Reinterpreting the French Revolution: A global-historical perspective (51 page)

authoritarian governance. Simultaneously, however, they tended to favor

precisely what the government-at-war could not tolerate: a “popular,” de-

centralized, direct politics. The
sans-culottes
, prepared for a government

that would wage war on foreign and domestic foes, were not adequately

prepared for a belligerent government that, in the end, would also oblige

them
to “toe the line.”121

120 Palmer,
Twelve Who Ruled
, pp. 361–62.

121 For the classic scholarly account of economic and political contradictions within the
sans-culotte
movement at Paris, see Albert Soboul,
The Sans-Culottes: The Popular
Movement and Revolutionary Government 1793–94
, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Princeton, 208

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

The prosecution of the war weakened the
sans-culottes
in more insidious

ways as well, thus helping to deprive the radical Jacobins of crucial popular

support in the first half of 1794. For one thing, plebeian militants given

jobs in the swelling ranks of officialdom became little more than docile

instruments of authority, while the activism of their sectional organizations

was curtailed by the burgeoning demands of national defense. Thus, the

spontaneity and militant mentality of the masses atrophied; the energy and

enthusiasm of the sections and streets were transferred to the state’s bureaux

and armies, and were applied to duties discharged at the behest of the

authoritarian government. Then, again, the waging of the war deprived the

leading militants of many of their natural adherents: young apprentices and

shop workers who were inclined to action in domestic politics, but who also

saw defending the nation as their most pressing civic duty. Conscription

thereby depleted the ranks and attenuated the revolutionary ardor of the

popular movement.122 These dynamics were presumably at work in other

major cities as well during this period; but it was naturally in Paris that they

operated most directly to undermine the popular basis of the Revolutionary

Government of the Year II.

And so the “international mission” of the French, rooted in three centuries

of the ancien régime and at the same time instrumental in its collapse, had

by 1794 (and by a similar historical logic) both contributed to and set

limits upon the succeeding era of revolution. The reversion to the historic

ways of war thrust state power into the hands of men who dreamed bold

dreams of cultural and social innovation, of public welfare as well as of

private enrichment. In the long run, however, the insatiate demands of

war engulfed the humanitarian aspirations and the very lives of these men,

exhausted their humble supporters in the ranks of the
sans-culotterie
, and

(in Thermidor, Year II) placed the victorious state in the hands of middle-

class Frenchmen with a less visionary agenda. In the period extending from

1794 to 1799, these last-named citizens would endeavor to stabilize the

Revolution on a basis of sociopolitical compromise; but would they prove

any more successful than their royalist and revolutionary predecessors at

managing the furies unleashed by war?

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). On the question of gendered tensions within the movement – and, more generally, on women’s participation in popular politics in revolutionary Paris, refer (initially) to Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, eds.,
Women
and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

122 On all of this, refer again to Soboul,
The Sans-Culottes
, esp. pp. 260–62.

5

The second attempt to stabilize the

Revolution: from 1794 to 1799

If the impact of the October Days of 1789 upon the revolutionary process

in France has sometimes been exaggerated, much the same may be said

of 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794). Granted, Robespierre’s downfall

was important in that it signaled the start of a drastic turnabout in the

government’s policy of political and economic “terror.” It is also safe to

conclude in hindsight that the execution of the “Robespierrists” dashed any

prospects for the realization of the most millenarian social, economic, and

cultural reforms envisioned by the Jacobins and their
sans-culotte
allies.

Still, when we contemplate the Revolution in its larger, global-historical

setting, Thermidor seems to be but a halting place on a road marked from

beginning to end by the crushing continuity of
war
and all its attending

circumstances. And in fact an analysis of the five years or so running from

the end of the Terror to the Bonapartist coup d’état of November 1799

drives this point home with added force by showing us a revolution

ultimately consumed in the blaze of an unprecedented international

conflict.

The following pages commence with a brief synopsis of events. Turning

then to analysis, the chapter will first reappraise the interactions between an

ever more aggressive and globally oriented France and the other European

Powers. The discussion will then take up the most important domestic

policies of the French government in this period and show how those

policies at times exposed enduring tensions between the state’s ambitions

and the idealism and socioeconomic interests of the Revolution. Finally,

Chapter 5 will reassess the attempt by the revolutionaries of 1794–99 to

institutionalize “liberal” or contestatory politics and show how that enter-

prise foundered in the end on the shoals of international war and discredited

domestic governance.

209

210

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

p r o l o g u e : n a r r a t i v e o f e v e n t s

With the executions of Robespierre and over one hundred other “terrorists”

in late July 1794, politics in France lurched back toward the Center

(the “Thermidorian Reaction”). The powers of the Committee of Public

Safety, the Revolutionary Tribunal, the “surveillance committees” in the

communes and sections, and other institutions of the Terror were curtailed.

Before year’s end, the Paris Jacobin Club had been shut down and its

sister societies in the provinces hobbled or silenced; some Girondists

had been readmitted to the Convention; thousands of prisoners had been

released from detention; and wage and price controls (the
Maximum
) had

been rescinded. (Interestingly, the government also moved at this time

to separate Church and State: complete freedom of worship was decreed

on 21 February 1795.) A general deterioration of economic conditions

helped set off the huge but disorganized
sans-culotte
uprisings of April

and May 1795 (the “days” of
Germinal
-
Prairial
) in the capital; they led to a systematic disarming of the Paris sections by the authorities.

But the Thermidorian leaders soon had to face an even more dangerous

challenge on the Far Right. The problem, at least for the time being, did not

involve foreign affairs: by making peace in 1795 with Prussia (in March),

the Dutch (in May), and Spain (in July), the Republic dislocated the Allied

war effort and won a new prominence in Europe. At home, however, a

murderous “White Terror” broke out in the South; royalists assassinated

ex-terrorists in other regions as well; and the death in captivity of the

child-king “Louis XVII” in June 1795 enabled the comte de Provence to

proclaim himself Louis XVIII and serve henceforth as rallying point for

the counterrevolution. At Paris, the Convention enacted the Constitution

of the Year III on 22 August; but its insistence upon ensuring its own

members at least two-thirds of the seats in the projected new (bicameral)

legislature touched off a royalist insurrection in the capital. The uprising

of
Vendémiaire
(October 1795) was, however, dispersed (with Bonaparte’s

“whiff of grapeshot”), and the Convention was able to give way peacefully

to the new regime (Directory) on 26 October 1795.

Over the next four years, the Directory tried to stabilize conditions

within a republican France. Yet, at least into 1798, it probably scored its

most signal successes beyond the country’s borders. The Directory sent

armies into central Europe, set up a chain of sister republics stretching from

Holland to the Italian peninsula, made peace temporarily with Austria at

Campo Formio in October 1797, and by 1798 would be sending Bonaparte

and an armada of soldiers and scientists to Egypt. Nevertheless, at home

political and economic problems persisted. Playing a
jeu de bascule
that

would characterize French politics to the end of the decade, the government

struck out at “Gracchus” Babeuf and his far leftist “Conspiracy of Equals”

The second attempt to stabilize the Revolution

211

in the spring of 1796, then purged nearly two hundred rightist deputies and

two Directors in Fructidor, Year V (September 1797), and then in Floréal,

Year VI (May 1798) purged leftist deputies and locally elected officials.

Revolutionary decrees against émigrés and “non-juring” clergy remained

in force, though the vigor with which they were applied depended upon

the pendulum swings of French politics. Meanwhile, the government by

1797 was forced to replace its depreciated and discredited paper currency

with metallic currency, and attempted with its “two-thirds bankruptcy”

and with a revamped system of taxation to reconstruct its finances upon

a sounder basis.

In the end, however, the Directory fell victim to a conjuncture of

international and domestic crises. French aggression in Europe and the

Near East led to the creation, in 1798–99, of a Second Coalition whose

members included Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey. By the

summer of 1799, the Republic’s armies had been driven out of most of

Italy, and France itself faced the prospect of invasion. A logical domestic

corollary of these developments was a revival of patriotic Jacobinism. In

the coup of Prairial, Year VII (June 1799), the newly elected Director

abbé Siéyès collaborated with the legislative councils to replace the

other four Directors with men who were determined to preserve the

Revolution. Siéyès’s desire to “stabilize” the Revolution upon the basis

of a strengthened executive was one of the key antecedents to the coup

d’état of 18–19 Brumaire (9–10 November 1799). Masséna’s defeat of

the Russians at the Second Battle of Zurich (25–27 September), however

important in relieving the pressures upon France, and in fact in presaging

the collapse of the Second Coalition, came too late to save the Directory.

Bonaparte, who managed to slip back into France from Egypt, conspired

with Siéyès and several other politicians to make the coup of Brumaire and,

using it to seize power for himself, proved to be its ultimate beneficiary.

Revolutionary France thus gave way to Napoleonic France.

‘ ‘ l a g r a n d e n a t i o n ’ ’ o n t h e m a r c h

European affairs in the middle and late 1790s were, arguably, dominated by

three interlocking realities: the dynamism of an ever less “idealistic” and

ever more predatory France, the undiminished centrality of Russia to east-

ern continental politics, and Great Britain’s ongoing pursuit of a balance of

power on the Continent and of preeminence in the world beyond it. The

renascent dynamism of France in part contributed to, and in part prof-

ited from, the breakup of the First Coalition. But the continuing advance

of the French into the heart of Europe eventually prompted the forma-

tion of the Second Coalition of opposing European states. It was in the

midst of the resulting international struggle, vaster than any war Europe

212

Reinterpreting the French Revolution

had heretofore witnessed, that General Bonaparte seized power in France,

effectively ending the Revolution.

In the National Convention’s final year (1794–95), the revolutionaries

dropped all thoughts of defensive strategy and moved unabashedly onto the

offensive. Fleurus (26 June 1794) was an especially crucial battlefield tri-