French Revolution

V

The Growth of Radicalism in The Government

On July 17, 1791, the Republicans of Paris massed in the Champ de Mars and demanded that the king be deposed. On the orders of Lafayette, who was affiliated politically with the Feuillants, a group of moderate monarchists, the National Guard opened fire on the demonstrators and dispersed them. The bloodshed immeasurably widened the split between the republican and bourgeois sections of the population. After suspending Louis for a brief period, the moderate majority of the Constituent Assembly, fearful of the growing disorder, reinstated the king in the hope of stemming the mounting radicalism and preventing foreign intervention. Louis took the oath to support the revised constitution on September 14. Two weeks later, with the election of the new legislature authorized by the constitution, the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. Meanwhile, on August 27, Leopold II and Frederick William II, king of Prussia, had issued a joint declaration regarding France, which contained a thinly veiled threat of armed intervention against the Revolution.

The Legislative Assembly, which began its sessions on October 1, 1791, was composed of 750 members, all of whom were inexperienced, since the members of the Constituent Assembly had voted themselves ineligible for election to the new body. The new legislature was divided into widely divergent factions, the most moderate of which was that of the Feuillants, who supported a constitutional monarchy as defined under the Constitution of 1791. In the centre was the majority caucus, known as the Plain, which was without well-defined political opinions and consequently without initiative. The Plain, however, uniformly opposed the Republican factors that sat on the left, composed mainly of the Girondins, who advocated transformation of the constitutional monarchy into a federal republic similar to the Montagnards, consisting of Jacobins and Cordeliers, who favoured establishment of a highly centralized, indivisible republic. Before these differences caused a serious split between the Girondins and the Montagnards, the Republican caucus in the assembly secured passage of several important bills, including stringent measures against members of the clergy who refused to swear allegiance. Louis exercised his veto against these bills, however, creating a Cabinet crisis that brought the Girondins to power. Despite the opposition of leading Montagnards, the Girondin ministry, headed by Jean Marie Roland de la Platière, adopted a belligerent attitude towards Frederick William II and Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, who had succeeded his father, Leopold II, on March 1, 1792. The two sovereigns openly supported the activities of the émigrés and sustained the opposition of feudal landlords in Alsace to the Revolutionary legislation. The desire for war spread rapidly among the monarchists, who hoped for defeat of the Revolutionary government and the restoration of the Old Regime, and among the Girondins, who wanted a final triumph over reaction at home and abroad. On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared war on the Austrian part of the Holy Roman Empire, beginning the protracted conflict known as the French Revolutionary Wars.

VI

The Struggle For Freedom

Aided by treasonable errors of omission and commission among the French high command, mostly monarchists, the armies of Austria won several victories in the Austrian Netherlands. The subsequent invasion of France produced major repercussions in the national capital. The Roland ministry fell on June 13, and mass unrest erupted, one week later, into an attack on the Tuileries, the residence of the royal family. On July 11, after Sardinia and Prussia joined the war against France, the Legislative Assembly declared a national emergency. Reserves were dispatched to the hard-pressed armies, and volunteers were summoned to Paris from all parts of the country. When the contingent from Marseille arrived, it was singing the patriotic hymn thenceforth known as the Marseillaise. Popular dissatisfaction with the Girondins, who had rallied to the support of the monarchy and had dismissed charges of desertion against Lafayette, increased the agitation. On August 10 the discontent, combined with the threat contained in the manifesto of the allied commander, Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, to destroy the capital city if the royal family were mistreated, precipitated a Parisian insurrection. The insurgents, led by radical elements of the capital and national volunteers en route to the front, stormed the Tuileries and massacred the king's Swiss Guard. Louis and his family took refuge in the nearby hall of the Legislative Assembly, which promptly suspended the monarchy and placed the king in confinement. Simultaneously, the insurrectionists deposed the governing council of Paris, which was replaced by a new provisional executive council. The Montagnards, under the leadership of lawyer Georges Danton, dominated the new Parisian government. They swiftly achieved control of the Legislative Assembly. The assembly shortly approved elections, by universal male suffrage, for a new constitutional convention. Between September 2 and 7, more than 1,000 Royalists and suspected traitors who had been rounded up in various parts of France, were tried summarily and executed. These so-called September Massacres were induced by popular fear of the advancing allied armies and of rumoured plots to overthrow the Revolutionary government. On September 20 a French army, commanded by General Charles François Dumouriez, checked the Prussian advance on Paris at Valmy.

On the day after the victory at Valmy, the newly elected National Convention convened in Paris. In its first official moves that day, the convention proclaimed establishment of the First Republic and abolished the monarchy. Agreement among the principal convention factions, the Girondins and the Montagnards, extended little beyond common approval of these initial measures. No effective opposition developed, however, to the decree sponsored by the Girondins and promulgated on November 19, which promised the help of France to all oppressed peoples of Europe. Encouraging reports arrived almost weekly from the armies, which had assumed the offensive after the battle at Valmy and had successively captured Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Nice, Savoy, the Austrian Netherlands, and other areas. In the meantime, however, strife steadily intensified in the convention, with the Plain vacillating between support of the conservative Girondins and the radical Montagnards. In the first major test of strength, a majority approved the Montagnard proposal that Louis be brought to trial before the convention for treason. On January 15, 1793, by an almost unanimous vote, the convention found the monarch guilty as charged, but on the following day, when the nature of the penalty was determined, factional lines were sharply drawn. By a vote of 387 to 334, the delegates approved the death penalty. Louis XVI went to the guillotine on January 21.

Girondin influence in the National Convention diminished markedly after the execution of the king. The lack of unity within the party during the trial had irreparably damaged its national prestige, long at low ebb among the Parisian populace, who favoured the Jacobins. The Girondins lost influence as a consequence of the military reverses suffered by the French armies after the declaration of war against Britain and the United Netherlands (February 1, 1793) and against Spain (March 7), which, with several smaller states, had entered the counter-revolutionary coalition against France. Jacobin proposals designed to strengthen the government for the crucial struggles ahead met fierce resistance from the Girondins. Early in March, however, the convention voted to conscript 300,000 men and dispatched special commissioners to the various departments for the purpose of organizing the levy. Royalists and clerical foes of the Revolution stirred the anticonscription feelings of peasants in the Vendée into open rebellion. Civil war quickly spread to neighbouring departments. On March 18, the Austrians defeated the army of Dumouriez at Neerwinden, and Dumouriez deserted to the enemy. The defection of the leader of the army, mounting civil war, and the advance of enemy forces across the French frontiers inevitably forced a crisis in the convention between the Girondins and the Montagnards, with the more radical elements stressing the necessity for bold action in defence of the Revolution.

VII

The Reign of Terror

On April 6 the convention established the Committee of Public Safety as the executive organ of the republic and reorganized the Committee of General Security and the Revolutionary Tribunal. Agents were sent to the departments to supervise local execution of the laws and to requisition men and munitions. During this period rivalry between the Girondins and the Montagnards became increasingly bitter. A new Parisian outburst, organized by the radical journalist Jacques-René Hébert and his extremist colleagues, forced the convention to order the arrest of 29 Girondin delegates and the Girondin ministers Pierre Henri Hélène Marie Lebrun-Tondu and Étienne Clavière on June 2. Thereafter, the radical faction in control of the government of Paris played a decisive role in the conduct of the Revolution. On June 24 the convention promulgated a new constitution, the terms of which greatly extended the democratic features of the republic. The document was never actually put into effect, however. Leadership of the Committee of Public Safety passed, on July 10, to the Jacobins, who completely reorganized it. Three days later the radical politician Jean-Paul Marat, long identified with the Jacobins, was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer. Public indignation over this crime considerably broadened the Jacobin sphere of influence. On July 27 the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre was added to the Committee of Public Safety and soon became its dominant member. Aided by Louis Saint-Just, Lazare Carnot, Georges Couthon, and other prominent Jacobins, Robespierre instituted extreme policies to crush any possibility of counter-revolution. The powers of the committee were renewed monthly by the National Convention from April 1793 to July 1794, a period known in history as the Reign of Terror.

From a military standpoint, the position of the republic was extremely perilous. Enemy powers had resumed the offensive on all fronts. Mainz had been recaptured by the Prussians, Condé-Sur-L'Escaut and Valenciennes had fallen, and Toulon was under siege by the British. Royalist and Roman Catholic insurgents controlled much of the Vendée and Brittany. Caen, Lyons, Marseille, Bordeaux, and other important localities were in the hands of the Girondins. By a new conscription decree, issued on August 23, the entire male population of France was made liable to conscription. Fourteen new armies, numbering about 750,000 men, were speedily organized, equipped, and rushed to the front. Along with these moves, the committee struck violently at internal opposition.

On October 16 Marie Antoinette was executed, and 21 prominent Girondins were beheaded on October 31. Beginning with these reprisals, thousands of Royalists, priests, Girondins, and other elements charged with counter-revolutionary activities or sympathies were brought before Revolutionary tribunals, convicted, and sent to the guillotine. Executions in Paris totalled 2,639: more than half (1,515) the victims perished during June and July, 1794. In many outlying departments, particularly the main centres of Royalist insurrection, even harsher treatment was meted out to traitors, real and suspect. The Nantes tribunal, headed by Jean-Baptiste Carrier, which dealt most cruelly with those who aided the rebels in the Vendée, sent more than 8000 people to the guillotine within three months. In all France, Revolutionary tribunals and commissions were responsible for the execution of almost 17,000 individuals. Including those who died in overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons and insurgents shot summarily on the field of battle, the victims of the Reign of Terror totalled approximately 40,000. All elements of the opposition suffered from the Terror. Of those condemned by the Revolutionary tribunals, approximately 8 per cent were nobles, 6 per cent were members of the clergy, 14 per cent belonged to the middle class, and 70 per cent were workers or peasants charged with avoiding conscription, desertion, hoarding, rebellion, and various other crimes. Of these social groups, the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church suffered proportionately the greatest loss. Anticlerical hatred found further expression in the abolition, in October 1793, of the Julian calendar, which was replaced by the Republican Calendar. As a part of its Revolutionary programme, the Committee of Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, attempted to reform France in accordance with its own fanatical concepts of humanitarianism, social idealism, and patriotism. Striving to establish a “Republic of Virtue”, the Committee stressed devotion to the republic and to victory, and instituted measures against corruption and hoarding. In addition, on November 23, 1793, the Commune of Paris, in a measure soon copied by authorities elsewhere in France, closed all churches in the city and began actively to sponsor the Revolutionary “religion” known as the Cult of Reason. Initiated at the insistence of the radical leader Pierre Gaspard Chaumette and his extremist colleagues (among them Hébert), this act accentuated growing differences between the centrist Jacobins, led by Robespierre, and the fanatical Hébertists, a powerful force in the convention and in the Parisian government.

The tide of battle against the allied coalition had turned, meanwhile, in favour of France. Initiating a succession of important victories, General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan defeated the Austrians on October 16, 1793. By the end of the year, the invaders in the east had been driven across the Rhine, and Toulon had been liberated. Of equal significance, the Committee of Public Safety had largely crushed the insurrections of the Royalists and the Girondins.

VIII

Struggle For Power

The factional struggle between the Committee of Public Safety and the extreme group surrounding Hébert was resolved with the execution, on March 24, 1794, of Hébert and his principal associates. Within two weeks, Robespierre moved against the Dantonists, who had begun to demand peace and an end of the terror. Danton and his principal colleagues were beheaded on April 6. As a result of these purges and wholesale reprisals against supporters of the two factions, Robespierre lost the backing of many leading Jacobins, especially those who feared for their own safety. A number of military successes, notably that at Fleurus, Belgium, on June 26, which prepared the way for the second French conquest of the Austrian Netherlands, increased popular confidence in eventual triumph. As a consequence, distaste for Robespierre's paranoid security measures became widespread. The general dissatisfaction with the leader of the Committee of Public Safety soon developed into full-fledged conspiracy. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, and 98 of their followers were seized on July 27, the Ninth Thermidor according to the Republican calendar, and beheaded the next day. The Ninth Thermidor is generally regarded as marking the end of the “Republic of Virtue”.

Until the end of 1794, the National Convention was dominated by the group, called Thermidoreans, that overthrew Robespierre and ended the Reign of Terror. The Jacobin Clubs were closed throughout France, the Revolutionary tribunals were abolished, and various extremist decrees, including one that had fixed wages and commodity prices, were repealed. After the recall to the convention of expelled Girondins and other right-wing delegates, Thermidorean conservatism was transformed into sharp reaction. During the spring of 1795, bread riots and protest demonstrations spread from Paris to many sections of France. The outbreaks were suppressed, and severe reprisals were exacted against the Montagnards.

The morale of the French armies was undamaged by these events on the home front. During the winter of 1794-1795, French forces commanded by General Charles Pichegru overran the Austrian Netherlands, occupied the United Netherlands (which the victors reorganized as the Batavian Republic), and routed the allied armies of the Rhine. This sequence of reversals resulted in the disintegration of the anti-French coalition. On April 5, 1795, by the Treaty of Basel, Prussia and a number of allied Germanic states concluded peace with the French government. On July 22 Spain also withdrew from the war, leaving Britain, Sardinia, and Austria as the sole remaining belligerents. For nearly a year, however, a stalemate prevailed between France and these powers. The next phase of the struggle opened the Napoleonic Wars.

Peace was restored to the frontiers, and in July an invading army of émigrés was defeated in Brittany. The National Convention then quickly completed the draft of a new constitution. Formally approved on August 22, 1795, the new basic law of France vested executive authority in a Directory, composed of five members. Legislative power was delegated to a two-chambered legislature, consisting of the Council of Ancients, with 250 members, and the Council of the Five Hundred. The terms of one member of the Directory and a third of the legislature were renewable annually, beginning in May 1797, and the franchise was limited to taxpayers who could establish proof of one-year residence in their voting district. The new constitution contained additional evidence of retreat from Jacobin democracy. In its failure to provide a means of breaking deadlocks between the executive and legislative bodies, it laid the basis for constant intragovernmental rivalry for power, successive coups d'état, and ineffectual administration of national affairs. The National Convention, however, still anticlerical and anti-Royalist despite its opposition to Jacobinism, created safeguards against the restoration of the monarchy. By a special decree, the first directors and two-thirds of the legislature were to be chosen from among the convention's membership. Parisian Royalists, reacting violently against this decree, organized, on October 5, 1795, an insurrection against the convention. The uprising was promptly quelled by troops under the command of General Napoleon Bonaparte, a little-known leader of the Revolutionary armies who later became Napoleon I, emperor of France. On October 26 the powers of the National Convention were terminated; on November 2 it was replaced by the government provided for under the new constitution.

Although a number of capable statesmen including Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and Joseph Fouché gave distinguished service to the Directory, from the outset the government encountered a variety of difficulties. Many of these problems arose from the inherent structural faults of the governmental apparatus; others grew out of the economic and political dislocations brought on by the triumph of conservatism. The Directory inherited an acute financial crisis, which was aggravated by disastrous depreciation (about 99 per cent) of the Assignats. Although most of the Jacobin leaders were dead, abroad, or in hiding, the spirit of Jacobinism still flourished among the lower classes. In the higher circles of society, Royalist agitators boldly campaigned for restoration. The bourgeois political groupings, determined to preserve their hard-won status as masters of France, soon found it materially and politically profitable to direct the mass energies unleashed by the Revolution into militaristic channels. Old scores remained to be settled with the Holy Roman Empire. In addition, absolutism, by its nature a threat to the Revolution, still held sway over most of Europe.

IX

The Rise of Napoleon

Less than five months after the Directory took office, it launched the initial phase (March 1796 to October 1797) of the Napoleonic Wars. The three coups d'état—on September 4, 1797 (18 Fructidor), on May 11, 1798 (22 Floréal), and on June 18, 1799 (30 Prairial)—which occurred during this period, merely reflected regroupings of the bourgeois political factions. Military setbacks inflicted on the French armies in the summer of 1799, economic difficulties, and social unrest profoundly endangered bourgeois political supremacy in France. Attacks from the left culminated in a plot initiated by the radical agrarian reformer François Noël Babeuf who advocated equal distribution of land and income. This planned insurrection, called the Conspiracy of the Equals, failed to materialize however, as Babeuf was betrayed by an accomplice and executed on May 28, 1797 (8 Prairial). In the opinion of Lucien Bonaparte, president of the Council of the Five Hundred, of Fouché, minister of police, of Sieyès, then a member of the Directory, and of Talleyrand-Périgord and other political leaders, the crisis could be overcome only by drastic action. A coup d'état on November 9-10, 1799 (18-19 Brumaire), destroyed the Directory. In these and subsequent events, which culminated on December 24, 1799, in a new constitution and the Consulate, General Napoleon Bonaparte, currently the popular idol of the recent campaigns, was a central figure. Vested with dictatorial power as First Consul, he rapidly shaped the Revolutionary zeal and idealism of France to his own ends. The partial reversal of the national Revolution was compensated for, however, by its extension, during the Napoleonic conquests, to almost every corner of Europe.