In the autumn of 1793, the government was forced to resort to economic regulations, including the effective nationalisation of foreign commerce. It also attempted to conciliate the peasants, the lower middle class, the artisans and shopkeepers by omitting some items from control. Thus as early as October 1793, the Convention decreed that livestock would be exempt, which in effect circumvented price controls on meat. While the sans-culottes and the armées revolutionnaires sought to check the hoarding of food, the Committee of Public Safety countered this by forbidding house to house searches in Paris and elsewhere. Through the medium of an army of middle men, a thriving black market developed. A pound of butter sold at twice the control price and eggs sometimes two and three times the control price.
The sans-culottes bitterly complained but tended to blame the merchants and the shopkeepers rather than the government. They called for sterner action by the government and a harsher implementation of the ‘economic terror’ against the ‘selfish rich’. The government was caught between two fires, the need to conciliate the peasants and producers by amending the regulations and increasing the profits of business, and the demands of the sans-culottes for greater repression. A ferocious struggle unfolded in early 1794 between the three factions: the Robespierrists, the Dantonists or ‘indulgents’, and the Hébertists. Robespierre at first leaned on the Dantonists, in a joint campaign against ‘dechristianisation’, in order to crush the Left. However, this emboldened the Right. Through the mouthpiece of Desmoulins’ journal Le Vieux Cordelier, they campaigned for the lifting of the terror, negotiations with the enemy, and the abandonment of the controlled economy.
Robespierre, who had zigzagged between both factions, first leaning on one and then the other, now concluded that it was necessary to strike blows against both factions. Robespierre’s actions were determined by the stage which the revolution had reached. Engels wrote later:
As far as the terror is concerned, it was a war measure in so far as it had a meaning. Not only did it serve to maintain at the helm the class, or fraction of a class, which alone could secure victory for the revolution, but also assured it freedom of movement, elbow room, the possibility of concentrating its forces at the decisive points – the frontiers.
The attack on the Hébertists
The Robespierrists, the revolutionary petit bourgeois democracy, and the bourgeoisie gathered in the ranks of the Plain, perceived both the Commune and the Dantonists as opponents – the Commune with its frenzied defence of plebeian democracy and decentralization, and the Dantinist ‘indulgents’ who wished to conciliate the counter-revolution. The power, or subsequent impotence, of leading figures in the revolution, such as the Girondin leaders, then Danton or later Robespierre himself, lay not primarily in their personal strengths and weaknesses but in the objective reality reflectred at each stage in the revolution.
Hundreds of books and millions of words have been spent in seeking to explain the confused, passive and puerile attitude of Danton in the last months of his life. However, the same disorientation and passivity beset Robespierre on the eve of his downfall. The explanation for this phenomenon is that they represented certain social formations which, having played a progressive role, then came into conflict with the further progress of the revolution. At a certain stage, they exhausted all political possibilities and could not move decisively forward because of ‘overpowering reality’.
Changed conditions in the internal economic situation, international factors and not least the changed outlook of the masses, converted formerly powerful figures such as Danton or Robespierre into helpless figures in the face of hostile historical currents. Of course, this or that mistake could accelerate or decelerate the process as the case might be, but it was the objective situation which determined the fate of personalities and groupings at each stage in the French revolution.
In the period leading up to the elimination of the Hébertists, the discontent of the sans-culottes at the deterioration in their economic situation began to be directed against the government itself.
In late February, a woman worker declared to a group of others: ‘If I were not restraining myself I would tell the new regime to go shove it’. Bread became scarce and inedible with the peasants, intimidated by the sections’ commissionaires, bringing in less and less of their produce. Meat was in short supply and the Hébertists, incited the sans-culottes to demand stringent measures, whilst strikes broke out in the arms factories. Under the pressure of massive discontent, Saint-Just obtained a decree confiscating property of suspects and distributing it amongst the needy. The left in the Cordeliers Club believed that if it only stepped up the pressure, it would triumph once and for all. Ronsin, head of the Paris National Guard, spoke of the need for a new insurrection along the lines of September 1793. All that was intended was probably a demonstration, but the police reported that a section of the sans-culottes were arming themselves for a new journée.
To begin with, the Jacobins attempted a reconciliation but were rebuffed by the Cordeliers Club. Therefore, the Committee decided to strike a death blow at the Hébertists. Along with their leader Hébert, Ronsin and Vincent were also arrested, and, for good measure, foreign revolutionaries domiciled in Paris. This was dome in order to sustain the fiction that the Hébertists were linked with a ‘foreign plot’. Again, it is impossible here not to draw an analogy with the Russian revolution following the victory of reaction and the accusations by Stalin that Trotsky and the Opposition were agents of ‘foreign powers’. The Hébertists were executed on 4 Germinal (24 March). Five days before this the ‘corrupt’ ones the friends of Danton, Fabre d’Eglantine, Chabot, Basire, Delaunay – had been arrested and charged. The Committee then added Danton, Camille Desmoulins and two others, concluding that, having struck down the left, it was necessary to deal a blow against the right.
At first, Robespierre hesitated to sanction the execution of Danton, ‘the long decayed idol’. Under pressure of others on the Committee, however, he accepted and ‘took it upon himself to quash the protest in the dismayed and trembling Convention’. Added to the list of Dantonists were some well known speculators and a group of ‘foreigners’ who were there to justify the ‘foreign plot’.
The Dantonists were executed on 5 April 1794, and were followed by a mixed ‘batch’ among whom were Chaumette from the Commune, Hébert’s widow, and Lucille Desmoulins, Camille’s wife. Historians have had to agree that the guillotining of Danton, ‘though distasteful to former associates in the Convention, caused not a ripple of protest in the Sections nor among the sans-culottes.’ They differ, however, as to the reaction amongst the sans-culottes at the execution of Hébert. While the mood may have been one of apathy rather than anger, the majority of the sans-culottes could not fail to be stunned by the execution of the editor of Le Père Duchesne and leader of the Commune together with the commander of the revolutionary army, and Vincent. Lefebvre considered that the execution of the Hébertists marked a decisive turning point in the revolution:
In the history of the revolutionary movement the fall of the Hébertists marked thebeginning of the ebb tide. For the first time since 1789, the government had forestalled popular action by doing away with its leaders… Next to the enragés, Le Père Duchesne and the Cordeliers had been the real leaders of the sans culottes.
The government followed up with a ruthless purge of all the former strongholds of the sans-culottes. The armées revolutionnaires were disbanded on 7 Germinal, Year 2 (27 March, 1794). The Ministry of War was purged, as with the general council of the Commune and the police, which was filled with stooges of the government. This was followed with a decree whereby the Commission on Provisions assumed control of supplying Paris with bread and meat. The Cordeliers Club was reduced to impotency. The Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers became rubber stamps for the government, later recording 100 per cent votes for the government. The popular societies, which had lain outside the formal structures of the Jacobins, were also effectively destroyed.
The threat of reaction
The corresponding disappointment of the masses was recorded by police observers, one of whom reported just after the execution of the Hébertists: ‘The people no longer trust anyone’. A week later he continued: ‘In the cafés… one observes that those who talked a great deal are no longer saying anything’. Another worker was heard to exclaim ‘What can we expect… when we are betrayed by the people we have most confidence in’. The disappointment was deepened with the further undermining of the concessions which the sans-culottes had enjoyed in the previous period. The agitation in the market over the allocation of eggs and butter continued in March and an unemployed worker was arrested for shouting ‘Fine liberty we have! It was made for the rich; the only war being waged was against the poor’.
The Committee amended the maximum in late March. This provided for higher prices and profit margins accompanied inevitably with the growth of speculation. The growing anger of the masses was reflected in a letter sent by the laundresses of the Faubourg Saint-Marcel who denounced General Hanriot, commander-in-chief of the National Guard, as a ‘wretched hanger-on of Robespierre’. There was an even greater outburst of anger when the revised maximum was applied to wage rates.
The maximum général, introduced in September 1793, had not only stipulated the reduction in prices, but also limited wages, but by a smaller percentage. These reductions did have an effect in some trades, where workers’ resistance was likely to be weak. However in Paris, where the Hébertist Commune was in control and where there was a labour shortage, wages rose between two and three times above their pre-revolutionary level. But in the government-controlled workshops, attempts were made to rigidly apply lower wage rates, buttressed by a severe disciplinary code against ‘agitators’. Therefore, when Hébert was out of the way and the Commune reduced to impotence, the government prepared, with fatal consequences, measures to lower wages.
At the same time, they applied the notorious Le Chapelier Law, which effectively outlawed trade unions. When plasterers, bakers, port butchers and port workers struck for increased wages, the matter was sometimes referred to the police. After a short lull, the movement started up again amongst the arms workers in June. It spread to other branches, but the ring leaders in a number of the workshops were arrested on the spot, while others left their shops in search of better pay and less restricted conditions elsewhere. Barère denounced the workers who struck and instructed the revolutionary tribunal to take action against what he called ‘the counter-revolutionaries who have employed criminal methods in the workshops.’ A clamour for increased wages developed throughout June and July, with workers in the building trades, potters, etc, pushing for increases. On 7 July, even the Committees’ own printing workers struck work, leading to the arrest of three of the leaders. It was against this background that the Paris Commune on 23 July, with immaculate timing, coming as it did around the time of Robespierre’s downfall, published new wage rates to operate in the capital. The authorities took absolutely no account of recent increases in either wages or food prices. The great majority of the working population were now faced with substantial reductions, sometimes amounting to one half or more of their existing earnings.
The alienation of the sans-culottes was deepened by these measures. They were to play their part, in the apathy and passivity so evident at the time of Robespierre’s overthrow. The Committee believed that it had assured its domination by the double blow against the Hébertists on the left and the ‘indulgents’ on the right in late March and early April. But it had alienated itself, particularly the Robespierre faction within the Committee, both from the bourgeois National Convention and from the plebeian sans-culottes.
The Committee believed that the elimination of the Dantonists had assured it a safe majority in the Assembly. But the existence of so many ’empty seats’ spread a secret terror amongst the Assembly members; nobody felt safe from the guillotine. The Committee had assured its position as a mediator between the Assembly and the sans-culottes. But now, by breaking with the sans-culottes, it freed the Assembly, and to complete its self-destruction, it only had to split internally. More importantly, the power of the Committee of Public Safety was only secure just so long as the revolution was threatened by the royalists internally and while foreign troops still occupied French soil. Once these dangers were lifted, the bourgeoisie’s yearning to enjoy the spoils of their victory over feudalism in tranquillity and peace was to topple Robespierre. Persona; grievances and personality splits within the Committee, although playing a part in the downfall of Robespierre and his group, were nevertheless subordinate to the decisive changes in the objective situation.
Only with the greatest difficulties and by summoning up the colossal revolutionary energies of the masses did the republican armies vanquish the counter-revolution. As Lefebvre put it: ‘The will to conquer was universal. Without exception the Montagnards sacrificed everything to the army’. Through the levée en masse, raised and organised by the organisational genius of Carnot, an irresistible force was fashioned which smashed royalist internal revolt and the armies of the Coalition.
The royalist insurrections are defeated
In August 1793, the royalist insurrections were largely reduced but at terrible costs to both sides. Thus, in Lyons, declared a ‘freed city’ after its liberation by republican forces, ruthless repression, involving the demolition of the houses of the rich, and mass executions tool place. By March of 1794, 1667 death sentences had been pronounced by revolutionary committees. At the same time, the first war of the Vendée – the scene of the most vicious massacres on both sides of the whole revolution – was terminated.
In September 1793, the royalist armies – the ‘whites’ – suffered a setback, but then, joining up with the bands of Jean Chouan, reached Angers in December. Terrible street fighting took place in Le Mans, but the Vendéan forces were annihilated on 23 December. The republican forces then implemented the plan of ‘devestation’ that had been decreed by the Convention on 1 August. Bourgeois and royalist historians have described the repression effected by the republic on the Vendée as ‘genocide’. There is no doubt that executions of refractory clergy, counterrevolutionary suspects, ‘brigands’ and common law prisoners were enforced on a large scale. The most horrendous nocturnal slaughter was effected involving the mass drowning of captured Vendéans in the river Loire. Between 2-3000 prisoners perished in this fashion. There is no doubt that there were excesses committed by uncontrolled local terrorists. However, the royalists and the Vendéans used equally reprehensible methods and on a similar scale against captured republican forces.
Such excesses, while deplorable from a general humanitarian point of view, are inevitable in a civil war. The victory of the government forces in the Vendée was the background against which the clamour rose for the lifting of the terror. Yet the area was not completely vanquished nor were the forces of the Coalition about to abandon the field.
The Committee correctly estimated that the war was bound to re-remerge in the spring of 1794. Meanwhile, a revolutionary army of one million was being moulded, capable of defeating the revolution’s enemies. Revolutionary volunteers were fused with regulars and new talented officers such as Bonaparte emerged. The latter had distinguished himself first of all as an artillery capital in the siege of Toulon. At the outset, the revolutionary army had elected officers, and representatives of the Commune or deputies on mission from the Paris Committee frequently intervened in debates on military decisions, distributed sans-culottes newspapers and harangued the soldiers in the clubs.
More than once, republican deputies such as Saint-Just were themselves architects of victory. But Carnot, in reorganising and centralising the army, considerably cut back the principle of election of officers. The ranks still elected corporals, but some of the officers achieved their position on the basis of seniority. Carnot declared on 23 December 1793: ‘The armed forces do not deliberate, they obey the laws and execute them’. The clubs ceased to intervene in the administration of the army. And yet it was not coercion or the threat of the guillotine, as the slanderers of the republicans have argued, which inspired the republican armées of 1793-1794. They still preserved their largely democratic character, with soldiers still frequenting the clubs, and with the wide distribution of patriotic newspapers within the ranks.
Moreover, the Convention promised to reserve some emigré property for soldiers and it granted pensions to the disabled and allowances to relatives of the defenders of the patrie (fatherland). Saint-Just had declared: ‘You must not expect victory from the numbers and discipline of soldiers alone. You will secure it only through the spread of the republican spirit within the army’. With this spirit came innovation, improvisation and new military methods. Strategy was transformed by the necessity to exploit large numbers of men in battle. Possessing a greater manoeuvrability than the Coalition armies, the republican forces could use great masses in overwhelming the enemy by sheer force of numbers. These principles, first tested out by Carnot, were vindicated in a spectacular and sweeping fashion under Bonaparte later on.
Nothing was spared in order to supply the army and defeat the counter-revolution. Lefebvre comments, ‘the economy of the country was nationalised to a considerable extent, either directly by the creation of state industry or indirectly through supplying raw materials and manpower, controlling production, requisitioning supplies and price controls’. Such a policy could not have been implemented without the terror which ‘compelled even the most indifferent to expend some effort’. Neither passive resistance nor rife speculation could have been suppressed without the means of coercion possessed by the Committee. This did not mean, however, that the Jacobins were ‘secretly’ moving in the direction of communism. Even if the Jacobins had aspired to this – which they did not – the material basis for communism did not exist in France or Europe at that stage.
Expediency dictated the measures which the Committee took. But, with the demise of the Hébertists and a scaling down of war, the Committee moved in the opposite direction. It handed back foreign trade to the merchants at the first opportunity and refused to introduce, as the sans-culottes demanded, a further extension of the controlled economy. At the same time, the Committee engaged in a bold policy of ‘social reform’ in education, industry, the civil code and public assistance. Some of these remained on paper while others were incorporated later on into the laws that emerged from the revolution.
An Education Act was passed in January 1794 and, on 4 February, slavery was abolished in all France’s colonies. In late February, measures were introduced into the Convention by Saint-Just, which decreed that traitors had forfeited any claim to property, and therefore their goods would be thereafter used to eliminate pauperism. On 11 May, a scheme for providing assistance and free medical attention to the elderly and unfit and to nursing mothers and widows at an annual cost of 50 million livres was introduced.
But the turning point in Year Two of the revolution came with the victories of the Republican armies. The terror had been required to hold down the counter-revolution while the Coalition and the royalist armies held a knife to the throat of the revolution. Much has been made by hostile historians about the ‘bloody’ Jacobins. And yet, according to the most authoritative analyses, the ‘reign of terror’ up to the execution of Robespierre, probably accounted for less than 30,000 deaths, together with another 10,000 who died in prison. Most of these were executed for participation in the civil war. The revolutionary tribunal in Paris, moreover, which was to feature in the grisly tales of bourgeois writers and historians, accounted for no more than 2639 executions. And yet, as one historian has pointed out: ‘Fifteen thousand to 17,000 communards were shot in May 1871; there were perhaps 40,000 executions after the liberation of France in 1944’. This ‘terror’ – the first directed by the bourgeois against the Parisian workers, the second arising from the outbursts of the French people against Nazi collaborators – the bourgeois have no difficulty in justifying. Not so the ‘terror’ of the French revolution, which, as we have pointed out, arose entirely from the forcible attempts of royalist counter-revolution in consort with feudal and semi-feudal Europe to drown the revolution in blood.
The Committee, however, stepped up the terror on 22 Prairial (10 June 1794). Writing in 1935, Trotsky said:
Frederick Engels, who justified the terror of the Jacobins against the counter-revolution, nevertheless pointed out that: ‘Once the frontiers had been safeguarded, thanks to military victories, and after the destruction of the “frenzied” Commune… terror outlived itself as a weapon of the revolution’. Robespierre was at the height of his powers but, says Engels, ‘Henceforth terror became a means of self-preservation for him and thus it was reduced to an absurdity’.
The ‘great terror’ which arose from the law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) accounted for 1367 persons guillotined, while only 1251 had been executed in Paris from March 1793 to 10 June 1794. The revulsion arising from this, and more importantly the victory of the republican armies at Fleurus on 26 June, snapped the links between the deputies of the Plain and Robespierre. The 22 Prairial law had been introduced ostensibly to speed up the process of justice following the attempt on Robespierre’s life just before. However, it deprived the prisoner of the aid of defending counsel and sent a shudder of horror and fear throughout the Convention.
With the eviction of the coalition armies from French soil, powerful tendencies developed for the dismantling of the revolutionary machinery. This was not restricted just to those who wished to see the return of the ancien regime. Many others, while remaining faithful to the revolution in principle, were weary and yearned for peace. The Jacobin Clubs were split down the middle and were locked in almost perpetual disagreement. The sans-culottes were alienated and showed their opposition to the Committee in many ways. The bourgeoisie in the Convention, now that the external danger was removed, wanted a rapid dismantling of the ‘controlled economy’ and full political and social authority for its class.
Since the break between the Jacobins and the sans-culottes, the Convention felt that it could now assert itself. As we have seen, the Jacobins never had a majority in the Convention but ruled with the compliance of the Plain. The latter for their part were prepared to tolerate the Montagnards’ dictatorship so long as this was necessary to secure the revolution. It had ratified the decreed of the Committee, renewed on a monthly basis, only as long as the danger persisted. Nevertheless, it had never forgiven the Montagnards either for having come to power on the backs of the sans-culottes or for the decimation of the Assembly. At the same time, the 22 Prairial had alarmed many of the deputies themselves. They perceived a danger to themselves if the terror continued. Disputes also broke out within the Committee of Public Safety and between that Committee and the Committee of General Security.
Carnot and Saint-Just had argued over the conduct of military operations. The ‘practical men’, Carnot, Lindet, etc, clashed more with the ‘ideologues’, Robespierre, Couthon and Saint-Just, whom they accused of leaning towards the sans-culottes. Robespierre also clashed with the ‘terrorists’ in the Committee, Billaud and Collot, who did in fact lean towards the sans-culottes. Such were the mutual hostilities and suspicions that, in the month leading up to his eventual overthrow, Robespierre withdrew in disgust from all meetings.
