The Jacobins had played no real part in the movement of 20 June. The Girondins were still in the ascendancy in the middle of July, at the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. But by the end of the month a combination of factors had wrought a profound change in the situation. On 28 July the news reached Paris that the Prussian commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, had published a brutal, threatening manifesto, at the behest of Marie Antoinette. He warned that if the National Guards resisted the advancing Prussian army, they would meet with summary vengeance.
Threatened on all fronts, the Parisian sans-culottes appealed to the provinces. Five hundred men from Marseilles, ‘who knew how to die well’, marched to Paris. As they marched they sang the famous ‘war song’, La Marseillaise. Marseilles was the first city to declare for the republic. They were joined by contingents from Brest, Arles and other cities. These fédérés bolstered the Parisian sans-culottes and, in two petitions in July, demanded that the assembly depose the king. As Lefebvre comments, ‘In this sense the revolution of August 10 was not Parisian, as that of July 14 had been, but national’. They set up a central committee with a secret ‘directory’ which involved some of the leaders of the Parisian sans-culottes.
By the end of July, 47 of the capital’s 48 sections had also come out for the king’s abdication. By this time, the division between passive and active sections had completely broken down. Parisian sans-culottes had in effect penetrated and taken over the sections. It was the section Théâtre Français which first gave all its members the right to vote. Jacobins and sans-culottes combined together to push aside the ‘moderates’ and on 30 July, passive citizens were admitted to the National Guard. An executive council, representing the 47 sections, prepared for insurrection. Yet Robespierre was against an armed insurrection, preferring instead replacement of the Assembly by a new Convention elected by manhood suffrage. But the threat of Brunswick and Lafayette, and attempts to mobilize the counter-revolution within the capital itself, forced the Jacobins under the pressure of the masses to reverse their position to one of favouring armed insurrection – an insurrection that was to be organized by the bodies of the sans-culottes themselves.
The insurrection of 10 August
Insurrection threatened to break out on 26 and 30 July but was postponed through the mediating efforts of Pétion. Faubourg Saint-Antoine gave the assembly until 9 August to ‘prove itself’. However, a successful insurrection was not automatically guaranteed in the situation which then obtained in Paris. The monarchy concentrated Swiss guards around the Tuileries. They mobilized hundreds of royalists in the capital. They believed they could rely on the National Guard through its commander, Mandat. Louis felt confident that by relying on these forces together with the Prussian troops, he would ensure that the sans-culottes would be crushed. The insurrection on 10 August was a defensive reaction against a renewed offensive of the counter-revolution. It was a decisive situation for the revolution; either the sans-culottes would crush the counter-revolution and its fountain head the king, or the revolution would be annihilated. On the night of 9-10 august, Faubourg Saint-Antoine invited other sections to send representatives to the Hôtel de Ville. The next day, they constituted themselves as the Paris Commune.
This represented a fundamental departure in the revolution. Up to now, the sections had been largely under the sway of the bourgeoisie. But, as Trotsky points out:
In the bold outbreak of August 10, 1792, the sections gained control of the Commune. From then on the revolutionary Commune opposed the Legislative Assembly, and subsequently the Convention, which failed to keep up with the problems and progress of the revolution – registering its events, but not performing them – because it did not possess the energy, audacity and unanimity of that new class which had raised itself up from the depths of the Parisian districts and found support in the most backward villages. As the sections gained control of the Commune, so the Commune, by way of a new insurrection, gained control of the Convention. Each of the stages was characterized by a sharply marked double sovereignty, each wing of which was trying to establish a single and strong government – the right by a defensive struggle, the left by an offensive.
The commander of the National Guard was summoned to the Hôtel de Ville, arrested and executed. The orders that he had given were cancelled, which resulted in the defection or disappearance of the National Guard around the Tuileries. The Girondins then persuaded the monarch to seek refuge in the assembly, believing that this would head off an armed conflict leave control in the hands of the deputies.
It is absolutely false to present 10 August, as bourgeois historians invariable do, as the armed manifestation of a minority in Paris. On the contrary, it was the culmination of a movement of the masses of Paris clamouring for the dethronement of the king and the setting-up of a republic. A series of what could be called exploratory manoeuvres had taken place in the proletarian areas of Paris.
On the night of 26 and 27 July, there had been a general call to arms led by the Montreuil section of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, with workers sounding the tocsin at the church of Sainte-Marguerite. The commander of the Saint-Antoine National Guard was aroused from his bed and the workshops remained closed the next day. On 6 August, a mass meeting of Parisians and Fédérés took place on the Champ de Mars with the crowd roaring for the abdication of the king. The mobilization had prepared a force of 20,000 men which marched on Tuileries on 10 August. With the defection of the 2000 National Guardsmen, they were met with just 900 Swiss, and just 2-3000 Knights of St Louis!
The republicans, with the Marseilles detachments in the front, advanced to fraternize with the Swiss, but were met with a hail of bullets. This recalled the treachery at the Bastille and a serious attack then began. However, the king ordered a ceasefire; this did not save the Swiss who suffered 600 casualties. Ninety Fédérés and also 300 sectionnaires were killed and wounded. Three women were also killed on the side of the assailants. Lefebvre comments: ‘July 14 (1789) had saved the Constituent Assembly. August 10 passed sentence on the Legislative Assembly.’ The sans-culottes decided to dissolve the assembly with power vested in their own hands. Yet the leaders of the new Commune were unknown, particularly in the provinces where the Girondins still had considerable support.
Therefore, the Assembly was maintained but a sea-change had taken place in the relationship between the Paris Commune and the assembly. The old Commune had been predominantly middle class, but the new one contained twice as many artisans as lawyers. Moreover, as one commentator put it, the Commune was little more than ‘a sort of federal parliament in a federal republic of 48 states’. The sections came more and more to represent the masses with the admittance of ‘passives’ to their meetings.
Justices of the Peace and police officers were dismissed and the sections appointed their own organs of justice, with committees appointed to hunt down counter-revolutionaries. At the same time, half the members, the openly royalist bourgeois wing, had fled the assembly on the night of 10 August, and only 284 deputies had remained. This increased the power of the Girondins, who took over all the ministries, with the exception of the Justice Ministry controlled by Danton.
The Assembly also agreed to the election of a National Convention, Robespierre’s idea, on the basis of universal suffrage. The king was not immediately dethroned but merely suspended and imprisoned in the Temple. A series of punitive measures were then enacted against feudal counter-revolutionaries. Emigrél property had been put under state control in April, but now, with the removal of the king’s veto, steps were taken for its sale. This in turn favoured the bourgeoisie, but a section of the peasantry also benefited. Nevertheless, these measures had not reconciled the revolutionary Paris Commune to the Girondins. The Commune was demanding immediate action for the dethronement and punishment of the king by a special tribunal.
A period of ‘competing authorities’ developed in Paris and throughout the country. The Assembly sent ‘representatives’, who were also attached to the army, on missions into the provinces. Danton, who dominated the executive council of the Assembly, sent out commissioners, whereas the Girondin minister, Roland, also had his own agents. At the same time, the Commune appointed its own commissioners who took revolutionary measures, arresting suspects, purging local authorities and ordering arrests.
The Girondins viewed with growing hatred the Commune which ‘disorganises everything, is always in the way… wants to overturn everything’. The truncated National Assembly with its Girondin majority vied for power with the revolutionary Commune. The left-wing Jacobins, led by Robespierre, leaned on the Commune against the Gironde. Both took punitive measures against internal counter-revolution. These were relatively mild, until the Prussian army crossed the French frontier on 16 August.
Very rapidly, Longwy fell, and by the end of August the Prussians were at Verdun, the last fortress and a bare 200 miles before Paris. The Paris masses prepared to defend the capital, with household searches for arms and the rounding up of suspects throughout the city. The alarm gun was sounded on 2 September, and all citizens were called to the sections. In addition to this, the walls of Paris were plastered with recruitment posters which urged: ‘To arms, citizens, the enemy is at our gate’. Danton, magnificently rising to the occasion, inspired the sans-culottes with his famous call: ‘De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace, et la France est sauvée!’ (Audacity, again audacity, always audacity and France is saved). An army of 20,000 sans-culottes marched from Paris to defend the revolution. It was in this situation that the first manifestation of the terror, the ‘September massacres’ took place.
The massacres
There had been a number of earlier occasions when a ‘great fear’ had swept through France. During the revolution they were invariably connected in the minds of the masses with counter-revolutionary intrigues by the aristocracy. Fearing a common uprising of the criminal and royalist prisoners and the expected arrival of the Prussian army, some of the sans-culottes took matters into their own hands. Summary executions of suspects took place, beginning on the afternoon of 2 September, and continued over a four day period. Between 1100 and 1400 prisoners were executed, including an estimated 223 priests and an unknown number of aristocrats.
Against this background, Robespierre, on the very day that the massacres began, had condemned Brissot and another Girondin minister Carra as ‘Servants of the enemy’. Carra had put forward the idea of setting up Brunswick or the Duke of York as king of France. A thorough search was made of Brissot’s residence, and he was only prevented from being arrested by the intervention of Danton.
The September massacres have invariably been portrayed as the ‘senseless outrages of the mob’. Yet, as Lefebvre has pointed out, it was precisely ‘The collective mentality’ which then existed in France which is the ‘explanation for the killing’.
The terror merely accentuated what was already taking place throughout France in the period following 10 August. Stern measures to suppress counter-revolution were undertaken. Repressive measures had been taken against refractory priests, and the remaining monasteries closed. At the same time, divorce was authorised by the assembly. Greater and greater control was exercised over the church, and the rupture between the republican and constitutional clergy was now only a matter of time.
At the same time, the first right-wing insurrection in the Vendée began on 21 August. Brittany was in revolt, and it was the royalists who had organised the surrender of Verdun to the Prussians. The September massacres were, in the eyes of the masses, a necessary ‘war to the death’ against the counter-revolution. The counter-revolution was even encouraging resistance to enlistment and was praying for deliverance by the Prussians. Savage as it was, the September error was an inevitable outcome of civil war and, moreover, was mild compared to the treatment which the Parisian masses would have received at the hands of a victorious Prussian army and restored nobility.
The crisis demanded firm measures. Ruthless terror to eliminate the danger of counter-revolution must go hand in hand, reasoned the sans culottes, with the requisitioning of food and other resources, the setting of fixed prices etc, in order to provision the armies. The Commune even attempted a general mobilisation, an anticipation of the later levée en masse (mass conscription) which would develop in Year Two of the revolution. The September terror, echoed to some extent in the provinces, at least checked the internal counter-revolution. The French army also halted the Prussians on 20 September.
However, the temporary breathing space did nothing to reconcile the Girondins with the sans-culottes supported by the Jacobins. The bourgeoisie, taken aback at the September terror and at the first beginnings of ‘the controlled economy’, rallied to the Girondins. They in turn denounced the ‘social peril’ allegedly emanating from the sans-culottes. On 13 September, Roland denounced the Commune’s commissioners and attacked its Vigilance Committee. Temporarily taken aback, the Commune submitted, suspended its Committee and apologised to the Assembly. Nevertheless, it merely replaced it with a new Committee. The Jacobin leadership, who in any case replaced it with a new Committee. The Jacobin leadership, who in any case had always adopted a rather ambivalent position towards the actions of the sans-culottes, did not seriously object to the attack on the Commune.
The Convention
These clashes were a precursor to the deadly drama which was to unfold in the newly elected Convention, which first met on 20 September. Out of its 750 members, only 96 were former constituents, while only 190 others had sat in the Legislative Assembly.
From the beginning, the Convention was divided into three main groups: the independent deputies, who, in the great majority, were known as the Plain, and were sometimes described in the semi-insulting term the Marsh. Other parties would acquire prominence and control of the Convention only on the basis of the acquiescence or support of the Plain. The biggest organised group was the Gironde, who sat on the right in the Convention. On the left sat the Jacobins, who were known as the Mountain, because of the upper tier of seats they occupied in the chamber. They were led by Robespierre and Marat and, at certain times, by Danton. It is from these, partially accidental, seating arrangements that we have acquired the terms of ‘right’ and ‘left’ wings.
The differences which ensued between the Gironde and the Mountain in the Convention have been graphically described by the Jacobin deputy Levasseur who participated in the Convention. He comments:
The only force which existed in France during the interregnum which began on 10 August was the popular élan… The only means of salvation still remaining was, therefore, to make use of the resources offered and to direct against our enemies the brutal force which it aroused… The decrees which it [the Legislative Assembly] issued had not the slightest authority. The ministry, product of an impotent assembly, was not itself a real power… The government therefore passed into the hands of those who knew how to separate themselves from it, that is, to the popular societies in the municipalities. But these improvised centres of government, products of anarchy itself and having no basis in law or in the Constitution, were simply the leaders of the people, powerful as long as they restricted themselves to directing the line of march of the people and giving effect to its wishes; they would not have been able to enforce obedience had they come into conflict with the people.
In relation to the split between the Gironde and the Jacobins, he says:
It is the Gironde which has separated itself from us. It is Buzot who left the place he had occupied in the Constituent Assembly; it is Vergniaud who abandoned the seat he had recently occupied in the Legislative Assembly… we were far from seeking divisions… Pétion [Girondin former mayor of Paris] was nominated president [of the convention] almost unanimously; the other members of the committee [the Convention Committee, re-elected fortnightly] were chosen from amongst the most influential members of the previous Assembly… Thus when we met the new deputies… who formed the great majority in the Mountain, they did not even know that there were two camps and that the republicans were not all inspired by the same sentiments and the same aspirations… The only party which came to the Convention with a complete system and a previously worked out plan took their place in the seats on the right (the Girondins). By swarming on to the seats opposite ours they declared war on us before they even knew us.
Thus it was the Gironde which went on the offensive against the Jacobins. The Jacobins were prepared to support the Girondin Pétion for the president of the Assembly, whereas the Girondins were the first to separate themselves from the Montagnards (deputies of the Mountain). It was the Girondins who left their former seats on the left and rushed en masse to the righthand side, thus indicating their changed political position. It was they who declared war on the newly arrived republicans who surged to the left, the traditional side of ‘patriotism’.
The Jacobins were strong in Paris – 23 of the 24 deputies from the capital were Jacobins – but weak in the provinces. The Gironde were weak in Paris where they had used up a lot of their capital because of their vacillations over the August revolution and their attacks on the Commune. Thus the Jacobins were champions of Paris and centralisation – ‘the republic one and indivisible’ – whereas the Gironde promoted the ‘federalist’ claims of the provinces. Levasseur observed ‘The majority of the party of the Gironde were by no means traitors but some were concealed in its ranks. No, it did not desire the ruin of the republic, but its theories led in that direction’. Marx further makes the point: ‘The few royalists in the Convention therefore joined forces with them’. Their strength came from the bourgeoisie who had remained monarchist, from the rebellious clergy, and from the partisans of the old regime. All of these forces used the Girondins as a camouflage for their real intentions. A reactionary wrote at the time: “The two main factions tearing us apart are abominable. Brissot, Pétion and Gaudet (Girondins) are as much to be feared as Marat, Danton or Robespierre’. If the Girondins had triumphed with the support of such allies, this would have been a mere episode on the road to reaction. If Kerensky had been victorious in Russia against the Bolsheviks in derailing the revolution, he would have soon been replaced by an open representative of reaction.
Although the majority of the bourgeoisie supported the Gironde, their long term interests were historically expressed by the Jacobins. While they did not enthusiastically support the ‘directed economy’ and were firm upholders of ‘private property’, nevertheless they were prepared to echo some of the demands of the masses as a means of defeating reaction and ensuring the safety of the republic. Lefebvre sums up the class forces which lined up behind the Gironde and the Mountain thus:
Virtually the entire bourgeoisie lined up behind the Girondins, whose name it used as a shield in the Convention and even more in the provinces, with its royalist tendencies. The Montagnards were elected from Paris and naturally favoured the throng of sans-culottes sectionnaires. The Mountain controlled the Jacobin Club, where it carried on discussions with the sans-culottes, and pleaded their cause.
Yet, in the first period of the Convention the Girondins maintained their popularity as masters of that body. Suspects were freed and many deported priests and emigrés were allowed to return. Controls over the grain trade were abandoned, but the masses still attempted to fix prices which resulted in violence in some areas in December. Under the pressure of Dumouriez, army private contractors linked to him were allowed to make immense profits from the war. The Girondin minister Roland denounced the Commune for keeping down the price of bread, and the peasants were also alienated by the decision to postpone the sale of emigré’s lands.
It was not the Jacobin ministers in the main who opposed these decisions, but the Commune and the sans-culottes. Nevertheless, the Gironde took the offensive against the Jacobin leaders with attacks against Marat and Robespierre as aspiring dictators. On their shoulders was placed the responsibility for the ‘September massacres” and an alleged plot to establish a ‘revolutionary dictatorship’. Nevertheless, the Plain refused to arraign either Robespierre or Marat, fearing that such a step would undermine the victory gained on 10 August, open the door to the royalists, and thus threaten their gains.
Execute the King!
The Girondins’ offensive having been checked, their power waned and they further compromised themselves in the debate over the fate of the king. Robespierre demanded on behalf of the Convention, of the sans culottes and the mass of the French nation that the traitor king be brought before the Convention and sentenced to death. A secret chest of his correspondence had been unearthed after the seizure of the Tuileries which revealed that he was up to his neck in a conspiracy with reaction, including foreign powers, to overthrow the republic by force of arms.
Yet the Girondins temporised, with some of the deputies wanting the king’s life to be spared. Their prevarication and obstructionism took the form of arguing that the execution of the king would arouse the ire of feudal Europe who, together with England, would once more endanger the republic. Was it not the Girondins who had argued in November for a revolutionary war to the finish to crush European reaction? The vote on the king’s fate took place on 14 January, 1793. The vote against the king was unanimous but when it came to the verdict, out of 780 deputies, 380 voted for the death penalty and 310 were against. The Girondins had split, with some voting for the death of the king and some voting for a reprieve.
On the morning of 21 January, with the entire National Guard lining the route to the scaffold, King Louis XVI was executed. The trial and execution of Louis in France was no more an act of personal spite than the beheading of Charles I by Cromwell and his supporters had been 144 years earlier, on 30 January 1649. It was perceived as necessary in order to safeguard the revolution and to ensure that only a complete carrying through of the revolution offered salvation to the French people.
The Girondins were undoubtedly compromised by their stand on the trial and execution of the king. Yet, as the war party, so long as the republican armies triumphed, they remained supreme in the Convention. The victory of the Republican armies at Valmy in September 1792 was followed by that at Jemappes in November and a wave of enthusiasm swept over France. At the same time, the foreign republican emigrés in France and some of the inhabitants in neighbouring states were agitating for annexation by France. The populations of Nice, Savoy and the Rhineland made such a request. Reacting to this, the Convention offered ‘Fraternity and assistance’ to all peoples who wished to regain their liberty. In the words of Lefebvre, ‘Revolution in France donned warriors garb and challenged the world’. Danton declared ‘It is our duty to give freedom to other peoples… I declare that we also have the right to tell them “You will have no more kings”.’
The battle cry ‘War to the palaces, peace to the cottages’ rang from one end of France to another. The convention had annexed Savoy in November. But the early victories were not maintained. In March, Dumouriez was defeated. He had sent a threatening letter to the convention which he followed up with an attempt to imitate Lafayette by organising a coup and a march on Paris. Once more however, an aspiring military dictator was deserted by his own army and on 5 April, he crossed over the frontier and deserted to the enemy. Danton, who had attempted to dissuade the general from this course but had been repudiated, was subsequently attacked by the Girondins. He had attempted to play a conciliatory role between the Mountain and the Girondins, but was now driven into the camp of the irreconcilable Jacobins.
The Committee of Public Safety
Under the pressure of the crisis, the Convention passed a series of emergency decrees including the creation of a revolutionary tribunal, a Committee of Public Safety and revolutionary committees in the sections or communes. Thus the ‘infamous’ Committee of Public Safety, the instrument of ‘Jacobin terror’, was in fact a creation of the ‘moderate’ Gironde. At the same time, special agents with the authority of the Convention were dispatched to the provinces as ‘representatives on mission’. But the economic and social situation worked to the detriment of the Girondins and to the benefit of the Mountain.
Food prices, after slowing down in the summer and autumn of 1792, shot upwards in the early months of 1793. Sugar more than doubled in price, with big increases in the price of coffee, soap, tallow candles, etc. This resulted in a popular outburst, far more extensive and insistent than the sugar riots of the previous year. Commenting on this, Rudé states:
…in this movement, all, or nearly all the Parisian Sections were involved and which, perhaps more clearly than any other incident in the revolution, marked the basic conflict of interests between the menu peuple [the common people] and the possessing classes, including the extreme democrats that spoke or applauded at the Jacobin Club, or sat with the Mountain or upper benches of the National Convention.
Indeed, Saint-Just, along with Girondin spokesmen, had opposed the imposition of price controls on corn. He was denounced in a sans-culottes petition as an example of ‘fine speakers who eat well every day… amongst these is the citizen Saint-Just’. The Convention had been petitioned by two deputations of women on 23 February. One of these deputations was made up largely of laundresses who complained about the price of soap. They reminded the deputies that a bill was before the Convention to raise 300,000 recruits for the army which would need the support of the sans-culottes! The Convention spokesmen assured the women that ‘an appropriate committee’ had the matter in hand. The women withdrew, complaining: ‘They adjourn us till Tuesday, but we adjourn ourselves till Monday. When our children ask us for milk we don’t put them off until the day after tomorrow’.
Losing patience, on 25 February the masses invaded grocers’ and chandlers’ shops, forcibly reducing prices. Starting in the Gravilliers section, where Jacques Roux the ‘red’ priest held sway, the movement spread to the whole of the city. Moreover, the prices which were fixed were roughly the same in all districts, which implied a concerted plan of action probably organised by the supporters of Roux. It was the big merchants and wholesalers who were in the main the objects of mass action. And while the Convention did not respond to the demands of the rioters, the Paris Commune, by subsidising bakers, on 4 March fixed the price of bread at twelve sous for a four pound loaf. The Convention itself was forced to follow suit two months later in also controlling the price of bread and flower throughout the country. This was an anticipation of the famous maximum général which was imposed after the purging of the Convention of the Girondins later in the year. In April however, a temporary bread shortage developed and bakers’ shops were once more pillaged by angry women. On 2 May, 10,000 unarmed citizens from Saint-Antoine marched before the Convention demanding that prices be controlled, and women from Versailles rioted in the Convention itself, refusing to leave the building. The Jacobins, amongst them Marat, had earlier joined with the Girondins in denouncing the movement to control prices. But now the conflict between the Gironde and the Jacobins had been heightened by the reversals of the French armies and a new outbreak of civil war, particularly in the Vendée. The peasants of this area rose en masse between 10 and 15 March. The nobles assumed the leadership, and several towns and districts were overrun, with both bourgeois and sans culottes being tortured and massacred.
These ‘patriots’ immediately appealed to the English for assistance to overthrow the revolution. Using favourable terrain for defence and surprise attacks, the Vendéans were able for a time to defeat the ‘blues’, the National Guard, which was sent against them. But being a largely peasant army, after having won a battle they then retreated to their scattered farms. Their armies were halted on 29 June before Nantes. But the Vendée was to become a running sore and the scene of terrible bloodshed on both sides in the course of the civil war.
The uprising in the Vendée had clear counter-revolutionary aims. Its leading council annulled the sale of church lands in the area it controlled and even decreed that the question of tithes would only be settled after the restoration of the monarchy. Modern bourgeois historians, particularly those on the right like Pierre Channu, have retrospectively accused the republican armies of ‘genocide’ in the Vendée. It is true that the civil war was fought with great ferocity. The murder of prisoners, collective reprisals, pillage and torture became commonplace. Yet the first to be massacred in the first days of the insurrection were over 500 republicans executed in the small town of Machecoul.
The atmosphere of civil war, the treachery of Dumouriez in April, combined with the routing of the French armies in the Rhineland, produced a new ‘great fear’ which swept over France. The Girondins, who had been closely associated with Dumouriez, working on the principle that the best means of defence is attack, sought to implicate Danton in his betrayal. This in turn forced Danton into the arms of the Jacobins. Moreover, the Convention, besieged on the internal and external front, introduced a number of draconian measures aimed against the counter-revolution. The death penalty was prescribed for all rebels captured under arms. Departments were given the authority to deport any clergymen. Emigrés who returned to France were to be executed. Any property inherited by emigrés during the ensuing 50 years was to be confiscated by the state. The Committee of Public Safety was set up in April to supervise the executive.
At the same time the Convention, mindful of the betrayal of Dumouriez, voted to send deputies armed with very wide powers who were to act as ‘political commissars’ to each army in the field. In April and May, the whole of France seemed to be consumed by upheavals and disturbances. Peasants rose, not just in the Vendée, but also in Brittany, partly in defence of their clergy and in opposition to forced recruitment into the army.
The divisions between the Girondins and Jacobins in Paris were mirrored in all the main cities of France. Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Nantes were convulsed by clashes between the Girondins and the Jacobins. In some towns, the Jacobins were victorious, but in others such as Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Caen, an anti-Montagnard coalition held power at the end of May.
In Paris, it was not the Jacobins, but the enragés (literally called ‘madmen’ by their opponents) led by Jean Varlet and Jacques Roux who initially led the masses in opposition to the Girondin Convention. Varlet, a young radical, made speeches near the Tuileries to vast crowds of supporters. The enragés led by Roux, Varlet and Leclerc openly campaigned for a ceiling on the prices of all consumer goods. Varlet demanded the death penalty for hoarders and speculators and the impeachment of Girondin ministers.
They were attempting to push the Paris Commune into another journée – a day of revolutionary struggle – an insurrection to overthrow the Girondins in the Convention. Their attempt to do this on 10 March, however, came to nothing. The Jacobins refused to support this movement, considering it premature. They were prepared to use the popular movement against the Girondins, but its leadership had to be firmly in their hands and not under the control of the sans-culottes’ leaders, who had attained recent popularity amongst the Parisian masses. These included not just Roux, Leclerc and Varlet but Hébert, the editor of Le Père Duchesne, who had gained support both in the Cordeliers and in the Paris Commune.
While the Jacobins wanted the Girondins purged, they feared that too drastic a purge would leave a rump which would then be at the mercy of the sans-culottes. Moreover, they feared that this could lead to a new version of the September massacres and thereby the isolation of Paris. However, it was the offensive of the Girondins against the Jacobins which forced them to ratify an insurrection. Levasseur comments ‘It is they (the Girondins) who demanded bills of indictment against their colleagues: It is they who, in handing over Marat to the revolutionary tribunal, violated the immunity of the elected representatives of the people’.
The Girondins had convinced the Convention to send Marat before the revolutionary tribunal. He was promptly acquitted but this ‘violation’ of the rights of ‘elected representatives’ set a precedent and was subsequently to be turned against its authors. Moreover, the Girondins sought to back up their successes in the provinces with an offensive in the Paris sections. The battle ostensibly revolved around the method of recruitment to the revolutionary army.
The Commune had adopted a method of recruitment the purpose of which was to excuse the ‘artisans’ and in their place to conscript ‘office workers’ (the ‘golden knee breeches’). Battle royal ensued in the sections between the Girondins and their supporters on the one side, and the Jacobins and the sans-culottes on the other. The Jacobins had jettisoned any previous reservations they may have had concerning an alliance with the sans-culottes on the other. The Jacobins had jettisoned any previous reservations they may have had concerning an alliance with the sans-culottes. On 5 April, Robespierre’s brother Augustin publicly invited the sections to present themselves at the Convention ‘ to put the unfaithful deputies under arrest’. In late April, Robespierre himself embraced the ideas of the sections and the Cordeliers, in supporting the ‘controlled economy’.
In proposing a new Declaration of the Rights of Man, he suggested that property be defined as ‘the portion of goods guaranteed by law’, but limited its extent by stipulating that it could not prejudice ‘the security, the liberty, the existence, or the property of our fellow man’. From a capitalist point of view, this is a complete contradiction. A precondition for the development of capitalism is the alienation of the working class from all ‘property’, that is, means of production. But nevertheless, it indicated that Robespierre was drawing closer to the sans-culottes.
A bitter class was unfolded in the sections throughout the month of May. Montagnard spokesmen called upon ‘locksmiths, carpenters, quarrymen, masons, cabinetmakers, in a word, all of you artisans and sans-culottes, working men’ to attend the section meetings. Hébert denounced the intervention of the Girondins ‘These villains have had the audacity to seize the registers, to appoint themselves presidents and secretaries. Several revolutionary committees have been dismissed by these brigands and in a word the counter-revolution had triumphed in several sections’. Girondin spokesmen on the other hand openly appealed to the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’. However, at the end of the battle, the sans-culottes and enragés, sometimes wielding chairs and other crude weapons, had won control over most of the sections. During this battle, the Girondins launched an offensive against the Paris Commune. They proposed to replace it by the presidents of the sections, but the Assembly decided on the less drastic course of a committee of twelve to investigate the behaviour of the Commune. Made up of Girondins, they sought to strike a blow against the sans-culottes and the Mountain by arresting Varlet, Hébert, the deputy public prosecutor of the Commune and two others. It was clear that the Girondins were preparing to strike a blow at the sans-culottes and the Jacobins. Faced with a life or death battle, with a stark choice facing them, the Jacobins threw in their lot with the sans-culottes, who were preparing themselves for an insurrection.
On 8 May, Robespierre addressed the Parisian masses:
The armies of the Vendée, the armies of Brittany and of Koblenz are marching against Paris, Parisians! The feudal masters are arming themselves because you are the vanguard of humanity. All the great powers of Europe are equipping themselves against you, and all the base and depraved persons in France support them… Parisians! Let us hasten to meet the bandits of the Vendée! Do you know why the Vendée is becoming a danger to us? The Vendée is a danger because great precautions have been taken to disarm a section of the population. But we shall create new republican legions, and we shall not hand over our wives and children to the daggers of the counter-revolution. I asked for money this morning in the Convention for the sans-culottes, for we must deliberate in the sections, and the workingman cannot deliberate and work at home at the same time. But he must receive pay for his task of guarding the City. I have asked millions for the sans-culottes of Paris… I have asked that people cease calumniating the people of Paris in the Convention and that the newspaper writers who desire to contaminate public opinion have their mouths stopped for them.
I demanded this morning in the Convention, and I demand it here again – and neither in the Convention nor here do I hear any contrary voices – that an army be held in readiness in Paris, an army, nor like that of Dumouriez, but an army consisting of sans-culottes and workingmen. And this army must investigate Paris, must keep the moderates in check, must occupy all posts and inspire all enemies with terror. We have an immense people of strong sans-culottes at our disposal, who cannot be permitted to drop their work. Let the rich pay!
We have a Convention; perhaps not all its members are poor and resolute, but the corrupt section will for all that not be able to prevent us from fighting. Do you believe that the Mountain has not enough forces to defeat the adherents of Dumouriez, Orléans and Cobourg combined? Parisians, the fate of all France, of all Europe, and all humanity is in your hands. The Mountain needs the People. The People need the Mountain. And I brand the reports that the provinces are turning their arms against the Jacobins as fabrications on the part of our enemies. In conclusion, I demand what I demanded in the Convention this morning, namely, that the Parisians shall be the revolutionary nucleus of the army, strong enough to drag the sans-culottes with them, that an army should remain in Paris in order to keep our enemies in check, that all enemies who are caught shall be placed under arrest, and that money must be confiscated from the rich in order to enable the poor to continue the struggle.
Some of the sections demanded the removal of 22 of the most well known Gironde deputies, which would have purged the Convention and ensured the Jacobins a working majority in it. By mid-April, 35 of the 48 sections had given their support to a rising. The Paris Commune endorsed this, and invited the sections to an assembly out of which a central revolutionary committee was organised. The majority of the executive committee of this body was composed of sans-culottes, with Varlet as part of the leadership. At the same time Hanriot, a former customs officer, was given command of the National Guard. Alongside of this, a 20,000 revolutionary militia of sans-culottes, paid at the rate of 40 sous per day, was organised.
After a false start on 31 May, battalions of the National Guard, supported by an army of sans-culottes, surrounded the Tuileries. Twenty-nine deputies and two ministers, all of them Girondins, were placed under house arrest. However, no action was immediately taken on the social programme of the enragés. The Mountain, which had emerged, victorious from this battle, pushed aside the insurrectionary committee and replaced it with its own Committee of Public Safety for the department of Paris.
The 1793 Constitution
For the time being, the sans-culottes, the organisers and the force which evicted the Girondins from the Convention, were left empty handed. Yet the Jacobins speedily pushed through the Convention and the primary assemblies the famous Constitution of June 1793. For the first time in history a system of government, which was both republican and democratic, based on the right to vote for all male citizens, was introduced. At the same time, a considerable measure of control was exercised by the population, in theory at least, over the representatives. However, Roux, as a member of a Paris Commune delegation which was congratulating the Convention on this constitution, pointed to its limitations in relation to the poor. This enraged the deputies of the Mountain. Yet Roux returned to the attack later in the month:
Have you outlawed speculation? No. Have you decreed the death penalty for hoarding? No. Have you defined the limits to the freedom of trade? No. Have you banned the exchange of assignats for specie? No. Deputies of the Mountain, why have you not climbed from the third to the ninth floor of the houses of this revolutionary city? You would have been moved by the tears and sighs of an immense population without food and clothing, brought to such distress and misery by speculation and hoarding, because the laws have been cruel to the poor, because they have been made only by the rich and for the rich… You must not be afraid of the hatred of the rich – in other words, of the wicked. You must not be afraid to sacrifice political principles to the salvation of the people, which is the supreme law. Admit then that, out of timidity, you accept the discredit of the paper currency, you prepare the way for bankruptcy by tolerating abuses and crimes that would have made despotism blush in the last days of its barbaric power.
The Jacobin and the Bolshevik dictatorships
Notwithstanding Roux’s qualifications, the sans-culottes, following the victory of Thermidorean reaction, would later demand the implementation of the 1793 constitution along with bread. The much maligned ‘Jacobin dictatorship’, like the ‘Bolshevik dictatorship’ 124 years later, was based upon a constitution which in theory envisaged the greatest democratic republic ever seen up to that point. The fact that it was not implemented was not due to the alleged ‘dictatorial’ tendencies of Jacobinism, but arose, like the terror itself, from the objective situation of the revolution which was besieged by reaction on all sides. Although different class forces were involved in the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks faced a similar situation as the Jacobins in France. The Soviet constitution which followed the October revolution of 1917, with power vested in the hands of soviets, with the right of re-call over all soviet deputies etc, was the most democratic in history. Yet, it could not be fully implemented because of a devastating civil war and the intervention of the 21 armies of imperialism. Emergency powers which effectively emasculated the soviets were vested in the hands of the Bolsheviks, the most democratic and revolutionary party in history.
The Bolshevik leadership, like the Jacobins before them, hoped that with the defeat of the counter-revolution, the soviets would be restored and freedom given to all of those who accepted the basis of the revolution. In the bourgeois revolutions, not only in France, but also in the English revolution of the seventeenth century, force was required to hold down the feudal counter-revolution. But the British bourgeoisie of the twentieth century do not need to employ force against advocates of a return to feudalism, to ‘merrie England’ (which was not so merry for the mass of the population). The advantages of bourgeois society over feudalism are no longer in dispute. However, things stood rather differently in the seventeenth century. Then, Cromwell was compelled to resort to the sword to suppress the advocates of feudalism and also to cut off the head of a king. The 1793 French constitution was prefaced by a new declaration of rights amplifying the 1789 version, with provisions for religious liberty, economic freedom and the institution of ‘political democracy’. Its main provisions allowed for a legislative body, elected by direct, universal male suffrage with single member districts. The executive council was to be chosen by the legislative body and provisions were allowed for the holding of referendums. The constitution itself would be ratified by the people. It also proclaimed that the aim of society was ‘the general welfare’, stipulating poor relief, a ‘sacred obligation’, as a right of the poor.
While introducing the Constitution, the Convention also ratified the sale of property of emigrés to the peasants, in small parcels to be paid for over ten years. This was seen as a means of binding the peasants, particularly the small peasants, to the revolution. This decree proposed the optional division of the common lands by head. On 17 July, the Convention also carried through the famous abolition, without compensation, of all that remained of manorial rights. This merely ratified ‘juridically’ what the peasants had in effect carried through themselves. Yet it completed the task of eliminating feudal rights which had been left unfinished in the wake of the 1789 revolution.
