The opponents of the Jacobins, particularly in the provinces, were not reconciled to the June overturn in Paris. A new civil war broke out. In Brittany, Normandy, Franche-Comté and in the south, the departmental administrations seceded. They had, in effect, been in open revolt since March but not, in Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon, ‘popular’ tribunals ordered patriots to be guillotined or hanged. Even in Paris, a number of sections in the centre and the west were controlled by the ‘moderates’ and behind them stood the royalists. Toulon was preparing to surrender to the English and its re-capture by the republic provoked a civil strife every bit as ferocious, including bloody reprisals, as in the Vendée. As Lefebvre has pointed out: ‘In July it had seemed that France was disintegrating’.
On top of this, the economy deteriorated further. The assignat slumped in value between June and August. The problem of food and prices had remained unsolved. The revolution of May and June had done little to remedy this. Price increases outstripped wages and attacks were once more made on the wealthy shopkeepers and wholesalers. A worker declared: ‘It is known that this class in general is the only one to have profited from the revolution’. Riots over the price of soap broke out in late June, which led to the outburst of Roux mentioned earlier. The Parisian masses inundated the Convention with demands for the introduction of a maximum, a ceiling on prices, coupled with demands to curb inflation and restrain speculation. The masses indissolubly connected the revolution’s mortal combat with its external and internal enemies with a war against the ‘selfish rich’. No compromise was possible with the Coalition of European powers, who wanted to restore the old regime. The Austrians in some areas, such as the Nord, which they had re-occupied, restored feudalism.
The September insurrection
Voices amongst the sans-culottes demanded the death penalty against hoarders, even the closing of the stock exchange and the suppression of joint stock companies, the quintessence of capitalism itself. In this situation the idea of another march, an ‘insurrection’, to enforce the demands of the sans-culottes, grew. In July and August the remaining strongholds of bourgeois and conservative elements in the Parisian section had been purged. Growing discontent culminated in the ‘insurrection’ of 4-5 September which, after some hesitation, the Paris Commune supported.
It began with the building workers joining with others from the workshops who then converged in a demonstration near the Ministry of War. The Commune’s leaders, Hébert and Chaumette, first of all tried to dissuade the demonstrators, but then agreed to a march on the Convention the next morning. Workshops were ordered to close the next day, and masters and journeymen were urged to join the demonstration. The issues of prices and food supplies were played down. Yet the decisions taken in the wake of this demonstration left their mark on the subsequent development of the revolution. On the one side, needy sans-culottes were to be compensated with 40 sous per attendance at the section meetings, while, on Danton’s initiative, the number of section meetings were cut down to two a week. This expressed the fear, not just on the part of Danton, but also of the Jacobin leadership as a whole, of their sans-culottes allies.
However, mass pressure for price controls was irresistible. On 29 September the Convention passed the famous maximum général. This put a limit on the prices of a large range of essential goods and services, including that of labour. Prices were limited to those which existed in the departments in June 1790 plus one third. At the same time, wages were raised by 50 per cent. A police agent was to report: ‘The people have been overjoyed by the news of the decreed passed by the National Convention on price ceilings for food and staples of prime necessity’. By this measure, the Jacobin Convention seemed to cement the alliance between it and the sans-culottes which had effected the June overturn and was the foundation of the revolutionary government in Year Two of the republic. This government lasted from the summer of 1793 to the summer of 1794.
The sans-culottes had made significant advances, with the right to vote and now, it seemed, cheap food and the control of supplies. The Jacobins on their part, by leaning on the sans-culottes, had risen to power and crushed their Gironde opponents. They ruled in the Convention, with the sans-culottes’ representatives almost totally excluded, while the latter controlled the Paris Commune, the section assemblies and the clubs, the local revolutionary committees and battalions of the National Guards. However, as Rudé has commented, this alliance was ‘riddled with contradictions, the partnership oculd not last long: these had already become apparent on the morrow of the common victory and will become far sharper in the critical months ahead’. Its bonds already loosened in October 1793, by the summer of 1794 the alliance lay in ruins and brought down both partners in its fall.
A revolutionary government had begun to take shape in France at the beginning of July. Its core consisted of Couthon, Saint-Just, and those like Barère who had come over from the Plain. Lindet and Robespierre joined them on 27 July. Carnot, Billaud-Varennes and Collot d-Herbois also joined on 6 September. As Lefebvre has pointed out, ‘Although they all belonged to the bourgeoisie, it was primarily social leanings that separated Robespierre or Saint-Just, who were partisans of a social democracy, from Carnot or Lindet, who were distinctly conservative’. These men controlled the committee which exercised power in the name of the Convention. Yet it had been barely assembled when it was beset on all sides by new disasters.
On 13 July 1793, Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, a young royalist from Normandy, and three days later the ‘moderates’ in Lyons beheaded Chalier. Janet, an historian hostile to the Jacobins, was to write a hundred years later: ‘Enemy troops invaded French territory from four sides: from the north, the English and Austrians; in Alsatia, the Prussians; in the Dauphiné, proceeding as far as the city of Lyons, the Piedmontese; and in Roussillon, the Spaniards. And all this at a time when civil war raged on four sides: in Normandy, in the Vendée, in Lyons and in Toulon’. Plekhanov comments:
The government, which had taken up the struggle against these innumerable inner and outer foes, had neither money nor sufficient troops: it could count on nothing but a boundless energy, the active support of the revolutionary elements of the country and the colossal courage to shrink from no measure, however arbitrary, illegal or ruthless, so long as it was necessary for the defence of the country.
Trotsky showed later, that it was not just the young French republic, but the bourgeoisie of the United States during the Civil War who also resorted to ‘terroristic’ measures to suppress the slave owners, their press and their supporters in the northern states.
In July and August, reaction appeared to have the revolution by the throat. Over a period of three weeks, Mainz capitulated to the Prussians and the Austrians seized the frontier fortress of Condé and invaded northern France. Spanish troops crossed the Pyrenees and advanced on Perpignan and, in Corsica, Paoli led a revolt with British naval support which expelled the French from the whole island. In addition to this, the siege of Dunkirk was opened by the British in August and October, and coalition forces invaded Alsace. At the same time, the royalists had seized some important provincial centres such as Lyons and Marseilles.
On 12 July, the Convention forces besieged Lyons, taking it in August. They followed this up by capturing Marseilled on 25 August, just in time to prevent it from capitulating to the British fleet which was cruising offshore. In Toulon, the counter-revolution handed the town and the arsenal over to the British fleet proclaiming Louis XVII as king. Twenty-six of the republic’s 65 ships of the line and 16 of its 61 frigates were handed over to the enemy. This was ‘a disaster worse than Trafalgar’. Modern bourgeois historians, eager to criticise the ‘bloodthirsty’ Robespierre, conveniently pass over the causes of the terror. Robespierre himself declared to the Convention: ‘In two years, 100,000 men have been butchered because of treason and weakness. It is weakness for traitors that is destroying us’.
The numbers who went to the guillotine during the Montagnard dictatorship were minimal compared to those who perished on the battlefield. Plekhanov points out:
After the Montagnards had called to arms the entire French youth, without being able to supply the newly formed armies even partially with arms and food out of the slender means flowing to them from taxation, they resorted to requisitions, confiscations, forced loans, decreed rates of exchange for the assignats – in short and in fine, they forced upon the scared possessing classes money sacrifices, all in the interests of an imperilled country for which the people were sacrificing blood.
The Iron determination and energy of the Jacobins bolstered by the sans-culottes was all that stood between the revolution and the triumph of reaction. Twenty years later, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Jeanbon St André, would declare:
Do you know what kind of government was victorious? A government of passionate Jacobins in red bonnets, wearing rough woollen cloth, wooden shoes, who lived on simple bread and bad beer and went to sleep on mattresses laid on the floor of the meeting halls, when they were too tired to deliberate further. That is the kind of men who saved France.
Up to August-September 1793, measures against the counter-revolution were relatively mild. Under the pressure of the demonstration of 5 September, however, the Convention made terror ‘the order of the day’. Between 6 and 8 September, measures were introduced resulting in the arrest of any enemy nationals and the confiscation of their property. Seals were placed on the houses of bankers and stockbrokers and, on 9 September, the revolutionary army was organised under the command of Ronsin.
On 17 September, the ‘Law of Suspects’ was agreed to by the Convention. This was followed by the obligatory wearing of the tricolour cockade. Thus, throughout September the Convention steadily moved toward the implementation of the ‘controlled economy’. This went hand in hand with the stepping-up of the terror. From October to December, executions were increased with the guillotining of Marie Antoinette on 16 October. She was followed to the scaffold by the 21 Girondins, including their leader Brissot who perished on 31 October.
The Girondin leaders were eliminated either through execution, suicide or mass arrests. At the same time, the Jacobins took steps to distance themselves from the more ‘extreme’ sans-culottes. Roux and Varlet were arrested and Leclerc disappeared. However, the Jacobin convention enjoyed colossal authority and support from the sans-culottes. The levée en masse had raised a million men, and on 10 October, on the initiative of Saint-Just, the Convention finally proclaimed that ‘the provisional government of France is revolutionary until the peace’.
War to the death against feudal reaction was now decreed by the revolutionary government. When this decree was read out in the Convention, one of the deputies cried out: ‘Have you then concluded a treaty with victory?’ The answer was: ‘No, we have concluded a treaty with death’.
The Committee, however, invested its hopes in the rank and file, predominantly sans-culottes, rather than the officers, many of whom were still suspected of royalist sympathies. The Jacobins were in a similar situation to that which faced the Bolsheviks after they took power. The latter were compelled to rely on former Tsarist generals in the early days of building the Red Army, but checked their actions through widespread democracy amongst the army’s ranks and by a system of ‘political commissars’. In France, the same functions were undertaken by the representatives of the Committee appointed to each army. Thus the Committee wrote to its representatives with the army of the Rhine on 6 October 1793: ‘Watch the generals. Make no allowance for them. When the armies are endangered it is almost always because of their treason’.
The economic situation of the masses had improved as a result of the introduction of the maximum général. Its introduction had the immediate effect of both guaranteeing the support of the sans-culottes and of arresting inflation.
In the three months that followed the introduction of the maximum, the value of the assignat also improved dramatically. The police reports at the time record the hopes of the masses who connected the cheap and adequate food that they received with early victory for the republic: ‘The workers who gather in great numbers at meal times in front of the city hall on the square rejoice at the reduction in staple prices, at the ardour of the youths being conscripted, and especially at the imminent victory of the republic’.
Robespierre’s stock had risen with the improvement in the conditions of the masses. The most oppressed layers were enamoured of the Convention as another report indicated ‘The market women are in a gay, charming mood; they sing the praises of the Convention’. This was the period when the power of the sans-culottes was at its height. They were dominant throughout the Paris administration. Their militants held sway in the sectional assemblies and committees, in the revolutionary committees, in the general assembly and in the executive of the Commune.
Out of the 454 members of the revolutionary committees holding office in Paris in the course of Year Two, it has been estimated that 9.9 per cent were wage earners, 63.8 per cent were shopkeepers, small workshops masters and independent craftsmen, while only 26.3 per cent were rentiers, manufacturers, civil servants, and members of the ‘liberal professions’.
The period after the September ‘insurrection’ and the implementation of the maximum général to the end of 1793 was the period of the greatest power of the sans-culottes. The authority of the Committee of Public Safety remained precarious. It was the sans-culottes who applied revolutionary measures, not just in Paris, but throughout the country. The representatives on mission from the Convention, surrounded on all sides by the hostility of local notables who were often closet Girondins, were forced to purge the local authorities and drew on the energy and revolutionary devotion of the local sans-culottes. Thus, an agent of the Minister of the Interior wrote on 24 September ‘I think the majority of the municipalities need to be changed so as to exclude big landowners and farmers who keep the other citizens in a state of dependence so that they don’t dare to say a word’.
The bourgeoisie were elbowed aside in Nantes and the municipality was made up of many sans-culottes with no wealthy merchants on the council. In some of the country areas, the councils were controlled by day labourers and the yeoman farmers. In one area, the members of the municipal council were illiterate, and sometimes the Justices of the Peace could hardly write while others could barely sign their names. Inevitably, the sans-culottes’ dictatorship at local and regional level was disorganised and anarchistic, but the Committee in Paris, groping towards the organisation of a government, was forced to base itself on them in the first period. The educated were also the wealthy, with Girondin and royalist sympathies. Nevertheless, the picture which has been presented of the sans-culottes as a disorganised rabble is completely false. Lefebvre comments:
When the government failed to act, it was the impetus of the Jacobins and deputies on mission that saved the republic in the summer of 1793. They re-established national unity, recruited and supplied the armies and fed the population. Nevertheless, there had been a surfeit of authorities and a lack of co-ordination and discipline. Arrests and taxes were causing anger, the revolutionary armies might be turned against the Convention, and local conflicts threatened to disorganise administration, or at least to reduce the effectiveness of the war effort. The spontaneous popular action had been salutary, but (as Levasseur noted) ‘Anarchy’ could not continue. The Committee deemed it necessary to organise the regime and to reinforce centralisation.
Robespierre in particular was determined to overcome the administrative anarchy that appeared throughout the country. The sans-culottes in Paris had circumvented the outlawing by the Convention of daily meetings of the sections and formed ‘Sectional popular societies’ which met on the nights when the sections themselves were not in session. Some of the local committees had raised armées revolutionnaires, sometimes from the unemployed, and powerful ‘pro-consuls’ like Fouché, Tallien and Carrier interpreted and applied the law in their own fashion in the provinces.
The need for a strong hand at the centre convinced the Committee that the power of the Paris government should be strengthened at the expense of local control and improvisation. This in turn required that the constitution of June 1793 should be put aside until such time as the counter-revolution had been defeated. The views of the Committee were summed up in the law of 4 December 1793 which vested full executive power in the Committees of General Security and Public Safety. They derived their authority from the Convention.
Bourgeois historians who accuse Robespierre of all along wishing to exercise a dictatorship conveniently pass over the fact that the deputies of the Plain accepted these emergency measures as did those of the Mountain. Thus the republican bourgeoisie, who were in a majority at the Convention, were prepared to sanction the most extreme revolutionary measures in order to safeguard the gains of the revolution.
It was the support of the Plain between June 1793 and July 1794 which was one of the factors which sustained Robespierre in power. So long as the counter-revolution remained a threat, they would continue to support Robespierre, no matter how reluctantly or distastefully they looked on the ‘terror’. Only when circumstances changes, when it appeared as though the counter-revolution had been driven from the soil of France, did their attitude towards the Montagnards in turn undergo a transformation.
The two great committees exercised a division of labour. That of General Security was responsible for the police and internal security, including the revolutionary tribunal, the work of the local vigilante and revolutionary committees. The Committee of Public Safety, on the other hand, had greater powers – to control ministers, appoint generals, conduct foreign policy and to purge and direct local government. As well as overruling local authorities, the Committee replaced local procurers of departments and communes with its own ‘national’ agents answerable to it.
At the same time, the independence and powers of the Paris Commune were severely curtailed. It was prohibited from sending commissioners to the provinces, its control over the National Guard was limited and the ‘revolutionary’ committees of the Sections came under the control of the Committee of General Security. The terror which up to now had been improvised was now directed from the centre. Rudé correctly comments: ‘It was the end of anarchy, but it was the beginning of the end of popular initiative as well’. Inevitably, the measures of the centralised, strong government provoked opposition from those who suffered at its hands. But it also came from precisely within the Jacobins’ own ranks and in the ranks of their allies in the Cordeliers Club.
Almost as soon as the Montagnards had taken power in June, divisions opened up in the Jacobin Club, with Hébert and his supporters clamouring for violent and extreme measures against reaction and the rich. They were opposed on the right by Danton. Around him gathered the so-called party of ‘indulgents’. Their opponents claimed they were indulgent towards the rich and the threat of counter-revolution. Danton had been dismissed from the Committee of Public Safety after its re-organisation on 10 July; he now retired with his wife to a country estate. Where ha had acquired the money for this farm we a mystery and has been since then a cause of endless speculation. The Robespierrists and some historians have suggested this came from bribes which he received from rich friends, those ‘corrupt’ ones who had grown fat on the war.
The main aim of the Dantonists was to break up the ‘revolutionary government’, to restore the freedom of action of local authorities, to dismantle the machinery of terror and to abandon the controlled economy. Above all, they argued for a negotiated peace, placing their hopes on the detachment of England from the European coalition. On 22 November, Danton declared: ‘I asked that the blood of man be spared’. Yet the foreign invaders had not yet been driven from the soil of France. The sans-culottes denounced such proposals as treason.
The opposition of the Hébertists represented, if anything, a greater threat to Robespierre. Danton enjoyed some support in the Convention, but the Left was powerful in the Cordeliers Club, the Paris Commune, the armées revolutionnaires, the clubs and Sections etc. The Jacobin leaders had already given notice of their attitude toward the most ‘extreme’ sans-culottes, with the repression of the enragés and the subsequent suicide of their leader Roux. Nevertheless, Hébert, in his journal Le Père Duchesne, echoed the demands of the sans-culottes for a more vigorous prosecution of the war and of the scaffold for hoarders and speculators. Hébert, together with Chaumette and Fouché (who was soon to switch sides, ending up as the police chief of Bonaparte), energetically supported the campaign of ‘Dechristianisation’. War was declared on the Christian religion in both Paris and the provinces. The sans-culottes carried through the wholesale closure of churches. They defrocked the priests and bishops, and enthroned the ‘Goddess of Reason’ in a special ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Every place of religious worship was closed down by the Commune in November. The Convention had shown its hostility to Christianity with the adoption of a totally new ‘republican’ calendar on 7 October. Accordingly, the new republican era began with the abolition of the monarchy on 22 September 1792. The year was divided into twelve months with thirty days, with five supplementary ‘sans culottides’ at the end. The months, at first known merely as ‘first’, second’, etc, were given names illustrating the seasons to which they applied: Ventôse, Floréal, Thermidor, etc.
The new calendar was supposed to symbolise the substitution of ‘reason’ for tradition, the cult of an idealised nature and a breach with Christianity. The Christian festivals disappeared overnight, along with Sunday, and the week became a ‘decade’ of ten days. The rest-day became a ‘decadi’ and Sunday was a working day.
However, the attempt to abolish the Catholic religion and worship was correctly attacked by Robespierre and the majority in the Convention as a major error. They were prepared to sanction the separation of the Church from the state, but, faced on all sides with enemies, they could not afford to drive devout Catholics, in the town but particularly in the rural areas, into the arms of reaction. Meanwhile, the undermining of the maximum général, inevitable on the basis of capitalism, brought the Committee into more and more conflict with the sans-culottes and their Hébertist leaders.
