A New Dictionary of the French Revolution

Richard Ballard

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781848854642
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The French Revolution was a huge, brutal yet inspiring phenomenon that changed global political thinking and action, and its echoes resound even in the twenty-first century. It was an intensely complex mix of events, concepts and individuals and 'The New Dictionary' is an invaluable aid to unravelling its complications, and an essential companion for students and general readers alike. There are over 400 entries covering the main events, personalities, parties, ideologies, political ideas, philosophers, writers, artists, rebellions and wars, as well as touching on colonial and international developments, the interaction of church and state, science, law reform, events in the provinces and overseas territories and the reverberations in other European states. The Dictionary provides a full and vibrant history from the outbreak of revolution in 1789 to the Terror, the Revolutionary state, its wars and the rise of Napoleon.
Entries contain much more than just bare factual information: they provide a detailed commentary and include suggestions for further reading - both in print and online - which reference the extensive literature of over 200 years of scholarship and the latest historiography. Cross-referencing is extensive and the index provides reference to minor but important subjects contained in main entries.

A

Absolute Monarchy

The Term ‘absolute monarchy’ suggests that, in the old regime, the king ruled on the basis of being answerable only to God. There were certain features of monarchy which represented that idea, like the concentration of royal power at Versailles, and the authorization of the arrest of individuals by means of sealed letters (known as lettres de cachet) sent to prison governors. ‘Absolutisme’ (a word recognized by the Académie française only in 1865¹) is a caricature of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century realities in France. It was a matter of blood and inheritance, since the king personified the absolutist state, and was accountable to God for it. He was surrounded by ceremonial from his coronation to the etiquette at court. When he went to a town in the kingdom there was an Entrée, and his position at the head of a national hierarchy and judiciary was demonstrated.

But yet, even at his most imperious, Louis XIV, who devised the Bourbon monarchical system, could not rule without ministers or without having his edicts registered by the 13 parlements of the kingdom. The membership of the conseil en haut (upstairs council), which met next door to the king’s bedroom at Versailles, could be changed but its advice could not be ignored. Louis XV worked within this framework, supporting his minister Choiseul in his plans for an unprecedented alliance with Austria in 1756, for example. He exiled the parlements at the end of his reign in what amounted to a coup d’état, but Louis XVI felt constrained to call them back at his accession in 1774. Customary law had always conditioned a monarch’s decisions. In November 1787, the Duc d’Orléans asserted that raising government loans by the king in person in the Paris parlement (called a lit de justice) would not be legal. The king was in error when he replied that it would be legal ‘because it is my will’.

The charge against monarchy on the lips of revolutionaries was that it had become despotic, despite all the checks and balances. As Munro Price has said, ‘The prime cause of the fall of the absolute monarchy was its failure to break free of the bonds of the social hierarchy and transform its basis of support.’² When Calonne had declared the extent of the monarchy’s financial problems in 1786, the monarchy by itself was powerless to regenerate the nation. Loménie de Brienne had also failed to do so after Calonne’s departure. Lamoignon’s Plenary Court set up by the edicts of May 1788 to replace the parlements was a dead letter. Louis XVI had already agreed to the summoning of the Estates-General, but brought the date of its meeting forward from 1792 to May 1789. This was the first time the Crown admitted that it could not govern without some sort of representative assembly.³ Then the government suspended payments on 8 August, which amounted to a partial bankruptcy, and Brienne resigned. Necker returned as the only politician the rentiers thought they could trust, and the king reluctantly accepted him. ‘Absolutism had collapsed.’⁴

When we think of what changed and what did not in the French Revolution, centralized government was a feature of absolutism that persisted. Before the changes, the intendants (who could be called provincial governors) represented royal power in the provinces of France. From the seventeenth century onwards, Bourbon monarchs undermined the power of rural noble seigneurs and charters of town councils granted by earlier kings. And yet, in 1793–4, the new administrative framework of the One and Indivisible Republic, ruled by the Mountain, was even more rigidly centralized through representatives on mission responsible to the Committee of Public Safety. All federalist opposition was eliminated by means of official Terror and military action. If this was relaxed at all under the Directory, while the ‘White Terror’ and brigandage were rife, the prefects in the Napoleonic Empire soon asserted it again.

Doyle, William, Old Regime France (Oxford: Oxford University Presss, 2001).

Active Citizens

‘Active’ citizens, designated in the decree of 29 October 1789, denoted men over 25 who paid tax each year equal to what a day-labourer would earn in three days. They would elect electors for the deputies in the Legislative Assembly. The electors chosen by the active citizens were qualified as such by paying a sum equal to ten days’ wages for a labourer and being a proprietor of some kind.⁵

The deputies in the Legislative could be any active citizens. Originally the candidates for election were meant to be landowners who paid tax of a silver mark. This requirement was rescinded before the 1791 elections took place, but it was left to stand in most places because there was no time to change the electoral arrangements.

In comparison with the English electorate at the time, the number of active citizens was quite large, about two-thirds of the adult male population, that is 4.3 million.⁶ They had the right to vote not only for electors, but all other officials, even constitutional bishops and parish priests, whether they were Catholics themselves or not. Those men whose income was below that of active citizens were called passive citizens. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (used as a preamble to the 1791 constitution) gave them legal equality with everyone else, but no political equality. They could not vote for electors, but they were required to serve as soldiers when the levée en masse was ordered in 1793. Army service then qualified them to be active citizens.

When, after the overthrow of the monarchy, new elections were called for the National Convention, the distinction between active and passive citizens was abandoned and universal male suffrage was adopted for the only time in the revolutionary decade. The socialist historian and Third Republic politician Jean Jaurès called this decree ‘the mass mobilisation of electors, preparing and announcing the mass mobilisation of soldiers’.⁷

Administrative Framework of France, 1790

The National Constituent Assembly rationalized the structure of the provinces of the old régime by a decree of 26 February 1790. They were replaced with 83 départements of more or less uniform size in which administrative centres (chef-lieux) could be reached in one day’s travel. (When papal Avignon and the Comtat-Venaissin were incorporated into France a little later, the Vaucluse became and remained Department 84.) These new areas were to be named after geographical features such as rivers or mountains.⁸

Then came sub-division into four or five districts, corresponding to the old bailliages or sénéchaussées. Departments and districts were ruled by elected directories whose function was to implement the decrees of central government – successively the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, the National Convention and the Directory. The districts contained a number of cantons made up of a dozen or so communes, each of which was controlled by an elected mayor with a council and several notables. Large towns such as Paris, Lyon and Marseille were also called communes, and had their own structure by being divided into sections. These sections had primary assemblies which stayed in being to put pressure on the municipalities, especially in the capital itself and ‘federalist’ places such as Lyon in 1793.⁹

Alliance of Throne and Altar

Since 1516 when Francis I made his Concordat with the Papacy, French Catholic bishops had been appointed by the king and their choice approved by the pope. That meant dependence by the Church on the king, whose coronation oath included his undertaking to defend it. The Catholic bishops in Paris made Henry IV’s coronation conditional upon his renunciation of his Protestant faith in 1598, and he agreed, with the famous words ‘Paris is worth a Mass’. The partnership became exclusive. Louis XIV needed funds from the bishops of Languedoc for the Midi Canal to join the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Their condition was that he should revoke Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes and exclude the Protestants from France. In 1685 he complied.¹⁰

By the time of the Revolution, many great monastic foundations (and some small ones) had commendatory abbots who were appointed by the king for the sake of the revenues they paid to the individuals concerned – who did not need to be priests at all. When abbeys were abolished, church lands nationalized, and the refractory clergy exiled, the nostalgic alliance was of no use: Louis XVI was powerless to help them in spite of the putative delay afforded by his suspensive veto. The alliance was broken in 1790 by the subjection of the clergy to the authority of lay politicians in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the oath required in support of it.¹¹

Amar, Jean-Pierre-André (1755–1816)

Amar was treasurer of Grenoble before the Revolution, a magistrate in the Dauphiné parlement and purchaser of an office which carried nobility. Even so, he became a radical member of the Convention, yet finished up as a devout mystic.¹² He remained in Grenoble until he was elected to the Convention, where he sat with the Mountain and voted vociferously for the king’s death. As representative on mission in the Ain and Isère in 1793, he made a point of arresting as many as he could label as counter-revolutionaries. After the Girondins had been expelled from the Convention in June, he was put on the Committee of General Security (16 June 1793). He was implacable in his demands for the arrest of 41 Girondins and of their sympathizers.¹³

After the queen had been executed in October 1793, the Mountain took the opportunity to express its anti-feminist attitude. Olympe de Gouges was executed, and an attack was made on the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (attached to the enragés) who had gained a decree from the Convention that all women must wear the revolutionary cockade and the Phrygian bonnet. Amar presented the report on the place of women in the Revolution to the Convention, on 1 November, reiterating the Jacobin line that women must bring up the republic’s children and leave politics to men.¹⁴

Amar supported the indictment of the Hébertists, who had smeared him with being a rich banker, and the Dantonists. Yet he feared a Robespierrist dictatorship, and was irritated by the Committee of Public Safety setting up a police bureau because that was the brief of his own c...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Chronology
• Entries A–Z
• Reference Notes
• Bibliography