Ami du peuple, L’: founded by Marat in September 1789 circulated widely among the people. Often suppressed, it changed its name to Publiciste de la République francaise in March 1793. The last issue appeared the day after Marat’s murder.
armee révolutionnaire: armed force of Jacobins and sans-culottes raised in the late summer of 1793. Its principal purpose was to force farmers to release their stocks for Paris and other towns. It was disbanded after the executions of the Hébertists.
assignats: interest-bearing bonds which –with a face value of 1,000 livres each – were intended to be used in the payment for former church land. Assignats stopped bearing interest in May 1791; and, by the time of the Directory, 100 livres in assignats were worth no more than fifteen sous.
barrieres: customs posts surrounding Paris.
Brissotins: the name by which the Girondins were at first more usually known, after Brissot.
cahiers de doléances: list of grievances drawn up by each of the three orders before the meetings of the Estates General in 1789.
‘Ca ira!’: revolutionary song. First heard in Paris during the preparations for the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790. The refrain, which was said to have been written by a street-singer named Ladre, originally ran:
Ah! Ca ira, ca ira, ca ira!
Le people, en ce jour, sans cesse repete:
(Here we go, here we go, here we go!
The people, on this day, with the chorus).
The words were altered during the Terror to:
Ah! Ca ira, ca ira, ca ira!
Les aristocrats a la lanterne!
capitation: poll-tax levied in rough correspondence to income. Established in 1701. The clergy bought themselves out in 1710 for 24 million livres. The nobility had also become exempt by the time of the Revolution and the capitation was levied only on commoners.
Champs de Mars: originally the chief military parade ground of Paris..
Chouans: royalist insurgents who took their name from four brothers named Cottereau, known more often as Chouan. Chouans were active in La Vendée, Britanny and Normandy.
comités de surveillance: watch-committees formed in each commune in March 1793 to keep an eye on officialdom and supervise public security and order. They were usually controlled by extreme Jacobins and often took the place of local government. They later became known as comités révolutionnaires and after Thermidor as comités d’arrondissements.
Commune: the revolutionary local government authority of Paris. It was formed in July 1789 and disbanded after Thermidor. The official Commune on 9 August 1792, the day before the attack on the Tuileries.
Cordeliers: A Parisian district inhabited by many actors, playwrights, booksellers, publishers, printers and journalists, Marat and Camille Desmoulins among them. Danton also lived here.
Cordeliers’ Club (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: formed when the Commune redivided Paris and the Cordeliers’ District was absorbed into the section Théâtre-Francais. The Cordeliers’ Club was generally more radical than the Jacobins, after 10 August 1792 the more moderate members such as Danton stopped attending, and the enragés began to dominate it..
corvées royales: direct taxes paid in service rather than money.
Enragés: extreme revolutionaries, led by Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, who became a powerful force in Paris in 1793. They were particularly antagonistic to those suspected of hoarding or speculating.
faubourgs: former suburbs originally outside the walls of Paris but by the time of the revolution they had all been enclosed within the city’s boundaries.
fédéres: the citizen soldiers who came to Paris from the provinces for the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1792. Prominent among them were units from Brest and the men from Marseilles who popularised the Marseillaise.
Fermiers généraux: paid large sums for the right to collect various indirect taxes and made fortunes by exploiting them.
Feuillants: constitutional monarchists who resigned from the Jacobin Club in July 1791 in protest against moves to have the King deposed.
gabelle: the government salt monopoly by which people were made to buy specific amounts of salt at prices far higher than they would have fetched on an open market..
Garde Nationale: the citizens’ ,ilitia which was formed by the Paris districts in 1789. Originally a predominantly bourgeois institution. Its character changed as the revolution progressed.
Gardes-francaises: royal troops stationed in the capital when the revolution began. Most of them proved sympathetic towards the masses in the July 1789 insurrection.
Girondins: Name originally given to a group of deputies in the Assembly who supported Brissot’s policy of a ‘revolutionary war’ in 1791. Many came from the Gironde region. Later the name applied to a wider group in opposition to the main body of Jacobins.
Indulgents: those, who advocated a policy of clemency during the height of the First Terror.
Jacobin Club: founded at Versailles in 1789 and then known as the Breton Club as most of its members came from Britanny. On the removal of the Assembly to Paris it became known as the Jacobin Club because it met in the convent of the Jacobin friars. In 1791 the Club was named Société des amis de la constitution, sénate aux Jacobins and after the fall of the monarchy Société des Jacobins amis de la liberte et de l’égalité. The Club became increasingly revolutionary. It was closed in November 1795..
jeunesse dorée: gangs of young anti-Jacobins, armed with whips and weighted sticks, who were encouraged by Fréron to attack left-wing agitators and recalcitrant workers.
journée: an important day, particularly one upon which some action of revolutionary significance occurred.
lanterne: a lamppost which served as a gibbet in the early part of the Revolution.
levée en masse: the mobilisation of the country’s total human and material resources. It was approved reluctantly by the Convention on 23 August 1793.
livre: unit of weight and monetary balue. 20 sous = 1 livre. According to the journalist Linguet (1736-94) a man needed 300 livres a year to live in reasonable comfort.
maximum: declaration of maximum prices. The maximum of May 1793 imposed a limit on the price of grain only, that of September 1793 on most essential articles. The maximum was abolished in December 1794. Many shopkeepers had flagrantly disregarded it.
Montagnards: Jacobin deputies, collectively known as the Mountain, who occupied the higher seats in the Convention. Originally led by Danton and Robespierre, they helped to form the government after the overthrow of the Girondins..
Pere Duchesne: Hébert’s irreverent journal which appeared three times a week between 1790 and 1794.
Plain: the group in the convention, also known as the March or Marais, that occupied the middle ground between Girondins and Jacobins.
sans-culottes: literally ‘without breeches’, breeches were a form of dress associated with aristocrats and the well-to-do; workers wore trousers. The term had political as well as economic significance. Numerous shopkeepers and master craftsmen who read revolutionary newspapers and pamphlets influenced by their illiterate workmen liked to be considered sans-culottes. But sans-culottes were generally poor.
sections: before the Revolution, Paris was divided into sixty districts. The Commune was re-divided into forty-eight sections. Each had its own revolutionary committee and armed force upon which it could rely in times of trouble.
taille: basic tax of the French monarchy during the ancien régime which varied from province to province. The privileged and influential managed to escape paying it so that in practice it was paid almost entirely by the poor, principally the peasants..
vigntieme: Originally intended as a five per cent tax on income, by the time of the revolution it was mostly paid by the peasants.
