In part 6 of the Revolutions series, Dominic Alexander charts how the radical phase of the French Revolution rose to its height and then collapsed

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed
Part 4: The French Revolution: the road to revolution
Part 5: The French Revolution: Revolution and the Sans Culottes

On 10 August 1792, Paris rose in a celebrated insurrection, but unlike previous ones, this was carefully planned by the popularly controlled sections, and aided by the Marseilles fédérés, with Danton, Marat and Hébert as key figures, supported by the Cordeliers club. Despite a few thousand troops with canons protecting the royal palace, the insurrectionary crowd began to fraternise with the National Guard, who withdrew, and turned the artillery against the palace, which was left with less than a thousand Swiss Guards, and a couple of hundred aristocratic defenders. Nearly a thousand insurrectionists were killed in the ensuing battle, and more on the royalist side, but the sans culottes and their allies from Marseilles won the day. The king and family were removed to protective custody, and the monarchy effectively ended.

The president of the insurrectionary Paris Commune then addressed the Legislative Assembly demanding its dissolution. Robespierre was shortly afterwards elected by his section to the new Parisian Commune. The Assembly did not concede a republic to the Commune, but did announce new elections to be held by universal (male) suffrage, ditching property qualifications and the distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens, but retaining the two-tier elections, to the disgust of the likes of Robespierre and Marat. On the 16 August, all feudal rights and dues were finally suppressed.

It was the Commune which stipulated that ‘madame’ and ‘monsieur’ should be replaced by ‘citizen’. This new popular Parisian government also acted to consolidate the victory over the king, supressing royalist and Feuillant newspapers, and itself publishing papers that had been discovered proving the king’s treasonable correspondence with foreign powers. Lafayette attempted to get his army to march on Paris to restore the king, but finding his orders soundly rejected, he fled to the Prussian invaders.

A new national Convention was elected in September, and abolished the monarchy as one of its first actions. Within the Convention, the largest single group was the left-wing ‘Mountain’ (for their habit of sitting on the high benches of the Assembly), a group which largely but not entirely overlapped with the Jacobins. The Girondins provided the next largest group, almost equalled by the politically wavering deputies of the Plaine (as opposed to the Mountain). It was the Girondins, representing wealthy mercantile interests,^[1] who provided the new government, with three positions given to the Jacobins, including one for Danton.

There remained considerable anger in Paris about the massive death toll of 10 August, which many saw as an ambush, deliberately concocted by hidden counter-revolutionary forces. Nor were all the political factions happy with the Commune and its ability to organise the sans culottes. Into this unstable situation came the worsening military situation, with Verdun coming under siege. This was the last barrier to Prussian and Austrian troops marching on Paris, and it was soon to be surrendered. Moreover, it was well known that the government administration and the officer corps of the army were suffused with royalists. The revolution appeared to be in grave danger, and, particularly with Lafayette’s defection to the enemy, the fear of counter-revolutionary plots was at a height from top to bottom of Parisian society. However much circumstances encouraged a climate of paranoia and suspicion, Brissot and the Girondins fanned such feelings throughout the term of the Legislative Assembly.^[2]

Revolutionary violence

Fear focused on the likelihood that aristocratic counterrevolutionaries, held in none-too-secure prisons in Paris, backed by other brigands or ruffians within them, had amassed arms, and could break out and massacre revolutionaries as the Prussian army approached Paris. This was seen to be a particular danger, as many sans culottes expected to leave for the front imminently, and feared leaving their families behind defenceless. None of this was particularly implausible, but the result was a widespread feeling that ‘one must kill the devil before he kills us’. What followed was the September Massacres, where crowds broke into Parisian gaols, killing between 1100 and 1400 prisoners. These massacres have been used to blacken the reputation of the revolution ever since, and these were certainly brutal events.

However, the killings were not merely episodes of mindless violence; the crowds that carried out the massacres of prisoners did create revolutionary tribunals for the purpose. These have been labelled ‘kangaroo’ courts,^[3] but while more than 1000 prisoners were killed, over 1,300 were ‘acquitted’.^[4] Bloodthirsty as they were, these were not the actions of a mindless mob, but of a scared and hungry people who saw this violence as the only way to protect the revolution, and indeed, their own lives. The ancien régime had been soaked in its own bloody punishments and violence, and the rhetoric of the bourgeois revolutionaries, even of the ‘moderate’ varieties, was also violent and bloody. The problem for them only came when it was the poor classes who were carrying out violence in the name of their political goals.

From the Réveillon riots^[5] in 1789 to the death toll on 10 August, the poor of Paris had borne a heavy weight of death by violence, so it is predictable that at this desperate time they would seek to forestall further violence against themselves with the political vengeance of the September massacres. There have been other, perhaps more sophisticated attempts to explain and defend the violence of the radical phase of the revolution, but as distressing as it was, it needs to be contextualised carefully.^[6] Popular violence has also been used relentlessly to condemn the French revolution in particular, and popular political mobilisations in general. The image of the tricoteuse knitting at the guillotine, with a witch-like delight in the mechanised slaughter of the enemies of the revolution, is, of course, a misogynistic attack on the prominent participation of Parisian women in revolutionary events, more than any reflection of the historical reality.

At the time, blame for the massacres was landed by the Girondins at the feet of the leaders of the Commune, ‘a few tyrants’, and most of all on Marat, but his paper was not even published in the two weeks prior, while one Girondin, Gorsas, had written on 3 September: ‘Let them perish! The furious people … are meeting out a terrible but necessary justice … for … we are in open war with the enemies of our liberty’.^[7]

Girondins vs sans culottes

The immediate crisis eased on 21 September when the news of the ‘battle’ of Valmy reached Paris. There, French troops had outnumbered and outgunned the Prussian army, which withdrew rather than risk a full-scale battle. Valmy itself was more a symbolic victory rather than a real military triumph, but it did mark a return to confidence that the revolutionary volunteer armies could defend France, and it was followed by a rapid series of victories. Another concern for the leaders of the revolution was the apparently uncontrollable power of the Parisian sans culottes. The Girondin leader, Brissot, called the crowd a ‘hydra of anarchy’.^[8] The revolution had been caught between two irreconcilable forces. On the one hand was the revolutionary ferment and the demands of the sans culottes. On the other was the bourgeois revolutionaries’ concern to protect property, and their related dedication to free-trade principles. This dichotomy ultimately lay behind the many political ruptures of the revolution. It also meant that it wasn’t until the summer of 1793, after the fall of the Girondins, that redemption payments for feudal dues were finally completely abolished.

The war with Austria and Prussia went on after Valmy, driven significantly by Girondin enthusiasm for it. This is sometimes put down to the mercantile interests of the Girondists, for whom the conquest and ‘liberation’ of Belgium from Austrian rule was advantageous. Furthermore, there was clearly a wish to divert popular discontents outwards, and to stabilise the leadership by keeping the sans culotte masses focused on outward counter-revolutionary dangers.^[9]

However, at the end of 1792, the food price crisis erupted once again, despite a good harvest, because the paper currency was devaluing, and resources were also being diverted to the army. Producers and traders both demanded higher prices as a result. New spokesmen for the sans culottes emerged, with the followers of Jacques Hébert from the radicalised Cordeliers club, and a disparate collection of others called, insultingly, the Enragés. The latter were particularly focused on economic issues and called for the punishment of hoarders as counterrevolutionaries. In Lyon, two Enragés presented a plan for the abolition of the trade in grain. Elsewhere, a parish priest sympathetic to this movement declared that ‘goods will be common, there will be only one cellar and one barn, from which each will take whatever they need.’^[10]

Yet the Convention stuck to its economic principles, and refused measures to control prices. This obstinance merely led to more disorder, with peasant bands, even supported by local authorities, fixing prices on their own authority, in so-called ‘food riots’. Ten thousand peasants marched on Tours, and with violent threats insisted on fixing the prices of a range of foods and essential goods. The Convention sent out troops to suppress these food riots, and despite Robespierre’s arguments that ‘the first social law is therefore the one that guarantees all members of society the means to live’, the Convention on 8 December 1792 decreed all regulation of trade abolished.^[11] The Gironde was now hated by the poor classes generally.

The antagonism that built up in 1793 between the Girondin faction and the sans culottes had begun with the former’s deep reluctance to put the king on trial after the events of August 1792. They delayed as much as they could, but had to concede it eventually, lest their republican credentials be called into question. Thus it was not until December that the trial began, and his execution followed on 21 January 1793.

This was a political defeat for the Gironde, but more difficulties followed with the army at the front halved when the volunteers, who had signed on for one campaign only, all returned home. There followed some disastrous defeats, and the defection of the Conventions’ leading general, Dumouriez. This followed a failed attempt, mirroring Lafayette’s earlier one, to persuade his army to march on Paris. For the Girondins, however, the war policy seemed essential and in February 1793, the Convention declared war on both Britain and the Dutch.

Rise of the Montagne

As the war widened, the price crisis in Paris reached a new height. A general popular demand on the Convention was a maximum price on commodities. When a Commune delegation presented a petition to this effect to the Convention, the Montagnard deputies and the Girondins alike felt threatened. Ten days later, crowds of women invaded first the Jacobin club, and then the Convention, to further this demand, but were rebuffed. The next day, crowds of women began to invade grocers’ shops and took provisions at prices they had determined as fair. This escalation of the ‘food riot’ type of action spread, overwhelming the authorities. The Jacobins played a major role in suppressing these events, and went on to blame the Enragés for organising them as a counter-revolutionary action. The Enragés were certainly involved, but were not by any means in control.

Alongside the military crisis, and the beginning of the genuinely counterrevolutionary peasant revolt in the Vendée, the Republic was once again in grave danger. This sparked off a deadly fight between the Montagne and the Gironde for political control, each accusing the other of being traitors to the Revolution. When Marat was sent to the new Revolutionary Tribunal for trial, he was accompanied by a huge sans-culotte crowd. On 24 April, he was acquitted, and carried by the crowd in triumph back to the Convention. Realising that they needed popular support to defeat the Girondins, the Jacobins compromised on their free-trade principles, and came round to the idea of a ‘law of the maximum’.

However, events seemed to be moving in favour of the bourgeois moderates. The Girondins in Paris continued to make moves against popular figures of the left, having Hébert and two Enragés, Varlet and Dobsen, arrested on 20 May. Girondins had also warned darkly that if popular tumult continued, Paris would be destroyed.^[12] In May, an alliance of royalists and ‘moderates’ overthrew the radical government in Lyons, and executed the Jacobin leaders there. The Jacobins had also lost power in Marseilles.^[13] The danger to the Jacobins nationally was clear.

The Commune and the Club of Revolutionary Republican Women Citizens protested against the arrest of the Cordeliers’ Jacques Hébert. Soon a new revolutionary assembly drawn from the sections, and led by the released Varlet and Dobsen called an assembly of all the Paris authorities at the Jacobin club, and decided to call for an insurrection by having the tocsins rung the next day. The uprising began, and the Convention was invaded, with the result being the arrest of 29 leading Girondin deputies. These journées of 29 May and 2 June marked the last major successful intervention of the sans culottes into the course of the revolution.

The Jacobins were now the government, but by June, around sixty departments in the provinces were in a state of revolt. Nevertheless, Robespierre exerted his leadership through Jacobin control of the Committee for Public Safety. The Jacobins granted the sans culottes their wish for a law of the maximum on commodity prices, and instituted a system of progressive taxation. They also attempted to pacify the peasantry with the final abolition of redemption payments, and land distribution measures. By the end of June, the Convention ratified a new Constitution which underlined the sovereignty of the people, and abolished two-tier elections.

However, the Jacobins still had to contend with serious military reversals, and on 13 July, Marat was assassinated by the Girondin Charlotte Corday. With the Girondins marshalling the revolt in the provinces, the Jacobins began to bring their deputies to trial, culminating in the guillotining of 22 of them in October 1793. While these events were unfolding, the Jacobins also began to act against the far-left Enragés. Their most prominent figure, Roux, along with Leclerc, was expelled from the Cordeliers club, and arrested on 22 August. He later killed himself before he could be executed. The Club of Revolutionary Republican Women Citizens was suppressed in autumn 1793, and the other leading Enragés variously disposed of in the same period, although Varlet survived to later become a Bonapartist.

Jacobin rule

In the course of 1793, the Montagnard-dominated Convention regained control of most of the rebellious areas, and also began once again to win victories against France’s external enemies. However, it was not just these threats that they were determined to extinguish, but also the institutions of popular power. The Committee of Public Safety whittled down the independence of the central committee of the sections.^[14] Local revolutionary committees became bureaucracies, paid salaries by the government, with some commissioners being purged. These gradually ceased to be organising foci for, or responsive to, popular power.^[15] Popular political societies, like the Revolutionary Women, were forced to dissolve themselves. The commissioners who investigated food hoarding were abolished.^[16] Over a long period, the Jacobin leadership, at the same time that it made concessions to popular demands, systematically took apart the institutions the sans culottes had built up to organise popular revolutionary power.

The Jacobin Montagnards were resolute revolutionaries, but while willing to compromise to some degree with popular demands, and even contemplate limits to the rights of property, as in Robespierre’s conceptions, they were still bourgeois revolutionaries, and determined to settle the revolution on a ground which ultimately guaranteed the safety of bourgeois property. The vacillations of the Girondists forced the Jacobins to turn against them, but the latter could not accept being dependent upon the support of the sans-culotte revolutionaries either.

The logic of the Terror which began in the course of 1793 was that anyone not hewing to the narrow ground of the Jacobin leaders, Robespierre and St Just particularly, was a danger to the Revolution. The suppression of the Enragés was not therefore sufficient to protect the Jacobin government, and in any case, popular discontents were taken up by the Cordeliers club (which had been abandoned by Danton after the declaration of the republic) after the demise of the Enragés.

Jacques Hébert, in particular, attacked Danton and Robespierre alike for being too moderate in pursuit of the revolution. However, the blood-curdling rhetoric of the Hébertists against the enemies of the revolution did little to advance the cause of the sans culottes, and their ambiguous gestures towards further insurrection doomed them. Hébert and his followers were arrested, tried and guillotined in March 1794, amid eager celebrations by the rich who flocked to the scene. Louis St Just sadly observed that following the liquidation of the Hébertists, the revolution was ‘frozen’. However, the Cordeliers lacked at this point the connections and depth of support among the sans culottes that could have protected them.^[17]

In attacking both its right and left, the Jacobin leadership grew increasingly isolated, creating pools of surviving enemies. The turmoil damaged their enemies too, however, with associates of the Girondins sheltering under the Dantonist umbrella. Danton, advocating clemency and a pausing of the Terror, could thus come under suspicion of becoming aligned with counterrevolutionaries. Danton and his faction fell to the guillotine soon after his enemy Hébert and the Hébertists.

By this point, the sans culottes were next to leaderless, and had little purchase any more on the governing institutions of the republic. They had won the law of the maximum on prices from the Jacobin leadership, but now the complement of that law came upon them. Wages had risen more quickly than prices over previous months, so that in April 1794, the Commune tried to push wages down to their maximum level as prescribed by the Maximum legislation. When workers went on strike or protested against the new policy, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the imprisonment of workers’ leaders, while the Convention pursued ‘counterrevolutionaries’ encouraging workers’ resistance. With many facing very substantial cuts to their wages, the working population of Paris were incensed, draining them of much motivation to defend the Jacobin leadership when it itself came under attack.

The fall of Robespierre

The very success of the Jacobins, or more specifically the French Revolutionary armies, in defeating the foreign enemies of the republic, and ‘exporting’ the Revolution beyond France’s borders, was another part of Robespierre’s undoing. With its armies in the ascendant, the sense of emergency engulfing the republic, which had both driven and justified the Terror, began to unwind. On 27 July 1794, the Convention revolted against Robespierre, taking him by surprise. The mass of delegates of the ‘plain’, those who had tepidly followed the Girondins, and then the Montagnards, suddenly found their voice, and Robespierre’s enemies on the right and left united against him. In the largest mass execution during the Revolution, 21 of Robespierre’s allies, and then another 71, were guillotined on two consecutive days.^[18] The Jacobins’ call to the Paris sections to defend them had met with a muted and ineffectual response.

In the accounting of Jacobin rule, the question that looms largest in many accounts is the violence of the Terror. The gruesomeness of the Terror has been an engrained part of the memory of the French Revolution, and also a major weapon used to discredit the idea of popular revolutionary movements. However, very rarely part of the picture of bloodthirsty revolutionary crowds are the victims of counterrevolutionary terror; during the Vendée revolt, people were shot simply for having gone to a mass officiated by a pro-republican priest, while hundreds of revolutionaries were executed by anti-Jacobin federalist rebels in 1793. The Jacobin reprisals in the Vendée and elsewhere were also very bloody. For events in Paris, a high estimate of 30,000 people may have been killed over the course of a year, but this only equals the number who died in Ireland in 1798 during a few weeks of the United Irishmen’s rising and its repression by British troops.^[19] The violence needs also to be seen in the light of the absolutist monarchy’s habits of exemplary executions and cruelties; eighteenth-century regimes were very violent, and their wars were desperately sanguinary, which is another point of context that is usually passed over.

Following the fall of the Jacobins, counter-revolutionary forces began to operate openly, with groups of fancily dressed ‘gilded youth’ or muscadins attacking Jacobin-supporting section meetings, and anyone displaying revolutionary sympathies. During this ‘Thermidorean’ (after the month of the revolutionary calendar) reaction, the Jacobin club was forcibly shut down. After the last sans culotte attempted rising in 1795, the Convention’s revenge was emphatic. The most radical sections in Paris were surrounded, invaded and disarmed, with some 6000 being imprisoned, and dozens guillotined. The remaining active Montagnards in the Convention were also executed. The post-Jacobin regime was unable to gain stability, however, and it passed over to the more dictatorial regime of the Directory, which in turn inadvertently enabled the rise of an ex-Jacobin, revolutionary general, one Napoleon Bonaparte, to power.

The last question to consider is why the sans culottes of Paris were unable to secure a government that could satisfy its demands and discontents. The sans culottes could act collectively in Paris, and other cities, and they were able to pressure the Jacobins to bring in price controls, but articulating a plan for a clear and workable new social order was always going to be difficult. The urban poor who were subsumed by the sans-culotte movement ranged from the actually destitute, to wage workers, to poor artisans, to better-off artisans, and into the ranks of shopkeepers and small capitalists. France was only at the early stage of an industrial economy, and was dominated by small producers. In an economy of this kind, there were severe limits to what could be achieved by attempting to regulate prices, and, while ideas about moving beyond private property could be conceived, the sans culottes were often enough themselves small property owners.

Some of the Enragés articulated a remarkable social programme, and the Jacobins instituted some measures that anticipate later reformist or social-democratic policies to a degree, but these still had limited purchase on the nature of the economy. Without a clearly realisable alternative social order to offer up, radicals were driven to extreme rhetoric. The Hébertists pursued a war agenda, hoping that the overthrow of absolutist monarchies in the rest of Europe would secure the Revolution in France. This went along with demands for vengeance against any suspected of working against the Revolution at home, that is, an intensification of the Terror.^[20] The requisition of grain and seeking out of hidden stockpiles of produce also alienated the peasantry, inevitably contributing to serious counterrevolutionary risings such as in the Vendée. The extremity of the Hébertists’ campaign against the Church and religion further alienated erstwhile supporters of the revolution. The large mass of property owners became increasingly alienated and alarmed by the radicals.

Ultimately, there was a contradiction between the social problems the ultra-radicals wanted to solve, and the interests of small property owners, who represented the great majority of society. This left the Enragés and the Hébertists little room to advance a positive programme to unite society around a new kind of social republic. The movement of the revolutionary sans culottes created, but could not solve, the social question of capitalist society. Nonetheless, the question of the social revolution had been opened, and would not be closed.

[1] Soboul, Short History, pp.88-90.

[2] Hazan, People’s History, p.191.

[3] Doyle, History, p.191.

[4] https://marxist.com/great-french-revolution.htm

[5] Doyle, History, p.98

[6] See, for example, Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror (Verso: London 2012), and the discussion by David Andress at https://revolution.hypotheses.org/156.

[7] Hazan, People’s History, pp.193-4.

[8] Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (Verso: London 1999), p.291.

[9] E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (George Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London 1962), pp.88-9.

[10] Hazan, People’s History, p.210.

[11] ibid. p.211.

[12] Harman, People’s History, p.291

[13] Doyle, History, pp.230-2.

[14] ibid, p.244.

[15] Hazan, People’s History, p.365

[16] Harman, People’s History, p.297.

[17] Hazan, People’s History, p.355.

[18] Harman, People’s History, p.299.

[19] Doyle, History,pp.258-9.

[20] For a summary of the Hébertist position see https://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/mathiez/1920/herbertist-program.htm