French Revolution

B

2

Reign of Terror

In this general crisis, revolutionary leaders began to turn on each other. The Girondins, who favored federalism, fought a battle to the death with the Jacobins, who denounced the Girondins for lacking revolutionary zeal and for aiding, intentionally or not, counter-revolutionary forces. The Jacobins already dominated the convention, but on June 2, pressured by the sans-culottes, they consolidated their power by arresting 22 Girondin leaders.

During the following months, the government put down the federalist revolts, sometimes with great severity. A new democratic constitution was drawn up but never implemented: In Robespierre’s view, constitutional government would have to wait until fear and repression had eliminated the enemies of the Revolution. The Jacobins operated through the existing convention and agencies responsible to it. They used the Committee of Public Safety, composed of 12 men led by Robespierre, to provide executive oversight; the Committee of General Security, to oversee the police; and the Revolutionary Tribunal to try political cases. Additionally, the Jacobins sent representatives from the convention with wide-ranging powers to particular areas to enforce Jacobin policies.

The most urgent government business was the war. On August 17, 1793, the convention voted the levée en masse (mass conscription), which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. To further that effort, the convention quickly enacted more legislation. On September 5 it approved the Reign of Terror, a policy through which the state used violence to crush resistance to the government. On September 9 the convention established sans-culotte paramilitary forces, the so-called revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On September 17 the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined “crimes against liberty.” On September 29 the convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods and fixed wages. On December 4 the national government resumed oversight of local administration. On February 4, 1794, it abolished slavery in the colonies.

Beyond these measures, the convention and sympathetic groups like the sans-culottes began to create and spread a revolutionary and republican culture. These groups sponsored the use of revolutionary and republican propaganda in the arts, public festivals, and modes of dress. In this way, they gradually began to spread and gain acceptance for their ideals among the common people.

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The most notable achievement of the Reign of Terror was to save the revolutionary government from military defeat. The government feared invasion, which might have allowed counter-revolutionary forces to undertake a terror of their own. To preserve the Revolution, it reorganized and strengthened the army. The Jacobins expanded the size of the army and replaced many aristocratic officers, who had deserted and fled abroad, with younger soldiers who had demonstrated their ability and patriotism. The revolutionary army threw back the Austrians, Prussians, English, and Spanish during the fall of 1793 and expelled the Austrians from Belgium by the summer of 1794.

The military success of the Jacobin-led government was undeniable. However, the repressive policies of the Reign of Terror that enabled the government to form and equip its large army did so at the expense of many French citizens’ security: about 250,000 people were arrested; 17,000 were tried and guillotined, many with little if any means to defend themselves; another 12,000 were executed without trial; and thousands more died in jail. Clergy and nobles composed only 15 percent of the Reign of Terror’s approximately 40,000 victims. The rest were peasants and bourgeois who had fought against the Revolution or had said or done something to offend the new order. The Reign of Terror executed not only figures from the Old Regime, like the former queen Marie-Antoinette, but also many revolutionary leaders. Some victims of the Reign of Terror, like Georges Danton, seemed too moderate to Robespierre and his colleagues, while others, like the sans-culotte leader Jacques René Hébert, seemed too extreme.

The Reign of Terror was the most radical phase of the Revolution, and it remains the most controversial. Some have seen the Reign of Terror as a major advance toward modern democracy, while others call it a step toward modern dictatorship. Certain defenders of the Revolution have argued that the Reign of Terror was, under the circumstances, a reasonable response to the military crisis of 1793. Others have rejected this idea, pointing out that the military victories of early 1794, far from diminishing the intensity of the Reign of Terror, were followed by the Great Terror of June and July 1794, in which more than 1300 people were executed in Paris alone. The Reign of Terror, they have argued, resulted from an ideology already in place by 1789 that put national good above personal rights. To this argument, others have replied that in 1789 no revolutionary leader seriously imagined establishing anything like the Reign of Terror.

VI

Search for Balance

The Jacobin government lasted barely a year. Although effective in the short term, in the long run it destroyed itself—in part because no one really controlled it. Victory on the battlefield had removed the pretext for maintaining the Reign of Terror. At the same time, the killing frenzy of the Great Terror convinced people—even allies of the Jacobins—they might be next on the guillotine. Furthermore, by killing off the likes of Danton and Hébert, Robespierre’s faction had narrowed its base of support and had no one to lean on when challenged. Thus the end was simply a matter of time.

A

The Thermidorean Reaction

As it happened, the coup against Robespierre and his associates was led by a group of dissident Jacobins, including members of the Committee of Public Safety. They had supported the Reign of Terror but feared Robespierre would turn on them next. On July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II, in the revolutionary calendar), Robespierre and his close followers were arrested on the convention floor. During the next two days, Robespierre and 82 of his associates were guillotined.

Although the conspirators of 9 Thermidor, who came to be known as Thermidoreans, could hardly have known it, the removal of the 83 Robespierrists represented a major turning point in the Revolution. Ever since 1789, counter-revolutionaries, who enjoyed support from many peasants, had tried to reverse the Revolution. But it had continued to become more and more extreme in nature, due to the increasing participation of urban radicals with whom the Jacobins had formed political alliances. Only after 9 Thermidor did the Revolution reverse its radical direction, and more moderate politicians came to dominate the government.

While these moderates wanted to preserve the Revolution’s achievements and tried to repress counter-revolutionaries, they also feared and repressed the radical groups on whose backs the Jacobins had ridden to power. In order to maintain control over both the radical left and the counter-revolutionary right, the Thermidoreans consolidated their power and began to limit democracy. These limitations led eventually to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte (see Napoleon I).

Immediately after 9 Thermidor an assortment of political groups began to use their influence to dismantle all vestiges of the Reign of Terror. Although the convention continued in power until October 1795, the teeth of the Reign of Terror were pulled one by one. To limit their power, the committees of Public Safety and General Security were restructured; the operations of the Revolutionary Tribunal were curtailed; thousands of prisoners were released; and in November 1794 the Paris Jacobin club was closed. People associated with the Reign of Terror were harassed in Paris by reactionary youth groups known as the jeunesse d’orée (French for “the gilded youth”) and even killed in strongly counter-revolutionary regions.

The last major popular rising of the Revolution occurred in the spring of 1795, when the near-total devaluation of the assignats produced a price rise that devastated the poor. But this rising was put down so effectively that the counter-revolutionaries imagined the monarchy might soon be restored, and their activities escalated. In response, the Thermidoreans now struck against the counter-revolutionaries, defeating and executing a group of émigré soldiers landed by the English at Quiberon Bay in Brittany during the summer of 1795.

B

The Directory

To avoid a revival of either democracy or dictatorship, the Thermidoreans put together and ratified a new constitution that limited the right to vote to the wealthiest 30,000 male citizens and dispersed power among three main bodies. Legislative authority was vested in two legislative assemblies, the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred. Executive power was lodged in a five-man Directory to be chosen by the Council of Ancients from a list of candidates presented by the Council of Five Hundred.

Fearing the results of a true referendum, moderate republicans decreed that two-thirds of the first legislature had to be made up of members of the former convention. As it turned out, the constitution, which was ratified by popular vote and took effect in late October 1795, neither protected the government from unfriendly popular forces nor prevented the concentration of power.

Did the Directory have good reason to fear that open elections would bring down the republic? Historians have disagreed on this matter. Some argue that the Directory eventually failed because it could not generate loyalty from either the left or the right. Other historians believe the Directory failed because it distrusted democracy and did not develop a strong centrist party.

Whatever the reason, for the next four years the Directory lurched from making concessions to the right and intimidating the left to making concessions to the left and intimidating the right. In May 1796 the Directory easily crushed a conspiracy of former Jacobins and agrarian radicals who intended to seize power and redistribute property. The right triumphed at the elections in 1797 and was slowly preparing to take power. Then in September, three members of the Directory, the triumvirate, eliminated the two other members who had counter-revolutionary sympathies and purged the legislature of nearly 200 opposition deputies. They did all this with the backing of the army. The triumvirate was then joined by two new associates. This new Directory proceeded to close down counter-revolutionary publications, exile returning émigrés and uncooperative clergy, and execute many political opponents.

This coup of Fructidor (the month of the revolutionary calendar in which it occurred) allowed the Directory to consolidate its power. As a result, it was able to take some bold new financial initiatives, such as establishing a new metal-based currency and imposing a new system of taxes on luxury goods and real estate. The coup also destroyed whatever hopes counter-revolutionaries had to gain power through legal means.

But Fructidor also unleashed the radical left, which won an important electoral victory in May 1798. To neutralize this threat, the Directory once again tampered with polling results by eliminating more than 100 elected left-wing deputies in what became known as the coup of Floréal. Whatever the short-term gains for the Directory, its continuing rejection of election results stripped it of its last remaining shreds of authority, as few could respect a regime that so routinely violated its own constitution.

C

Foundations of Dictatorship

The end came in 1799. Military reverses, a domestic political crisis, and the ambitions of a military hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, combined to give rise to the Revolution’s last major coup and the creation of a dictatorship.

The military reverses occurred after French armies had enjoyed five years of considerable success. Following the victories of the Reign of Terror, the first coalition of European powers fighting revolutionary France crumbled in 1795 and 1796. Prussia, Spain, the Dutch Netherlands, and Tuscany (Toscana) signed peace treaties with France, leaving England and Austria to fight alone. In October 1795 France annexed the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium). The Dutch Netherlands became the first of many so-called French sister republics. France fitted it with a new, relatively democratic constitution closely patterned on the Directory. France also forced the Dutch Netherlands to pay it a large indemnity. In 1796 and 1797 French armies swept into Italy and western Germany.