On the situation in the Parisian municipality, see Marc Bouloiseau,
The
Jacobin Republic, 1792–1794
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. p. 113.

202

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

insurgents in the South against Paris, it was most often touched off by the

central government’s war-compelled intrusions into local society. The war

on Europe, that is to say, did much to set the basic terms of the political

relationship between Paris and provincial France in this most dangerous

phase of the Revolution.

We should first point out in this connection that even as the hurly-burly

of combat between Feuillants and Brissotins, and then between Girondists

and Montagnards, gripped political observers in the country’s capital, so-

ciopolitical evolution was progressing – sometimes smoothly, sometimes

by fits and starts – in provincial communities. (We have, for that matter,

just seen something of it reflected in the changing composition of local

Jacobin clubs.) At Toulouse, the moderate lawyers and entrepreneurs who

had wrested control of civic affairs from the old elitists of sword, robe,

and miter had by 1793 compassed a thoroughgoing overhaul of old regime

institutions.103 At Bordeaux, the citizens securely established in the hier-

archies of trade and the law were now enjoying the full status recognition

and political clout that they had so coveted in prerevolutionary times. As

of the mid-1790s, their middle-class values prescribed the preservation of

the revolutionary status quo as reflected in political stability, flourishing

local businesses, and vigorous international trade.104 At Lyon, a certain

nascent bourgeois class-consciousness emerged in 1792 and 1793. Affluent

and “respectable” Lyonnais, no longer divided among themselves by ju-

ridical status distinctions, and facing the perceived challenge of democratic

demands from silk weavers and other “proletarians,” came together in a

concerted defense of the political powers now officially reserved to bour-

geois of property, the professions, and commerce.105 Both at Caen in coastal

Normandy and at Limoges in the west-central province of Limousin, mer-

chants and craftsmen dominated local politics from 1791 on, and there

are some signs that political evolution was favoring a shift of influence

within the commercial bourgeoisie toward its less affluent members.106

Meanwhile, Marseilles seems to have witnessed the ascendancy, by 1793,

of bourgeois of various kinds, merchants of moderate income, school in-

structors, members of the legal professions – of, that is, “the middle-ranking

group of articulate and educated individuals” solidly installed in the sec-

tional organizations of the municipal regime.107 And so it went, all over

France. However the process might vary from community to community,

the general impression we derive from the pertinent local research is of

the “down-shifting” of influence from the noble-dominated elites of the

103 Lyons,
Revolution in Toulouse
, p. 39.

104 Forrest,
Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux
, pp. 253, 159–60.

105 Edmonds,
Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon
, pp. 134–35.

106 Hanson,
Provincial Politics in the French Revolution
, p. 212.

107 Scott,
Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles
, pp. 101–4.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

203

ancien régime to more middling strata of professionals and entrepreneurs.

(In smaller towns and villages, an analogous process transferred power

from seigneurs to affluent peasants and their advocates in law and admin-

istration.)

The news of an all-out French commitment to European war exploded

upon all these local urban and rural scenes early in 1793. This posed, for all

localities, a painful choice between accepting (however reluctantly) or re-

jecting the taxes, conscription, and other demands of a government at Paris

grown ever more bureaucratic, impersonal, and intrusive. In the end, most

communities fell in line with Jacobin wishes at Paris; but for many of them

it must have been the lesser of two evils. Patently, something more basic

than the purging of twenty-nine leading Girondists from the Convention

was involved here, however much consternation the news of the Parisian

uprising of 31 May–2 June and its aftermath may have caused across the

nation. The insurrection in the capital did not so much cause outrage in

the provinces, Bill Edmonds has written, as serve “as a convenient jus-

tification for resistance to Jacobin centralism which was gathering force

anyway.” But, as Edmonds has suggested perceptively in an article on the

“federalist” movements of 1793, most cities and towns knew where to

draw the line when it came to opposing the will of Paris, and could even

make their endorsement of the Jacobins’ war pay local dividends. The

“shape of the emerging Montagnard dictatorship” may have been

“abhorrent to those who had embraced (and profited by) the system of

government established between 1789 and 1791.” And the federalist threat

was extensive precisely because this “abhorrence” was itself widespread.

“But in the final analysis, faced with the risks of civil war, invasion, and

counterrevolution, the provincial bourgeoisie abandoned its political prin-

ciples. Acquiescence in Montagnard centralism at least offered the pos-

sibility that direct Parisian intervention in local affairs could be avoided

and the local predominance of the
notables
maintained largely intact.”108

By choosing the politic path of cooperation with Paris, most communities