A Social History of the French Revolution

Norman Hampson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134812455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The revolutionary movement which began in 1787 disrupted every aspect of French society, rising to a pitch of such extreme violence that the effects are still felt in France today. The Revolution was the product of social tensions that developed throughout France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Norman Hampson analyses the nature of these social conflicts within their political framework. With enough background information to satisfy the general reader with no previous knowledge of the subject, Norman Ha mpson's book devotes particular attention to provincial France. The result is both a picture of the supreme crisis in French society, and an examination of social attitudes and aspirations whose influence has been universal and enduring.

IX The Failure of Both Principle and Expediency

Nous sommes placés entre l’anarchie du terrorisme et celle du royalisme.

FLORENT GUIOT, representative on mission in the Nord

ALL through the autumn of 1793 the Committee of Public Safety consolidated its authority in the Convention and the country at large. The system of government, based on a sovereign assembly and an executive similar to a war cabinet, evolved, in the British way, both by statutory decision and the accumulation of precedent. The Committee’s victory of 24th– 25th September, when it was attacked in the Assembly by malcontents of various persuasions, gave it a measure of control over representatives on mission, who were gradually transformed into its own agents. The decree of 10th October, which shelved the application of the new constitution until peace returned, officially entrusted the Committee with the supervision of ministers, generals and local government. The establishment of a national food commission, under the control of Lindet, on 22nd October, greatly extended its control over the economy and partially centralized the system of requisitioning on which towns and armies increasingly depended for their bread. This process of centralization reached its climax with the important decree of 4th December which was intended to substitute a unified national policy for the chaotic local initiative of the autumn.¹ The Central Government now asserted its complete control over representatives on mission, who were forbidden to delegate their powers and to maintain their own revolutionary armies or impose special taxation without approval from Paris. The powerful Departments were replaced as organs of revolutionary local government by the humbler Districts, to each of which was attached an Agent National, nominated by the Committee. The latter now assumed the power to dismiss elected local government officials and replace them with its own nominees— a threat to their position on the Paris Commune that was not lost on Hébert and Chaumette. Departments, Districts and their comités de surveillance, generals and civil and military courts were each to submit reports to the Central Government every ten days. In this way revolutionary France acquired a bureaucratic organization without parallel in eighteenth-century Europe.²

The extent of this centralization was naturally limited by material factors such as primitive equipment and communications no quicker than those of the Romans—although a semaphore was installed to link Paris with the north-eastern frontier in the summer of 1794. The way in which the system of government had evolved also limited the powers of the Committee of Public Safety, for finance was in the hands of an independent committee under Cambon, while the Committee of General Security, in charge of police activities, developed an ‘empire’ almost equal to that of its more famous partner. But with all its limitations and imperfections the revolutionary government proved powerful enough to overwhelm its foreign and domestic enemies. Lyons fell on 9th October; Toulon was recaptured on 19th December. Three days later the relics of the Vendéan army which had crossed the Loire in October were destroyed at Savenay and the danger of offensive military action from the Vendée was over. By the end of 1793 French territory had been cleared of invaders, with the exception of Condé, Valenciennes and le Quesnoi in the north-east and Port- Vendres and Collioure near the Spanish frontier, and the republican armies had once more penetrated into the Palatinate.

The new economic controls succeeded in supplying towns and armies with an adequate supply of cheap bread and in feeding the rapidly-expanding war industries with labour and raw materials. In spite of the enormous war expenditure, prices were relatively stable, and the assignat, which had fallen to 29 per cent of its facevalue in September, had actually risen to 51 per cent by the end of the year. All this was what the sans-culottes had demanded in the summer and they had few grounds for complaint. But the revolutionary Government had no intention of sharing its power with any section of the community. Henceforth the sans-culottes could exercise local authority only as its obedient agents. When Chaumette, on 1st December, tried to assert the control of the Paris Commune over the comités révolutionnaires of the Sections, he was sharply called to order and the Commune was henceforth on the defensive. The political strength of the sans-culottes lay precisely in the semi-autonomous authorities—Section, Clubs and well-disposed representatives on mission—whose freedom of action was being continually whittled away by the Central Government. Moreover the Committee of Public Safety, which had shared in the savage anger of the sans-culottes in the autumn, now drew back from the anarchic violence that had resulted. On two issues, dechristianization and the more extreme forms of terrorism, the Committee drew away from the militant sans-culottes.¹

In Paris the dechristianization campaign had been exploited by a handful of minor politicians, notably Proli, Desfieux, Pereira, and Dubuisson, in search of popular support. In the Committees of Public Safety and General Security as October the deputy, Fabre d’Eglantine denounced these men to counter-revolutionary agents in foreign pay.² Whether or not the committees believed this—probably false—accusation, they had good reason to suspect that the motives of Proli and his associates were primarily political. Moreover the Government and ministeriallyminded deputies such as Danton were well aware that dechristianization was creating unnecessary enemies in the countryside. Robespierre was sensitive to both these arguments and in addition his religious temperament was probably outraged by the crude blasphemy of the mascarades that delighted the sans-culottes. Towards the end of November he and Danton took the offensive, had Proli, Desfieux and Pereira expelled from the Jacobins, intimidated Chaumette into repudiating the attack on religion and induced a somewhat reluctant Assembly to reaffirm the principle of freedom of worship. This latter decree was generally disregarded in the provinces, where the dechristianizing campaign had still to reach its peak. Even in Paris the churches remained closed. But the new argument that dechristianization, and extremism in general, formed part of a foreign plot to destroy the Revolution by its own excesses, inaugurated a period of suspicion and confusion in which all the old landmarks disappeared. When an excess of revolutionary zeal was denounced as treason by respected Montagnard leaders, the sans-culotte militants began to lose some of their enthusiasm for Sectional politics, which in any case were being deprived of much of their interest as the Government drew more and more power to itself.

Victory in the civil war, at Lyons, Toulon, and round the Loire estuary, brought with it the most furious repression of the whole Revolution. The republicans found themselves confronted with large numbers of prisoners who had taken up arms against the Revolution. Their methods of exterminating opponents, who were all liable to the death penalty on the mere proof of their identity, attained a degree of ferocity almost comparable to those of the twentieth century. At Lyons, Collot and Fouché, finding the guillotine too slow, mowed down over 350 by cannon fire. Eventually almost 2,000 of the Lyonnais perished. Carrier at Nantes, with the gaols overflowing with Vendéan prisoners dying of an epidemic which carried off 3,000 in six weeks, tolerated if he did not authorize the drowning of up to 2,000 prisoners in barges scuttled in the Loire, while 3,000 more were shot. Although many of the Toulonnais escaped with the British fleet, Fréron and Barras shot 800 in the first three weeks after the recapture of the port.¹

To some extent the Committee of Public Safety shared in the responsibility for this slaughter. But towards the end of the year the Government’s attitude seemed to be changing.¹ Ronsin, the commander of the revolutionary army at Lyons, was recalled to Paris and arrested, and early in the new year Fréron, Barras, and Carrier were also brought back. Collot felt obliged to hasten back from Lyons in mid-December to defend himself against the changing current of opinion. The terrorists had also been powerful allies of the sans-culottes— Carrier was the hero of the Cordeliers Club and Collot the sans-culottes’ protector on the Committee of Public Safety. Their ruthless punishment of rebels had corresponded to the primitive violence of much sans-culotte opinion, and they had tended to combine extreme repression with dechristianization, economic levelling and the promotion of sansculottes to positions of local power. A halt to this policy of extreme Terror, however justified or desirable, was bound to produce a reaction against the terrorists, to confuse the revolutionary rank and file and to prepare the way for the revival of the local bourgeoisie, with bitter wrongs to avenge.

The changing attitude of the Government and the collaboration of Robespierre and Danton inevitably raise the question of whether the Committee of Public Safety was not deliberately trying to moderate the course of the Revolution and return to its conciliatory policy of the previous June. On the whole this appears unlikely, but the obscure political intrigues of the autumn and winter of 1793–4 permit only of the most tentative interpretations. The Montagnards had no sooner won control of the Revolution in the summer of 1793 than they split into warring factions.² Hébert and the partisans of violent and extreme measures took the offensive in the Jacobin Club. In November they encountered growing opposition from a number of deputies who, for various reasons, objected to the increasing violence of the Revolution. Among these was Fabre d’Eglantine, implicated in a piece of parliamentary corruption whose exposure would cost him his life.³ Fabre therefore set out to destroy his accomplices and political enemies and, if possible, to install his friends in positions of power. His associates, commonly known as ‘Dantonists’, although Danton’s own rôle is remarkably obscure, advocated a policy of clemency towards the defeated enemies of the Revolution. Desmoulins’ support for this policy was probably disinterested, but for Fabre clemency began at home and could only be guaranteed by a change of government.

At the same time the Committee of Public Safety became convinced, perhaps correctly, that the British Government was employing its agents in France to set the revolutionaries against each other.¹ Robespierre, whose freedom from departmental responsibilities gave him time to concentrate on general policy, had therefore the difficult task of destroying these agents of division while protecting the honest revolutionaries whom they had misled. He apparently regarded the dechristianization movement in Paris and the extremists’ liking for the denunciation of their colleagues as confirmation of the foreign plot that Fabre had ‘revealed’ in October. His alliance with Danton in defence of religious freedom led him to give general support to the ‘Indulgents’ in December, reading in proof the first two copies of Desmoulins’ new journal, the Vieux Cordelier. Even when Fabre moved on to attack the structure of revolutionary government itself Robespierre’s silence seemed to imply approval.² By mid- December it looked as though Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety were aligning themselves with conservative forces against the advocates of violent terror and their sans-culotte supporters.

This situation was transformed by the return of Collot from Lyons on 17th December. Alarmed at the transformation of the political climate in Paris while he himself was still carrying out the old policy of ruthless repression in the south, Collot rallied the ‘Hébertist’ forces, which returned to the fight in the Jacobin Club. The Committee of Public Safety, threatened with an open breach between Robespierre and Collot, recovered its unity behind a policy of neutrality, Robespierre trying to divert the leaders of the two factions from their war of personalities. Fabre’s corruption was exposed, and his arrest on 13 January 1794 possibly convinced Robespierre—always inclined to equate corruption with treason—that the foreign agents were as active on the one side as he had previously supposed them to be on the other. Fabre’s imprisonment brought a temporary lull, but no reconciliation between the two factions.

In March the Cordeliers Club, perhaps hoping to profit from sans-culotte unrest caused by a temporary food shortage, began vague talk of insurrection. Collot tried in vain to induce the Club to resign itself to Jacobin leadership, and on 12th March the leading ‘Hébertists’ were arrested. Their trial by the revolutionary tribunal was a mere formality, and on the 24th Hébert, Ronsin, Vincent, Momoro, Clootz, Proli, Desfieux, Pereira, Dubuisson and ten others were executed.¹ The Committee of Public Safety had been insisting for months that all its critics, of Left and Right, were the agents of a counter-revolutionary plot. It was therefore not surprising that the trial of the ‘Hébertists’ should be followed by a blow in the opposite direction—especially since Fabre and his fellow-embezzlers were unlikely to arouse much sympathy. It was presumably not the principle of the jeu de bascule that divided the Committee, but the decision to include in the purge eminent deputies with many friends in the Convention, notably Danton and Desmoulins. The origins of this decision are obscure. Robespierre at first opposed the judicial murder of Danton and Lindet refused to sign the order for his arrest on 31st March. Once the Committee had decided to strike, however, it had no alternative but to continue to the bloody end: an acquittal in a political trial is a vote of no confidence in the Government. The Convention was bullied into lifting the parliamentary immunity of nine deputies. The revolutionary tribunal was subjected to heavy pressure until it returned the appropriate verdict. On 5th April Danton, Desmoulins, Delacroix, Philippeaux, Fabre, Chabot, Basire and seven others were executed, together with Hérault-Séchelles, wrongly suspected of betraying the Committee’s secrets to the enemy. On the 13th Chaumette and bishop Gobel followed them to the guillotine, with the widows of Desmoulins and Hébert, in one of the most cynical of all Fouquier-Tinville’s amalgames.

The three trials of germinal transformed the whole political situation. The sans-culottes were stunned by the execution of the Père Duchesne, the commander of the revolutionary army, and Vincent. All their positions of influence fell one after the other: the revolutionary army was disbanded, the inspectors of foodhoarding dismissed, Bouchotte lost the War Office, the Cordeliers Club was reduced to frightened impotence, and Government pressure brought about the closing of 39 popular societies within two months. The sans-culottes found their faith in revolutionary men and institutions shaken and the Section of the Cité, dutifully congratulating the Assembly, remarked with more truth than tact, ‘From now onwards the people will not be so ready to believe those who call themselves its friends.’¹ Henceforth the Sections tended more and more to abandon politics for the collection of saltpetre and the raising of funds to equip cavaliers jacobins—a tendency that all of the members of the Committee of Public Safety were sooner or later to regret. The Commune, shorn of Hébert and Chaumette, soon suffered another blow in the arrest of Pache, the mayor. Under his successor, Lescot-Fleuriot, with Payan as Agent National, it became entirely subordinate to the Government. The majority of the deputies would have consoled themselves easily enough for the destruction of sans-culotte power in Paris, but the execution of the ‘Dantonists’ had deprived the Conve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• I France on the Eve of the Revolution
• II The Victory of the Aristocracy
• III The Victory of the Third Estate
• IV The Failure to Compromise
• V The Re-Shaping of France, 1789–1791
• VI The Turning-Point
• VII The Division of the Republicans
• VIII The Precarious Victory of the Sans-culottes
• IX The Failure of Both Principle and Expediency
• X The Aftermath
• Bibliography