During 1790 and 1791, reaction gathered around the figure of Lafayette. He had already stained his hands with the blood of the masses in suppressing the Nancy garrison in August 1790 and the subsequent execution of 41, predominantly Swiss, soldiers.
In conditions of revolution, the army could not fail to mirror the class divisions which were tearing the nation apart. The soldiers split into opposing groups with the majority of the officers, of noble birth, hating the revolution and all its institutions. They continually referred to the National Guard as ‘blue porcelain that can’t bear firing’. On the other hand, patriotic agitation was undertaken amongst the sailors and shipworkers at the naval bases. Robespierre demanded a thorough purge of the officer corps (a big section of them in any case had fled abroad) but the assembly, terrified of the reaction of Europe at such a measure, refused to act.
The ‘July Days’
Lafayette’s suppression of the Nancy garrison was a dress rehearsal for his bloody role in the massacre at the Champ de Mars in July of the following year (1791). The period leading up to this saw the counter-revolution gradually encroaching on the gains of the revolution with a layer of former ‘revolutionaries’ going over to the king and the court.
The anger of the masses was to culminate in the French revolution’s equivalent of the ‘July Days’ during the Russian revolution. Such a stage is inevitable in all revolutions. Furious at the march of the counter-revolution, the masses decide to go out onto the streets. Such were the June days of the 1848 revolution in France and the movement in January 1919, known as the ‘Spartacist Uprising’, in Germany. They are inevitably defeated because only a minority has reached the conclusion that it is necessary to overthrow the existing regime. Largely without strategy and tactics or authoritative leaders, such spontaneous outbursts of mass anger are inevitable.
The period leading up to the Champ de Mars events was one of the growing class antagonism not only between the people and the royal/noble conspiracy but within the representatives of the crumbling Third Estate as well. Lafayette’s attempts at compromise foundered on the resistance of the aristocrats. The threat of civil war fuelled by religious divisions hung over the head of the nation.
The disappearance of feudal rights, and many other traditional institutions, to begin with resulted in increased unemployment. A big section of those unemployed were concentrated in Paris. In January, they numbered 24,000, but by June the figure had risen to 31,000. The bourgeoisie were given notice of the rising anger of the Parisian masses with the first serious breach of the peace which occurred on 28 February 1791. An attempt was made to demolish part of the Chateau de Vincennes which was being converted into an overflow prison for the capital. Patriots protested because this had been a notorious detention centre in the pre-revolutionary period. A thousand workers marched to demolish it, among whom were Bastille demolition workers. They compelled one of the leaders of the National Guard himself to lead their battalion to Vincennes, where they then proceeded to demolish the building. Lafayette scurried after them and marched back to Paris with 64 demonstrators as prisoners.
These prisoners were, however, released after huge protest demonstrations organised by the Cordeliers. Rudé comments that this event was ‘but one example of the continuous efforts made by the democrats in the course of the spring and summer of 1791 to indoctrinate and to win the allegiance of the small tradesmen, craftsmen, and employed and unemployed workers of the capital’.
Their efforts were to culminate in the great demonstration on 17 July when the Parisian masses assembled to sign a petition drawn up by the Cordeliers Club, which hinted at the removal of the monarchy and the proclamation of a republic. Among those arrested in Paris during this period were large numbers of the unemployed. There were former painters, sculptors, tailors, barbers, domestic servants, jewellers, joiners and basket makers. They were constantly involved in clashes with the authorities.
Alarmed at the growth of a radicalised layer of the unemployed, the bourgeoisie, through the mayor Bailly, closed the Bastille workshop and this was later ratified by the Assembly. The workers refused to accept the loss of their meagre subsistence allowance. They were joined by the journeymen of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and their actions aroused the sympathy of both the Cordeliers and the Jacobin clubs. Robespierre himself, together with Camille Desmoulins, supported one such petition which demanded subsistence as a citizen’s right, to be paid for out of the profits from the sale of church lands. This demonstrates, as Engels later argued, that the proletariat of Paris and the small businessmen who made up the sans culottes, encouraged by the example set by the bourgeois who helped themselves to the land of the church, were pressing forward for similar benefits for themselves. These demands commingled in some of the demonstrations with a call for the replacement of the monarchy with a republic.
The ‘constitutionalists’, those who supported a constitutional monarchy, denounced this movement of the Paris masses. Its newspapers condemned the popular movement which they claimed foreshadowed the dreaded ‘agrarian law’: that is, the distribution of property, not by ‘legal’ means, but by pillage and forced expropriation. Lafayette and his circle had concluded that the work of the Assembly had to be revised, property qualifications made even more stringent, the clubs to be suppressed and the press to be firmly controlled.
The bourgeoisie was in a cleft stick. To lean on the ‘blacks’, the royalist counter-revolution, risked unwinding the spool of revolution. They wanted a monarchy as a means of stupefying the masses and as a figurehead to be used against a popular movement. But they wished to maintain the gains of the revolution, they wanted to maintain themselves in power, giving the king larger powers and bolstered by an upper house like the British House of Lords. They wanted new elections to be called which would allow constituent members to become ministers. These proposals were defeated in the Assembly, but they had not given up hope that they would eventually realise a constitutional monarchy. However, the prop upon which they rested was suddenly knocked from under them.
The King flees
The king and his entourage decided to flee to the imperial borders. The king and queen had kept up continual contact with the royalist emigrés and the European despots who backed them. They secretly pleaded for foreign aid to overthrow the revolution. Louis even tempted the age-old enemy of England in May 1791 with some ‘colonial morsel’ in return for ‘neutrality’ if an attempt to restore the monarchy should result in civil war. The Tsarina of Russia welcomed royalist emigrés enthusiastically declaring ‘to destroy French anarchy is to prepare one’s immortal glory’. However, at this stage, while long on words, European reaction was very short on deeds. It would take a declaration of a republic, the execution of the king and the contagious effects of a revolution throughout Europe to bring them together in military consort in an attempt to crush the revolution.
Louis and Marie Antoinette therefore decided to act on 20 June. There was plenty of evidence to indicate that the birds were about to flee the coop. Indeed there was a wide expectation of this amongst the masses. Such an enterprise could not fail to attract the attention of even the most casual observer of the actions of the court. Marat constantly warned in L’Ami du Peuple that the king was preparing to flee. A massive, sumptuously furnished Berlin coach was to carry Louis and his family on a secret route out of the country. His downfall was bad planning and the alertness of the masses who had been prepared for such a development by the republicans in the previous period. It was the postmaster of Sainte-Menehould, Drouet, who raised the alarm. He overtook the coach, arrived at Varennes and ordered the bridge over the River Aire to be barricaded. The king was forced to admit his identity and church bells called the peasants out.
The troops who rushed to the spot fraternised with the crowd and the king and queen were returned to Paris with threatening crowds of peasants and workers denouncing them along the way. A noble, Comte de Dampierre, who went to greet the king was murdered by a group of peasants. The news of the king’s flight reached to every corner of France and once again a ‘great fear’ gripped the population. Nobles and priests were attacked and once more chateaux went up in flames.
The masses demanded that the king be brought back as a hostage, not as a king. The flight to Varennes completely transformed the situation in Paris. The Cordeliers declared: ‘At last we are free and kingless’. The isolated voices calling for a republic rapidly increased their support. Before these events, both the Jacobins and the Cordeliers were cautious in expressing republican views. Now the Club demanded that the Assembly declare a republic or, failing that, to delay any decision until the mass of the population in the departments had been consulted.
Some of the deputies, notably Brissot, Bonneville and the Marquis de Condorcet, now came out in favour of the republic. Many of the provincial clubs did likewise. Robespierre was not foremost in this agitation, fearing that Lafayette would be installed as president in place of the king. The majority of the assembly, however, once the king had returned to Paris, set their faces against the agitation for a republic.
The upper bourgeoisie, the dominant voice in the Assembly, invented the fiction that the king had not fled but was ‘kidnapped’. This despite the fact that Louis had left a proclamation behind him when he fled repudiating all the revolutionary acts of the assembly! He was obviously conspiring with the Austrian army to crush the revolution. On 24 June, the Cordeliers, massively supported by the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, launched the ‘petition of thirty-thousand’ inveighing against any rehabilitation of Louis. This issue resulted in deep class divisions, a bitter polarisation, in Paris and throughout the country. The Jacobin Club itself split, with the great majority of the deputies, henceforth known as ‘Feuillants’, defecting to form their own club. They subsequently became the bulwark of the constitutional monarchist party within the assembly. The Jacobin Club was left with only five or six deputies following this split. Its unpopularity amongst the big bourgeoisie was in inverse proportion to its growing support amongst the petit bourgeois and the Parisian proletariat – at that stage, not a homogeneous class, but composed of unemployed, shopworkers, artisans and other sections. Together with the Cordeliers, they organised a massive agitational campaign throughout the capital.
However, the majority in the Assembly voted to cover-up for the king. The authorities were preparing to suppress the mass movement, and on the 16 July the Assembly, criticising the security measures of the Hôtel de Ville, instructed Mayor Bailly to take ‘firm measures’ to maintain order. The National Assembly was, as Trotsky pointed out, ‘just as the Russian compromisers 126 years later were screening the treachery of the liberals’. The royalist bourgeoisie hoped to drown the mass movement in blood and settle accounts with the party of the revolution forever.
July 1917 – A comparison
The republican leaders such as Robespierre did not feel strong enough to take power. Neither did the Bolsheviks in July 1917, when the revolutionary temper of the Petrograd workers was way ahead of the rest of the country, and particularly of the peasant-soldier mass. The Bolsheviks, however, put themselves at the head of the July demonstration in order to limit the damage which would inevitably result from a premature insurrection in the capital. Although July led to a temporary triumph of the counter-revolution, the tactics of the Bolsheviks ensured that the masses were educated even in the course of the ‘semi-defeat’.
The French republicans such as Robespierre, in contrast to the Bolsheviks, hastened to separate themselves from the mobilisation on the Champ de Mars on July 17. Fifty-thousand had gathered in an entirely peaceful demonstration to sign a petition drawn up on the spot. It was drafted by Francois Robert and, while it was couched in radical terms, it did not specifically call for a republic. Nevertheless, its wording implied this, stating: ‘To convoke a new constituent body to proceed to the replacement and organisation of a new executive power’.
The calumniators of the Parisian masses were to later argue that the demonstrators were violent. It is true that two individuals had been killed in the morning of the demonstration when they were found to be hiding under the ‘altar of the fatherland’. Over 6000 had already signed the petition before the troops arrived. But Bailly, the Mayor of Paris, and Lafayette put into operation a preconceived plan to suppress the popular movement. The National Guard, numbering 10,000 and composed of the bourgeoisie, showed intense hostility towards the ‘rabble’.
The Massacre in the Champ de Mars
The demonstrators were mainly from the poorer sections of the Parisian population. Indeed, Rudé has demonstrated that, while the masses came from all parts of the capital, it was not just the Faubourg Saint-Antoine but previously ‘peaceful and orderly’ Faubourgs such as Saint-Marcel which were to the fore in the demonstration. This Faubourg was now to stand alongside Saint-Antoine as a bastion of the revolution. When a few stones were aimed at the National Guards, this was the signal to open fire. In the words of the demonstrators ‘They fired upon the workers as if they were poultry’.
The massacre of the Parisian masses on the Champ de Mars led to a bourgeois reign of terror. Desmoulins went into hiding in Paris as did Santerre. Danton fled to England for some time and Vincent and Momoro were arrested along with many others. Marat’s presses were seized and Robespierre took shelter with the carpenter Dupley. The royalist bourgeoisie was temporarily victorious but the patriotic party was irreparably split. The chasm between the two wings was signified in the spilling of blood on the Champ de Mars and the ‘tricolour’ terror which followed. The forces of order had murdered more men in one day than the allegedly bloodthirsty Parisian crowds had executed in the first two years of the revolution.
The majority of the bourgeois leaders gathered around the king and even sought an accommodation with the ‘blacks’. The aristocrats, however, refused these overtures and the royalist bourgeoisie hesitated to make too many concessions to them. Duport, Barnave and the Lameths, masters of the assembly, frantically attempted to reach an agreement with the monarchy and to enshrine this in the 1791 constitution. However the majority of the Assembly, composed mostly of bourgeois, feared that the considerable gains accruing to them from the revolution were endangered by Barnave, who, they felt, was going too far in seeking accommodation with the right. The aristocracy for their part refused all compromises, confident that they would topple the upstart republicans on the backs of foreign armies if necessary.
The first constitution proclaimed in September 1791 was based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and was solidly weighted in favour of the bourgeoisie. Louis XVI, in accepting the constitution, declared ‘The revolution is over’. The upper bourgeoisie which now dominated the newly elected ‘Legislative Assembly’ concurred. Yet this constitution was based upon a fiction, the complete independence of the legislative and executive powers. As Trotsky pointed out, it concealed a ‘double sovereignty’: the bourgeoisie firmly entrenched in the National Assembly, and the monarchy still relying upon the bishops, the refractory clergy, the bureaucracy, the military and, last but not least, foreign intervention. This state of affairs could only end either with the abolition of bourgeois representation by foreign intervention or, in the words of Trotsky, ‘the guillotine for the king and the monarchy. Paris and Koblenz (the centre of foreign intrigues against the revolution) must measure their forces’.
The promulgation of the constitution did allow, however, for the amnesty of political prisoners. The Parisian crowd demonstrated its feelings by booing the Assembly deputies and giving a heroes’ reception to Robespierre and Petion. Moreover, noble deputies profiting from their new freedom streamed across the border to join the emigré army of Prince Condé who was gathering his forces in the Rhineland.
The king in reality merely pretended to accept the constitution while continuing to intrigue with foreign feudal reaction. Hand on heart, he earnestly declared to the deputies: ‘I have no longer any doubt as to the will of the people. And so I accept the constitution’. Yet Marie Antoinette had informed the Austrian ambassador that this very same constitution was ‘monstrous’. She went on ‘We cannot go on like this… our only source of help lies with the foreign powers; at whatever price they must come to our aid.’ To her brother, the Austrian emperor, she wrote on the 8 September ‘It is for the emperor to put an end to the disturbances of the French revolution. Compromise has become impossible. Everything has been overturned by force and force alone can repair the damage’.
On 3 December, Louis wrote to the king of Prussia personally asking for help to crush the revolution. Frederick William declined however to intervene at that stage. However, the flight of the king, notwithstanding his ‘acceptance’ of the 1791 constitution, had had a profound effect on his fellow European tyrants.
The Austrian emperor Leopold reacted by issuing the Padua proposals suggesting that the monarchies of Europe act in concert to save the French royal family. However, only Catherine of Russia and Gustavus of Sweden were firmly in favour of action. George III of England, prompted by the cautious Pitt, despite his touching concern for Louis, wrote that he would ‘remain neutral’.
In the light of the threatening noises emanating from the courts of Europe, the ‘constitutionalists’, who were now ascendant in the Assembly, bent all their efforts to reconcile the monarchy with the bourgeois regime. The new Legislative Assembly was composed of 264 Feuillants with 136 Jacobins and Cordeliers, and 350 constitutionalists, half of the Assembly. And yet all efforts at compromise were dashed by the rising tide of counter-revolution throughout the country.
In August, refractory priests had provoked the peasants to rise in the Vendée. At Avignon in October 1791, they killed the mayor, and the patriots avenged his death by a massacre at the Glacière. In February 1792 they instigated uprisings in the Lozère. Levasseur, who was a deputy in the Assembly, declares in his memoirs:
The session of the Legislative assembly was nothing but a barely concealed war of the popular power against the royal authority… this great epoch of 1791-1792 which decided France’s destiny was not marked by outstanding parliamentary struggles. It was between the people and the rulers that the battle continued to be waged… The deputies acted as conspirators and not as deputies.
The Girondins
The Legislative Assembly saw the rise to prominence within the left of the Brissotins, named after their leader Brissot. They came to be known as the Gironde, because most of the deputies supporting them came from this area of France, although Brissot himself was a deputy from Paris. They were what Lefebvre called ‘a second generation of the revolution’. They had been given their opportunity because the deputies of the previous Assembly ruled against the re-election of deputies. They were mostly petit bourgeois lawyers and writers, with a fair sprinkling of adventurers like Brissot himself. A journalist, he had led a varied life which included a period in the debtor’s joil in Britain, and had at one time been in the employ of the Duc d’Orléans, of the speculator Clavière and even of Lafayette.
While accepting ‘political democracy’, they undoubtedly saw the revolution as a means for personal advance. They moreover consorted with the business bourgeoisie – shipowners, wholesalers, bankers – who wished to defeat counter-revolution, stabilise the assignat and, as Lefebvre puts it, ‘did not regard with disfavour a war that would bring lucrative contracts to suppliers’. Their support for war, however was conditional on the fact that hostilities would be confined to the continent, leaving the ports free to carry on a prosperous trade.
Marseilles, Nantes and Bordeaux were the centres of capitalism at this stage – trade and commerce being the key factors, rather than industry – and they played a decisive role in the history of the Gironde party. The Girondins made their mark in the Assembly by seeking to strike down the revolution’s enemies. They also attacked the refractory, or rebellious, priests and demanded the separation of church and state.
Towards war with Austria
The Assembly did not turn their backs on those clergy who supported the revolution. They also demanded measures against the royalist emigrés assembling on his territory. They wished to turn the public against Austria and push France into a war, in the process helping to force Louis to accept patriot ministers pledged to a policy of war.
The Gironde expected that such a ‘revolutionary war’ would bring uprisings of the oppressed peoples in the neighbouring states. Yet the Gironde ministers would never have carried the day without the support of Lafayette and without the king doing an about face. Lafayette hoped for a short war, victory to the French armies, and with a newly acquired authority, to use the army to disperse the Assembly and crush the patriots. The king on the other hand, despairing that his fellow European rulers would come to his aid, hoped to force their hand through war. If they were attacked they would, he reckoned, come to his assistance. The Gironde ‘revolutionaries’ were playing into his hands. The queen even wrote to Fersen, the Swedish ambassador on December 14: ‘The imbeciles! They don’t even see that this serves out purpose’. Louis also secretly wrote ‘Instead of civil, we will have a political, war, and things will be much the better for it. France’s physical and moral state renders it incapable of sustaining a semi-campaign’.
The monarchy were, in effect, proposing a policy of counter-revolutionary defeatism. Far better to be defeated and occupied by a foreign power than for the revolution to triumph. The French bourgeoisie, in its turn, was to display the same tendencies in 1871, preferring occupation by the Prussian enemy, rather than allow the triumph of the Paris Commune. In 1940 also, they preferred capitulation to the Nazi occupiers, rather than arm the French masses, thereby risking a new and much more dangerous edition of the Commune. Only Robespierre and Marat were to remain consistently and implacably opposed to the declaration of war by the Gironde dominated Assembly. Brissot convinced the Assembly that the ‘patriots’ in other countries were waiting with open arms for the arrival of the French revolutionary armies. Robespierre replied that the peoples of Europe would not readily welcome ‘armed missionaries’. Indeed, it would allow reaction to whip up popular national resistance against the French. In addition, he believed that the French armies were unprepared and would suffer defeats. Foreseeing the schemes of the monarchists, he demanded that before opening hostilities the Assembly must weed out the counter-revolutionaries from the army and gain mastery over the king.
The revolution from the outset had an international appeal. Therefore Robespierre conceded that it may be necessary to help a revolution already underway, but he drew the line at armed intervention in other countries, including the conquest of France’s ‘natural frontiers’. But their voices were lost in the general clamour against the foreign enemy who harboured the emigrés.
After fruitless negotiation, France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792, and soon faced the combined armies of the Prussians and the Austrians. Before these developments, however, under pressure from the Girondins, Narbonne, the Feuillant minister, was dismissed by the king. Dumouriez was called into office in his place. He appointed a few Gironde ministers to office and the speculator Clavière.
The French army had been decimated by the desertion of at least half of the predominantly royalist officer corp. The troops suspected the officers as did the latter the lower ranks. The French armies fled in disarray, with Lafayette drawing back without even having caught a glimpse of the enemy. Outraged at what they considered was desertion at the top, some of the soldiers killed their generals. On May 18, the heads of the army, in violation of the orders they received from the ministries, declared that an offensive was impossible and advised the king to make immediate peace.
The midwife of revolution
Once more war – military defeat this time – proved to be the midwife of revolution. Frederick Engels later commented ‘The whole French revolution is dominated by the war of the Coalition, all its pulsations depended upon it’. In war all that is weak, feeble and rotten is exposed. It pushed to extremes the underlying tensions and class antagonisms in society. The war had broken out against the background of renewed economic crisis and clashes on the issue of food in Paris. It was inflation which, in the spring and summer, together with the war, was to inflame the temper of the masses and give the pendulum of a revolution a further swing to the left.
The value of the assignat had dramatically plunged by the early months of 1792. The price of sugar increased from between 22 to 25 sous a pound to between 3 and 3.5 livres. The merchants blamed the rise on the civil war in the West Indies and consequent shortages. The masses believed that the merchants and wholesalers were deliberately hoarding sugar in order to push up the price.
In January 1792, riots broke out in Saint-Antoine, Saint-Marcel and Saint-Denis as well as in the sections of Grravilliers and Beaubourg. In January and February, crowds invaded grocery shops and forced a maximum price of 20 sous a pound of sugar onto the owners. In some instances, these examples of ‘popular taxation’, the first attempts to limit prices since 1775, were extended to wine, bread, meat and other foodstuffs. In February, a riot broke out in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel, where crowds outside a warehouse where 80,000 pounds of sugar had been stockpiled by two speculators. Attempts were made to break into the warehouse, with the women, laundresses amongst them, sounding the tocsin in the church of Saint-Marcel. Petion – the Girondin mayor of Paris – arrived on the scene with armed force, took prisoners and cleared the streets. The two Faubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine where these demonstrations took place played a decisive role in the events later in the year. Without question it was the worsening economic conditions of the masses, allied with the aristocratic conspiracy both internally and externally, which aroused the masses once more to fever pitch.
Girondin propaganda in favour of the war struck a chord amongst the masses. Rouget de Lisle published his song on April 26 in Strasbourg, which became subsequently famous under the title of the Marsaillaise, the national anthem of the republic. He captured perfectly the mood of France at that stage with a denunciation of traitors, parasites, the ‘perfidious’ and all the accomplices of the ‘tyrants’. Revolutionary fervour went hand in hand with love of ‘la patrie’ – fatherland. The defeats of the French army were attributed to royalist and aristocratic sabotage.
The aristocracy who had remained in France impatiently awaited the arrival of the German army in Paris. Aristocratic insurrections broke out in the south-east and in other areas of the country in expectation that they would link up with the Austrian and German armies. The forces of the revolution in the early months of 1792 in turn organised against the counter-revolution. In February and March, the Jacobins in Marseilles organised an army which crushed their opponents in Avignon and Arles. From this time, Marseilles was to play a critical role in the revolutionary events of 1792. The Assembly granted an amnesty to all those convicted of acts connected with the revolution. At the same time, the bourgeoisie became alarmed at the direction in which the masses were moving. The masses, not just in Paris but throughout the country, were demanding that everything, particularly the interests of the bourgeoisie, be subordinate to the war.
Agrarian revolt broke out in the countryside around Paris in the agriculturally rich growing plain of Beauce. Groups of up to eight thousand peasants and rural workers invaded the town markets, imposed their own prices on everything and announced their intention to reduce rents. Dome peasants divided up the common lands on their own initiative. In the towns there was intense hostility, particularly on the part of the sans-culottes, to the speculators who tried to profit from the war, who were denounced as counter-revolutionaries.
The deteriorating economic situation, caused by the war and the civil war in the West Indies – where a slave revolution had taken place under the impact of the events in France – led to a clamour for price controls and economic regulation in the early part of 1792. The royalist bourgeoisie gathered around the Feuillants was screaming about threats to the constitution and the danger of ‘agrarian law’. The Girondins, holding cabinet positions and linked to the bourgeoisie, could not fail to register the terror of the possessing classes at the emergence of the sans-culottes. Trotsky comments in his History of the Russian Revolution:
How striking is the picture – and how vilely it has been slandered! – of the efforts of the plebeian levels to raise themselves up out of the social cellars and catacombs, and stand forth in that forbidden arena where people in wigs and silk breeches are settling the fate of the nation. It seemed as though the very foundation of society, tramped underfoot by the cultured bourgeoisie, was stirring and coming to life. Human heads lifted themselves above the solid mass, horny hands stretched aloft, hoarse but courageous voices shouted. The districts of Paris, bastards of the revolution, began to live a life of their own. They were recognised – it was impossible not to recognise them! – and transformed into sections. But they kept continually breaking the boundaries of legality and receiving a current of fresh blood from below, opening their ranks in spite of the law to those with no rights, the destitute sans-culottes.
The emergence of the sans-culottes as a major force terrified the Girondins and behind them the bourgeoisie. This was, in time, to drive and behind them towards the right and even force them to seek an accommodation with the king. But in the earlier part of 1792 it was the growing danger of counter-revolution, internally and externally, which pre-occupied the Girondins. Lafayette was openly using his position in the army to assemble the forces to organise a march on Paris, to disperse the clubs and terminate the revolution. The king did not support Lafayette but used his breach with the revolutionaries to dismiss the Girondin ministers. Before then, however, the Girondins were compelled to take action against the gathering counter-revolution.
A series of measures, including the arrest and possible deportation of any priest denounced by 20 citizens, was rushed through the Assembly. The king’s constitutional guard was also dissolved. At the same time, 20,000 National Guards were ordered to attend the proposed federation ceremony, to celebrate the taking of the Bastille, and they set up camp outside Paris. The king, however, refused to ratify these measures and instead, on 13 June, dismissed Roland and other Girondin ministers. The Feuillants were returned to power and Lafayette sought to use this situation to strike a decisive blow against Paris and the revolution.
However, the masses of Paris were worked up to an insurrectionary mood by the economic and social situation and the open march of the counter-revolution. Alarmed by the dismissal of the Girondin ministers, they used the pretext of the anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath on 20 June to organise a petition signed by the Gobelins section on behalf of the Faubourgs Saint-Marcel and Saint-Antoine. This requested from the Girondin mayor Pétion the right to parade with arms to present a petition to the Assembly and the king. The bourgeois-dominated municipality and department of Paris supported such a request.
After much to-ing and fro-ing, at five in the morning of 20 June, the sans-culottes in the two Faubourgs, with women and children amongst them, marched on the Tuileries. A section of the sans-culottes entered the royal apartments through a side entrance. For once, royalty was confronted with the real forces of the revolution instead of the ministerial shadows in the assemblies. To roars of ‘Down with the veto! Call back the patriot ministers. Tremble tyrants! The sans-culottes are here!’, the armed mass paraded before the king. He was forced to don the Phrygian cap, the red cap of liberty – recently introduced and made popular by the Girondins as the symbol of revolutionary patriotism – and also joined in toasts to the health of the nations.
This movement proved to be a dress rehearsal for August 10 – the ‘second French revolution’. Counter0revolution, of course, used the ‘indignities’ allegedly heaped on the head of the royal family to re-enforce its position. The king refused to give up his veto or to recall the Girondins, and he also proceeded to suspend Pétion and Manuel, officials of the Commune. This was followed by Lafayette appearing before the assembly on 28 June, insisting that strong measures should be taken to ‘restore order’. He once more failed to get support and returned to the front, from where he urged the king to join him. Louis refused all offers to flee Paris, but instead counted on the arrival of the Prussian invaders to restore his hull authority on the bones of revolution. As Lefebvre points out, ‘He also relied on Girondin vacillation’.
The Girondin for their part accused the king in early July of treason and the assembly declared ‘the fatherland in danger’. This resulted in the resignation of the Feuillants on 10 July, with the Girondins hoping that the king would recall them. They secretly opened up correspondence with the king, who gave vague promises as to their possible re-admittance into the cabinet. This resulted in a complete metamorphosis on the part of the Girondins, who were transformed from assailants to defenders of the monarchy. As Rudé points out, they were like ‘the sorcerer’s apprentice of legend… (who) were not prepared to face up to the consequences of the storm that they themselves had let loose’. The vacillation of the Gironde was not an accident. Tied to the bourgeoisie, they were terrified of relying on an insurrection of the sans-culottes which, while it could remove the king, could also make encroachments on ‘private property’. They hesitated, and into the breach stepped the Jacobins.
