Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (50 page)

in 1793 avoided the horrors of repression visited by wrathful government

emissaries upon rebellious cities like Marseilles, Lyon, and Toulon.109

What, then, drove some citizens – most notably, those of the three last-

named communities – to take the fatal step of open military revolt against

Paris? Again, Edmonds has provided a valuable insight by suggesting that

“only where ‘federalism’ appeared in a context of deep-rooted local polit-

ical violence and instability did serious revolts follow.” Where prolonged

108 See Edmonds, “Federalism and Urban Revolt in France in 1793,”
Journal of Modern
History
55 (1983): pp. 22–53.

109 For a different explanation of the “federalist” phenomenon of 1793, see Hanson,

Provincial Politics in the French Revolution
, pp. 235–38, 246–47. Hanson’s explanation keys more upon local “environmental” (social and cultural) factors.

204

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

periods of conflict and agitation had left plebeian loyalties significantly

divided between local Jacobins and their less radical opponents, and left

the “men of property” with but a tenuous grip on power, the impact of

the central government’s war taxation and conscription could be translated

into an anti-Jacobin fervor that temporarily united moderate bourgeois and

menu peuple
against local militants and their allies from Paris. “Federalist”

revolt, in such situations, was a result of insecure notables fending off

Jacobin opponents and finding at least some support for doing so from

skilled artisans, shopkeepers, and manual laborers who were alienated by

adverse local conditions from the Jacobin-dominated government at Paris.

Hence the antigovernment uprisings – occurring at a time of maximum

national peril – at Lyon, Marseilles, and Toulon. At Bordeaux, things very

nearly came to the same pass.110

In all citadels of urban France, whether of “federalist” inclination or

not, the war was unmistakably
the
preeminent issue in 1793–94. As early

as May 1793, those Bordelais who were still thinking of resisting the desires

of Paris heard unnerving reports of Spanish troops crossing into France and

menacing the town of Bayonne. And panic spread in the department of the

Gironde, for instance, over rumors “that 40,000 English troops had disem-

barked at La Teste on the Bassin d’Arcachon.”111 Small wonder, perhaps,

that Bordeaux in the end remained “patriotic.” At Marseilles, we learn un-

equivocally, the Terror “was principally a means of national defense – the

immense military effort of a city which was decidedly anti-militaristic.” The

“rich egoists” there had willy-nilly to adopt “a more realistic assessment

of their interests than they had shown in their involvement in the fed-

eralist revolt – interests which hardly would be served by the English at

Toulon or the Prussians at Paris.”112 The Committee of Public Safety’s

draconian treatment of formerly “federalist” Lyon during the period from

October 1793 to July 1794 reflected in part Parisian perceptions of perva-

sive Lyonnais corruption; but the committee’s paramount concern “was to

deter further revolt at a time of continuing military crisis.”113 At Toulouse,

the progress of the Revolution through the Terror “followed the progress of

French arms in the Pyrenees.” The city’s “revolutionary surveillance com-

mittee” was set up “to spur on the recruiting drive in March 1793.” The

guillotine was first erected permanently there “after the anti-conscription

110 Refer again to Edmonds, “Federalism and Urban Revolt in France,” esp. pp. 52–53.

In addition to the works cited above, see M. H. Crook, “Federalism and the French

Revolution: The Revolt of Toulon in 1793,”
History
65 (1980): 383–97; and Colin Lucas,
The Structure of the Terror: The Example of Javogues and the Loire
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

111 Forrest,
Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux
, pp. 113–14.

112 Scott,
Terror and Repression in Revolutionary Marseilles
, pp. 344–45.

113 Edmonds,
Jacobinism and the Revolt of Lyon
, pp. 282–83.

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

205

riots of September 1793 had frightened the municipal authorities into

repressive action.” Harsh treatment meted out to the local clergy mirrored

in part a “popular identification of the enemy with the most superstitious

beliefs of traditional Catholicism.” And the relaxation of the Terror at

Toulouse – as elsewhere – responded directly to the improved military

situation.114 The evidence, again and again, points to an urban experience

of government-orchestrated “terror” whose undeniable social, economic,

and cultural aspects were necessarily subordinated to the requirements of

diplomacy and war.

In rural France, too, the Terror above all meant an unheard-of assertion

of central government concerns – concerns ineluctably centered around the

war. In this connection, it is significant to find two specialists concluding, in

a general fashion, that the antigovernment violence in rural Brittany known

as
chouannerie
resulted from “traumatic” disruptions in the “balance of

power” inside individual communities caused by intrusive Parisian revo-

lutionaries and their local allies. The
chouans
could perceive all too clearly that the Revolution spelled an end to the old regime’s tolerance of self-government in most local affairs and naturally tried to turn the “moral

unity of the community” against all proponents of integration into na-

tional revolutionary politics.115 In a very real sense, this kind of “political/

sociological” interpretation of antigovernment, counterrevolutionary ag-

itation could be extended to the Vendée region on Brittany’s southern

flank, as well as to the Massif Central and other areas in the South.116

“It hardly needs repeating,” one historian has remarked, that “the Revo-

lution was . . . chiefly a centralizing and modernizing phenomenon centred

in the towns; its consequences were most traumatic in the countryside.”117

But, again, if the general question in rural France was one of rallying to

or against the disputed banner of novel government interference in people’s

daily lives, the specific issue providing the sharp edge to the debate was the

issue of war. “In practical terms,” P. M. Jones has written, “it was the war

emergency consequent upon the formation of the First Coalition during

the spring of 1793 that brought the Terror to every peasant’s doorstep.”

The ordinance of 24 February summoning three hundred thousand men

to the colors was followed up by the
levée en masse
of August: one

recruitment drive gave way to another, and parliamentary
commissaires

114 Lyons,
Revolution in Toulouse
, pp. 131–33.

115 See T. J. A. Le Goff and D. M. G. Sutherland, “The Revolution and the Rural Community in Eighteenth-Century Brittany,”
Past and Present
62 (1974): 96–119.

116 The literature (up to 1968) on the uprisings in the Vendée is reviewed in Harvey Mitchell,

“The Vendée and Counterrevolution: A Review Essay,”
French Historical Studies
5 (1968): 405–29.

117 Harvey Mitchell, “Resistance to the Revolution in Western France,”
Past and Present
63 (1974): 122.

206

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

and (eventually) “representatives on mission” used the opportunity pre-

sented to “give provincials an elementary lesson in republican politics.”

This turned out in many cases to be too much for rustic Frenchmen, whose

accumulating grievances against Paris overflowed when they had to face the

hateful prospect of being dragooned into combat against other Europeans.

“In Burgundy, in the Massif Central, in parts of the South West, in Brittany,

and more generally throughout the West,” Jones has observed, “a mood

of exasperation prevailed. It was as though the issue of whether or not to

fight for the republic had brought to the boil a host of simmering discon-

tents.” When the youths of Beaune and Arnay-sur-Arroux, of Autun and

Dijon, and of hundreds of other communities cried out that those bene-

fiting most handsomely from the Revolution – Jacobin clubbists, public

officials, buyers of
biens nationaux
– should be the first to march to the

frontiers, they were forcefully personalizing the cutting geopolitical issue

that had impelled the revolutionary process forward from the start.118

And so the massive war effort of these years was pivotal in defining

the nature of political relations between Paris and the provinces – which

is to say in forging (at least for the time being) new chains of dependency

linking the outlying regions of the nation to the revolutionary center. Once

successful, however, that same military effort, which had imposed unprece-

dented demands upon Frenchmen (and Frenchwomen) of all walks of life

and in all places, was just as likely to lead to an unraveling of the extraor-

dinary coalition of middle- and working-class citizens that it had called

into being in the first place. To put it somewhat simplistically: the great

French victory at Fleurus in Belgium on 26 June 1794 opened the way for

Robespierre’s overthrow a month later and for the more gradual but also

more comprehensive relaxation of wartime controls known conventionally

as the “Thermidorian Reaction.”

There are, essentially, two points we should underscore here: one deals

with the erosion of “bourgeois” support for Maximilien Robespierre

and his closest confidants in the Committee of Public Safety and the

Convention; the other deals with the breakdown of the alliance between

the revolutionary leaders and the Parisian
sans-culottes
. To revisit each issue even briefly is to reaffirm the inescapable centrality of the war.

Too much has probably been made of the role played in this critical phase

of the Revolution by Robespierre.119 Outstanding spokesman though he

118 For these citations, see Jones,
The Peasantry in the French Revolution
, pp. 207, 223–24.

119 The literature on the “Incorruptible” is, of course, vast. For the American reader, these English-language works should prove especially helpful: J. M. Thompson,

Robespierre and the French Revolution
(New York: Collier Books, 1962); Norman Hampson,
The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre
(London: Duckworth, 1974); George Rudé,
Robespierre: Portrait of a Revolutionary Democrat
(New York: Viking Press, 1976); and David P. Jordan,
The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien
Robespierre
(New York: Free Press, 1985).

The “revolutionizing” of the Revolution

207

undoubtedly was for one early experiment in political democracy in the

Western world, Robespierre was only one member of an executive commit-

tee (and of a much larger Convention) whose collective effort staunched the

military bleeding of 1793 and made the victories of the following year pos-

sible. When, in the spring and summer of 1794, the assertion of French arms

abroad (and the suppression of the last vestiges of counterrevolutionary in-

surrection at home) made it safe to quarrel in the governing committees

and in the Convention over the excesses of the Terror, there was really no

philosophy or argument that could justify sustaining those sanguinary ex-

cesses – or the politicians most persistently identified with them. There was

certainly nothing in the nature of a “personality cult” that could have in-

definitely focused Jacobin loyalties upon, say, a clique of “Robespierrists.”

Nor could even so terrifyingly idealistic a Jacobin as Saint-Just have seen

in dictatorship a permanent solution to constitutional problems in France.

Even after Vent ôse, the Robespierrists (if we can even assume the tempo-

rary existence of such a group) did not regard themselves as “absolute” in

any lasting
legal
sense. Of course, Robespierre may have wanted the Terror

to last until democracy was securely founded; but “most people consid-

ered its usefulness over when the Allies were defeated.”120 Now that France

appeared to be safely on the offensive on all military fronts, the former bu-

reaucrats, lawyers, and entrepreneurs of the Convention wished to get back

to legislative and economic business-as-usual. Not for them Robespierre’s

moralistic and democratic dreams; and his attempt to threaten them over

the realization of those dreams only hastened his downfall.

The war was also critical in first requiring and then undercutting the col-

laboration between the “bourgeois” revolutionaries and the artisans and

shopkeepers of the capital. The contradictions built into that collaboration

were, in part, economic, involving tensions between the propertied and

propertyless, between capital and labor, between producers and consumers.

The contradictions were also gendered: activist
sans-jupons
could find

themselves at odds with their male counterparts as well as (more and more)

with bourgeois politicians. Most telling, however, were the
political
strains in this alliance. The
sans-culottes
recognized up to a point that to prosecute the war and crush “federalism” and
chouannerie
required centralized and