Explaining … the French revolution

I like explaining things so today I’m going to outline the main events of the French revolution

Fred Carver
Nov 8 · 38 min read
After the Bastille was torn down a giant elephant statue was built in its place. The elephant was hollow and quite important bits of Les Miserables happen inside it. It’s weird that no one talks about the elephant

I don’ really know why I wrote this and I’m even less sure you should read it.

It started off as rough notes I was making while reading Hilary Mantel’s brilliant and meticulously researched novel A place of Greater Safety to keep track of who was who, and then at some point my obsessive and completest streak took over and it spiralled into a full blown chronological list of who did what in the French Revolution, based mostly on Mantel but also what I could remember of The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm and dipping back in to Mark Steel’s wonderfully fun Vive la Révolution. Not to mention a shedload of wikipedia trawling (wiki is surprisingly poor on the French revolution, although it’s better in French).

As a consequence of this, naturally, what follows is terrible history and probably quite biased. It’s also absurdly Paris-centric, even for the notoriously Paris-centric subject that is French history. But honestly trying to understand what was going on in Paris was enough.

It’s a list of people and their actions and so if you read it as history (please don’t) then it gets very “big man” — it centres the prominent individuals. Aside from the fact that big man theory in general has been discredited for centuries (although politicians still find it flatters their ego to believe in it), if ever there was a moment for history-from-below it was the French revolution — with its lengthy spells of shared and contested power, especially outside of Paris, and the significant role played by the street and popular sentiment.

Anyway, in for a penny and all that, so insofar as any one person can said to be ruling France at any given time (which is a stretch) I’ve put their name in italics at the point they take charge, I’ve also put major events in bold.

So here’s a thing. It’s basically a chronological list of things, people and dates you might want to google if they interest you. It should at least be slightly easier to follow than Wikipedia, and I hope you find it interesting.


Pre-1789: absolute monarchy

The French economy was in a bad shape. Inflation was pushing the cost of bread to unaffordable levels, and the national debt was becoming unsustainable. New taxes were urgently needed but the middle classes refused to pay them without constitutional reform. Various negotiations between the king and bodies such as the Parliament of Paris and the Assembly of notables came to nothing. In the end, on 24 January 1789 the king summoned the Estates General.

The Estates General were an ancient mechanism for resolving constitutional crises. It had not been used in over 175 years. The Estates General historically consisted of an equal number of delegates from the First Estate (the clergy), the Second Estate (the nobility) and the Third Estate (the commons). In 1789, as a nod to changing times, the Estates General were made up of 300 clergy, 300 nobles, and 600 commoners. However the king envisaged that each estate would meet separately, with each estate having one collective vote over any final constitution. This way the king’s allies in the First and Second Estates would be able to outvote any troublesome proposals from the Third Estate.

The convener of the First Estate was Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the Agent-General of the Catholic Church. He almost immediately disappears from our story, spending most of the next decade as a diplomat in England, but he then went on to become one of the world’s most notable and effective diplomats, dominating French foreign policy from 1800 to his death in 1838.

There were several centres of power in the Second Estate, most of them conservative, but the Duke of Orleans and his supporters were well represented.

The Third Estate was effectively led by the Comte de Mirabeau, a fairly radical aristocrat who was elected to the commons having being thwarted from representing the Second Estate by his family. Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer from Arras, was one of a tiny and at this stage inconsequential number of ultra radical republicans in the Third Estate.

May-October 1789: absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy

On June 20th the members of the Third Estate arrived at their usual room in Versailles to find it locked and guarded by soldiers. Fearing that this was the cue for the king to forcibly disband them, the delegates reconvened in the nearby real tennis court and swore the Tennis Court Oath. The oath announced the Third Estate as a new National Assembly for France, called upon members of the First and Second Estates to join them in this Assembly, and pledged “not to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established”.

The king addressed all three Estates on the 23 June but this failed to resolve tensions. Shortly thereafter a small number of radical priests from the First Estate joined this new National Assembly and on the 27 June the Duke of Orleans led 47 members of the Second Estate in joining the Assembly. Two rival institutions now felt themselves to be the sovereign power: the king had not conceded it but the new National Assembly claimed it. However, to all intents and purposes the King remained in charge.

This changed between 12 and 14 of July. Responding to popular outrage against the sacking of popular liberal finance minister Jacques Necker, a lawyer and journalist (and schoolfriend of Robespierre’s) Camille Desmoulins, possibly acting with the encouragement and resources of Orleans or Mirabeau (or foreign powers), incited a mob to riot and led them in a two day rampage in which they stormed the national army museum at the Hôtel des Invalides, seized the muskets and cannon stored there, and used them to storm the Bastille, a symbolic fortress and prison (the Bastille was actually virtually unused, its primary purpose had been to imprison the Marquis de Sade, but he had been moved to an asylum a few days earlier because he wouldn’t stop shouting at passers by).

Around 100 people were killed, mostly members of Desmoulins’ mob who were fired on by the Bastille’s defenders, but a small number of government officials were lynched from lampposts in the immediate aftermath.

July 15 saw a number of immediate responses to the riots:

  • Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, a general and hero of the American war of independence, and a classical liberal, declared himself the Commander-in-Chief of a new military force — the National Guard — which answered not to the king but to the National Assembly. Being the man with the guns behind him, Lafayette became the greatest single power in France.
  • Georges-Jacques Danton, a friend and neighbour of Desmoulins, established a citizen’s militia. Danton was a lawyer, a former minor public official, and the centre of the radical social circles in the Cordeliers district of central Paris. His militia was ostensibly the Cordeliers Battalion of Lafayette’s National Guard, but in effect answered directly to Danton. Given the revolutionary fervour of the district, and its proximity to the centre of Paris, this gave Danton significant political clout (he was also a personally intimidating man, being very tall, very well built and having a face scarred as a consequences of smallpox and three separate childhood near death experiences at the hands of farmyard animals). The Cordeliers Battalion created a model, and in the years to come a large number of other citizens militias — known as sans-culottes — would be formed. Unlike the Cordeliers Battalion these militias would not answer to any one leader, but their existence exerted significant pressure in favour of a radical agenda.
  • A new government of Paris, the Paris Commune, was established, and would become an important alternative power base in the years to come. The leader of the Commune was Jean Bailly, a scientist who had presided over the Tennis Court Oath as President of the National Assembly. Mayor Bailly would become an ally of Lafayette, but elsewhere in the Commune Danton exerted a lot of influence.

These actions emboldened the National Assembly, renamed the National Constituent Assembly. On 4 August they abolished feudalism and disestablished the Catholic church, on the 26 August they passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen establishing equality between citizens and freedom of speech and religion.

The king might have lost power in Paris, but he wasn’t willing to concede France just yet, and he refused to ratify these proclamations. This changed on October 5–6 when thousands (perhaps ten thousand) of market women, perhaps stirred up by Orleanists or perhaps genuinely furious and the lack of action on the price of bread, led a march on Versailles. Lafayette attempted to intervene to protect the Royal Family, who at various points came close to being torn apart, but was hamstrung by the fact that the sympathies of the National Guardsmen were largely with the mob. After two days of siege, Lafayette negotiated a compromise whereby the Royal Family would relocate to Tulliers, in the centre of Paris, where they would be effectively under the house arrest of the sans-culottes.

October 1789-August 1792: Constitutional Monarchy

On the Right were the monarchists, the supporters of the catholic church and the supporters of Lafayette who felt that the revolution had now gone far enough. Lafayette’s command of the National Guard, and their numbers in the Assembly, gave them power.

On the Left were the Orleanists, the supporters of Mirabeau (the main leader of the left until his death, of a heart attack at 42, in April 1791), and a still small but growing number of radical republicans who took the name Jacobins. The Jacobins also held considerable informal power outside the Assembly, through the popular press and political clubs (see below) and the influence of the Cordeliers and the sans-culottes. Most radical of the Jacobins were a group around Robespierre who called themselves Montagnards (mountaineers) from their habit of sitting on the very highest benches on the Left.

In the middle were the centrists, known as the Plain or Marais/Marsh. They would be the one consistent force in the next six years of French politics. They were frequently the largest group but, being largely unaffiliated to any political faction or interest group, rarely acted as a cohesive whole. They were largely middle class lawyers and shopkeepers and their instincts would often be inclined towards the right, but they could switch left in response to a shift in the popular zeitgeist or as a consequence of intimidation from the sans-clouttes. Almost as a matter of definition there were few political leaders in the Plain, but there were some interesting centrist theorists like the Abbé Sieyès who, alongside Lafayette and his mate Thomas Jefferson, contributed a lot to the early constitutional law and theory of this period. Lazare Carnot was another important member of the Plain (although his personal connections to Robespierre mean he isn’t always counted as such). A technocrat and an exceptional logistician, Carnot was one of the main reasons France avoided defeat in the many wars it fought in this time, and he was a member of almost every single government from the fall of the Bastille to Napoleon’s final exile in 1815.

A number of incidents occurred over the nearly three years of constitutional monarchy to weaken the position of the Right and strengthen that of the Jacobins.

  • On 28 February 1791, the Day of Daggers, a large demonstration of monarchists at Tulliers was broken up by Lafayette, significantly weakening public perceptions of the monarchy.
  • On 20 June 1791 the king escaped Tulliers and fled to Varennes, a small town on the way to Germany, seemingly on his way to join up with the Austrian or Prussian armies and lead a counterrevolution. He was recaptured by the national guard and led back to Tulliers. Lafayette was widely believed to have been behind the escape attempt which damaged his position. Furthermore popular support for the monarchy collapsed, as the Monarch was felt to be in league with France’s enemies (indeed from that point forward the term “patriot” was used to mean an opponent of the king).
  • On 17 July 1791 the Jacobins organised a demonstration in favour of a republic on the Champs de Mars. Thousands or perhaps tens of thousands attended. Lafayette and Mayor Bailly ordered the National Guard to fire on the crowd, causing several (the exact number is much disputed) deaths in what became known as the Champ de Mars Massacre.

While the immediate consequences of the massacre was a police crackdown which saw the closing down of the Jacobin media and the flight of many leading Jacobins into hiding or overseas, the long term consequence was an increase in popular support for the Jacobins and the fall from grace of Lafayette. Mayor Bailly lost his job and was replaced by Jérôme Pétion, a moderate Jacobin.

Varennes and Champ de Mars also sank Orleans’ political ambitions. He had panicked in response to both, and very briefly fled Paris. This dented his perception of invincibility and those he patronised started to wonder if, if he couldn’t protect himself, he could protect them. In addition his money was mostly spent (and better money was available from foreign intelligence services)and many progressives felt that their stock was now higher than his and so they didn’t gain much by calling themselves Orleanists. Laclos went back to the army and Orleans’ claim to the throne petered out.

With Mirabeau also dead there was now a bit of a political vacuum; into it stepped Antoine Barnave, the assemblymember who had gone to Varennes to recover the king, and his faction: the Feuillants. Much like Blairites the Feuillants started almost imperceptibly to the left of centre as the acceptable-to-the-establishment face of progress, but quickly became the new right wing. Barnave had a personal friendship with the queen, and they together conspired to develop a liberal constitution which would protect the position of the monarchy and still satisfy the demands of progressive forces (the king meanwhile refused all compromise while encouraging military confrontation, thinking that a war would restore him to absolute power.

On 3 September 1791 the National Constituent Assembly endorsed the French Constitution of 1791, the output of Barnave’s plan. It failed to end demands for a republic. It cemented the gains made by the revolution thus far, while disappointing many and so increasing support for the Jacobins — as did the king’s initial refusal to endorse it. It also, on Robespierre’s suggestion, contained the “self-denying ordinance” under which no member of the National Constituent Assembly could become a member of the new Legislative Assembly that replaced it. The stated purpose was to ensure that new blood entered the political process, but the other consequences were that a) a large number of Paris based members of the old Assembly, who mostly had Jacobin sympathies, were at a loose end and so took up roles in the Paris Commune, increasing Jacobin control of the Commune and b) Barnave and Lafayette were excluded from the new body.

The subsequent election, held under the limited suffrage enshrined in the constitution, was comfortably won by the Feuillants, who became the new right wing under the remote leadership of Barnave and Lafayette, but the Jacobins came a clear second and developed new leaders among the influx of freshly elected deputies such as Jacques Brissot, Pierre Vergniaud, François Buzot and the mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet. These new Jacobins, called Girondins after the Gironde or Bordeaux region from which many of them originated, were maybe not less radical than the Montagnards (more on that below) but were more socially acceptable due to their distance from Paris and lack of connection to the sans-clouttes. (Not all those elected were Girondins: the aristocratic Hérault de Séchelles immediately identified himself with the far left as did the ex-communards Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois)

In March 1792 the rise in Jacobin soft power on the streets and in the popular press and the failure of the Feuillant compromise, forced the king to appoint a Girondin cabinet of ministers. The actual ministers appointed were solid establishment moderates like Jean-Marie Roland and General Dumouriez, but they resulted in an effective transfer of power to the Girondin’s de facto leader Jacques Brissot, albeit still heavily tempered by a right-heavy Legislative Assembly and a recalcitrant king.

Meanwhile tensions were still rising. In April 1792 war was declared between France and Austria and Prussia (with short pauses France would remain at war with most other countries in Europe for most of the next 25 years). In July 1792 the Prussians, in their Brunswick Manifesto, announced that their intention in fighting the war was to restore the king of France to his full powers and to execute every revolutionary in Paris. For Jacobins the continuation of the revolution was now not just about politics but also survival.

On 14 July 1792 the Jacobins invited a number of provincial National Guard brigades known for their radicalism to come to Paris to celebrate the third anniversary of the revolution. The largest and most radical were the Marseilles brigade, who had written a new song for the occasion: the Marseillaise. After the commemorations ended the Marseilles brigade stuck around, adding to the tension of a hot summer with Austro-Prussian forces advancing, the king vetoing the bills the Assembly sent him, the sans-clouttes getting increasingly restless and numerous Assembly members calling for a republic.

August 1792 — August 1793: Republic under the National Convention

The Legislative Assembly renamed itself the National Convention and granted itself full executive powers. Fresh elections were held, the first to be held under universal (if indirect) male suffrage (giving women the vote was never seriously discussed, Condorcet and Robespierre had both said at various points that they were in favour of the idea, but neither pushed that hard for it while women’s rights activists like Sophie de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges did not have enough formal power). In addition to the elected members, the Convention appointed two foreigners to their ranks: the English liberal theorist Thomas Paine, and the Prussian aristocrat and proto-Anarchist Anacharsis Cloots.

Most monarchists, even moderate liberal ones, fled at this point, and so these elections returned only Jacobins and members of the Plain. The foundation of the republic, however, further widened the divide that was already opening up between the Girondins and the Montagnards, and this divide would come to dominate the politics of the Convention.

It has become customary to think of the Girondins as the relative right, or the moderates, and the Montagnards as the left or the radicals. The reality is a little more complicated than that. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that the Girondins were classic liberals and the Montagnards were left wing populists but that doesn’t quite capture it either. Here are some of the key differences:

  • The Girondins were largely from the provinces and distrusted the disproportionate political power of Paris. The Montagnards were largely Parisian and distrusted those outside Paris who they feared had not been freed from the influence of the aristocracy and clergy. This Paris/provinces divide was perhaps the most important of all, and the other divisions stem from it
  • Consequentially the Girondins were strong federalists and decentralisers and in that sense were the purer democrats, whereas the Montagnards were centralisers who felt that only a strong Parisian centre could safeguard their revolutionary values
  • Also linked: the Girondins were deeply distrustful of the sans-clouttes who they felt used the threat of violence to exert disproportionate and thus undemocratic influence on the Convention. The Montagnards felt the sans-clouttes were the manifestation of popular will and the revolution’s only protection against elite takeover. They saw their role as to be the voice of the sans-clouttes in the Convention.
  • The Girondins were very pro war (indeed “the war party” was an alternative name for them in the early days). The Montagnards were much more ambivalent about the war, and Robespierre in particular was strongly opposed as he felt it would lead to the transfer of power to the military.
  • The popular view is that the Girondins were more liberal and the Montagnards more authoritarian, but I think that’s a simplification and is only really true in the sense of their attitudes towards the how far the Terror (see below) should go specifically. On other matters, such as freedom of the press, the situation is far less clear. When it came to social issues bon vivants like Danton (a Montagnard) were certainly more liberal than small c conservatives like Manon Roland (a Girondin), and the fallout between Desmoulins (a Montagnard) and Brissot (a Girondin) was over the issue of legalised gambling where Desmoulins was advocating the liberal position.
  • The Montagnards supported strict price controls to enable the urban poor to afford bread. The Girondins supported looser price controls to enable farmers to make money at market.

At the start of the republic the Girondins had the greater numbers in the Convention, the backing of the Marseilles brigade and Mayor Pétion, and incumbency, and so Brissot continued to be in effective control of the country. However the Montagnards had multiple factors in their favour which allowed them to increase their influence over the years, notably:

  • effective control of the two influential political clubs: the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers Club. These clubs acted as the think tanks of the revolution, as well as being at the heart of its social circle, its recruiting ground, and the rehearsal space for debates in the Convention. (The Girondins were part of these clubs, but were not at their centre, and instead developed a parallel culture around the “salons” or late afternoon parties hosted by two influential Girondin women: Manon Roland (Jean-Marie’s wife, but a far more influential figure herself) and Sophie de Condorcet (the Marquis’ wife and an early feminist).)
  • the backing of the sans-clouttes, the Cordeliers and more broadly of the people of Paris. Danton was able to put more armed men onto the streets than anyone else, and particularly after the Marseilles brigade went back to Marseilles this became a powerful weapon
  • charismatic and intimidating leaders in the Convention. Robespierre, no longer barred under the self denying ordinance, was returned and Danton and Desmoulins were elected for the first time. Danton had a powerful booming voice, one of the few which easily carried over the awful acoustics of the Convention. Desmoulins was a national hero because of his role in the storming of the Bastille, and overcame a profound stutter to become an exceptional speaker. Robespierre cemented his reputation as the intellectual heart of the left
  • the support of almost all of the popular press that had flourished in Paris in the last few years. Desmoulins was one of the most influential journalists and pamphleteers, and pioneered many elements of the art of propaganda and insinuation. Even more influential was Jean-Paul Marat, the ultra radical Montagnard and author of the newspaper: “People’s Friend”. Hébert, and Stanislas “rabbit” Fréron (another old schoolfriend of Desmoulins and Robespierre), and the poet and playwright Fabre d’Églantine also added to the pro-Montagnard bias in the press and Parisian public opinion.

As a consequence power slowly slid away from the Girondins and towards the Montagnards (particularly Robespierre and Danton) in the subsequent year.

The early days of the republic were violent. First came the September massacres. Over the course of about a week in early September 1792 a series of seemingly spontaneous, but clearly well orchestrated, riots took place during which sans-clouttes overran all the prisons in Paris and hauled over 1,000 political prisoners — around half the prison population — in front of ad hoc “people’s tribunals” and then summarily executed almost all of them. This made it one of the most lethal acts of the revolution (second only perhaps to the Noyades, which we will come to). The massacres had been timed to immediately follow a policing operation in late August to round up those whose loyalty was subject to question and so the victims were largely royalists, aristocrats and real or perceived allies of the Duke of Brunswick who the Jacobins feared would lead reprisals in the event of a Prussian invasion.

It is unclear precisely how the attacks were orchestrated but Marat was definitely involved, Danton probably was, Robespierre actually might not have been, and the predominantly Girondin government certainly sat on their hands and allowed it to continue once it had started.

Next came the trial of King Louis which ran throughout December 1792 to his execution on January 21 1793. He was tried by, an in, the Convention, and it quickly became apparent that the entire body was in favour of him being found guilty of treason and that the majority wanted him executed (Thomas Paine was one of the few that argued for clemency, and he didn’t speak French). The debate was mostly over process and timings, but this was subsequently used by the Montagnards to accuse the Girondins of ambivalence over his death. The trial also created a new Montagnard superstar: Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, the 20 year old lawyer who led the king’s prosecution.

In March 1793 the reign of Terror started with the reestablishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal (it had been set up in August 1792 but had barely got going when it had been put on hold for the trial of the king).

It’s a tricky subject to talk about because one needs to strike a balance without either on the one hand slipping into excusing atrocities or on the other hand totally decontextualising events. But here goes. Here are some observations to contextualise the Terror in to which, I hope it goes without saying, neither condonation nor additional condemnation should be read.

  • Beheading people is bad, here’s a good piece about that.
  • The Terror was a process whereby the public could denounce people they felt were plotting to overthrow the revolution to the revolutionary tribunal which would put them on trial for treason.
  • The architecture of the Terror was established by the Girondins but they did so under pressure from the Montagnards (especially Marat and Robespierre), and out of a desire to avoid repeats of the September massacres.
  • The Terror ran from March 1793 until July 1794 but moved quite slowly until September 1793 when it rapidly picked up pace
  • Executing your political enemies was entirely standard practice at the time. The logic of the day was that it was better that the leaders of a political movement pay the price for disagreement today than ordinary people do on the battlefield tomorrow. In fact the only serious opposition to either the death penalty in principle or to its use on political opponents came, in the early days, from Robespierre. His private correspondence suggests he remained personally opposed to the death penalty until his dying day, but he came around to the idea that they were a necessary evil to ensure the survival of the revolution. He became one of the foremost advocates for the Terror.
  • By the standards of the time, the Terror could even be considered “humane”. While previously political executions had been as painful and brutal as possible to increase their deterrent effect, the revolution introduced the guillotine to give adversaries supposedly painless deaths, and outlawed torture.
  • Further, while it’s absurd to use terms like “fair trial” when talking about executing individuals for what were effectively thought crimes, the Revolutionary Tribunal did feature what were, for the time, groundbreaking advances in terms of independence and due process. There was political interference at times, but nevertheless around half the people accused were found not guilty. In its later stages, particularly in its final two months, and in high profile cases, due process was significantly eroded, but even then a good quarter of those accused escaped execution.
  • All that said, the Terror was orders of magnitude larger than the levels of execution under the Ancien Régime of Louis — if perhaps not quite as large as is popularly assumed. Around 2,500 people were guillotined in Paris over the course of about 18 months, a huge number by any count, although one that pales in comparison to those who died in the revolutionary wars or the war in the Vendée (see below). Its hold on the popular imagination perhaps has more to do with the social class and fame of the victims than the absolute numbers.
  • The Terror outside of Paris was far bloodier, with perhaps 15,000 deaths. This number includes both those executed and those killed in lynchings and low level political violence (minor civil wars etc..) Many were killed as part of local score settling and inter-factional conflicts, reprisals and counterreprisals. Others were executed on the orders of representatives on mission appointed by the Revolutionary Tribunal to impose the will of the republic in a local area. These representatives had near absolute power which they frequently abused. For example, by some distance the bloodiest single incidents in the Terror occurred on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative on mission in Nantes. In late 1793 he summarily executed up to 2,000 prisoners and then drowned around 4,000 priests in trick-bottom boats in the river Loire — in an incident known as the Noyades. When Carrier’s actions came to light he was executed for warcrimes (in late 1794). Nevertheless in his case, and the case of most of the deaths outside of Paris, while neither the Republican Government nor the Revolutionary Tribunal may have directly ordered the killings, they have complicity due to their creation of an enabling atmosphere, their lack of oversight, and their implicit and frequently explicit approval for those actions.
  • While there was almost no opposition to the Terror as an idea, throughout the life of the Terror there was an ongoing debate as to how far it should go. The Girondins wanted merely to execute the opposition leadership, spies and active traitors. The Montagnards wanted to execute those who threatened the survival of the revolution and the implementation of popular will. Marat and Hébert wanted to eliminate the ruling classes, the clergy, and the aristocracy in their entirety.

The War in the Vendée also started in March 1793 and ran throughout the rest of the year. The Vendee was an area of western France where a large but poorly equipped army of Catholics, Royalists and supporters of the local aristocracy (which was more popular than the aristocracy in other regions) rose in insurrection against the Republican Government and was put down with quite extraordinary brutality. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, mostly civilians, with atrocities committed on both sides, but particularly by the victorious republicans.

Tensions between the Girondins and Montagnards grew throughout spring. In March General Dumouriez defected to Austria, casting suspicion on the Girondins. In April the Girondins issued an order for Marat’s arrest. The Cordeliers rioted and it was several days before he could be arrested. When he finally faced trial the Revolutionary Tribunal found him not guilty and he was carried in triumph through the streets of Paris. In early May Desmoulins wrote a bestselling pamphlet denouncing Brissot.

In late May the Girondins made another attempt to crack down on the Montagnards, ordering the arrest of Hébert and several other minor Montagnards and the closure of several printing presses. This backfired leading to the Insurrection of 31 May — 2 June 1793.

In response to speeches from Robespierre in the Jacobins and Danton calling out the Cordeliers many thousands if not tens of thousands of sans-clouttes took to the streets. They surrounded the Convention and made its members virtual prisoner. In fact so numerous and genuinely leaderless were the sans-clouttes (François Hanriot, appointed the day before by the Paris Commune as the leader of the Parisian National guard, was the notional leader) that the Montagnards themselves soon found that they too had lost control of the situation. Hérault de Séchelles, the Montagnard President of the Convention, found himself having to beg Hanriot for the member’s lives. This was granted in exchange for the expulsion and arrest of 22–29 (numbers vary) prominent Girondins and the replacement of the Girondin ministers. Brissot was arrested and, although he almost immediately escaped, Girondin power was broken and the Montagnards were left in total control.

Robespierre was still the Montagnard talisman but to all intents and purposes George Jacques Danton became the leader of the nation, a position he quickly moved to cement.

He was helped by the revolutionary fervour of Paris at the time, which was further whipped up by the death of Marat just one month later on 13 July 1793, assassinated in the bath by Girondin sympathiser Charlotte Corday.

Danton began concentrating power into the new Committee of Public Safety. The Committee was an elected subcommittee of the Convention established by the Girondins in April, but taken over by Danton shortly after, and fully under his control after the insurrection. The Committee initially merely had responsibility for protecting the state from internal and external threats, but under Danton’s reforms soon became the executive body of the state: de facto from August 1793 and de jure from December 1793.

August 1793 — July 1794: Republic under the Committee for Public Safety

Into the gap stepped Maximilien Robespierre. He had been the intellectual leader of the Montagnards for many years, since almost the very beginning, but had deliberately eschewed executive power (he had previously been offered the Presidency of the Revolutionary Tribunal and had turned it down, claiming it would be a conflict of interest). He had initially refused to sit on the committee and had only eventually reluctantly joined after a member fell ill in late June 1793. However, once on board he fully committed: packing the committee with his inseparable ally Saint-Just (Robespierre actually disliked Saint-Just for his obvious relish towards actions Robespierre viewed as necessary evils, but they were indistinguishable on policy), his friend Georges Couthon, and his fellow academy member in Arras Lazare Carnot — as well as making his doctor Joseph Souberbielle and his landlord Maurice Duplay jurors on the Revolutionary Tribunal, his Arras colleague Martial Herman the prosecutor, and his friend the painter Jacques-Louis David and Duplay’s son-in-law Philippe Lebas members of the police committee. While in theory just an ordinary member of the Committee Robespierre’s power was therefore almost absolute.

One of Robespierre’s first major achievements was the Constitution of 1793. This was a truly radical document which combined classic Robespierreian demands for popular sovereignty and economic equality with surprisingly Girondin classical liberalism: further demonstrating that Robespierre was an intellectual liberal, for all his pragmatic authoritarianism. The constitution guaranteed freedom of speech and association, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, a right to work and public assistance, a right to public education, universal male suffrage and an astonishingly federal and devolved system of government.

However, crucially, the constitution was not to be adopted straight away and instead would only come into force once the revolutionary war had ended. Sadly by the time that happened the constitution had long since been discarded, and its supporters were largely dead, and so it never came into force.

Robespierre oversaw a significant escalation of the terror and a large number of Girondins and Feuillants were executed or otherwise died in this time including:

  • Charlotte Corday on 17 July 1793
  • Marie Antoinette on 16 October 1793
  • Jacques Pierre Brissot on 31 October 1793 (he had been recaptured)
  • Pierre Vergniaud on 31 October 1793
  • Olympe de Gouges on 3 November 1793
  • Orleans on 6 November 1793. Orleans had changed his name to Philippe Égalité, and had been elected as a deputy for the far left in 1792, sitting with the Montagnards, but this was not enough to save him, particularly after his son Louis Philippe defected to Austria
  • Manon Roland on 8 November 1793
  • Jean-Marie Roland on 10 November 1793 (by suicide while in hiding)
  • Mayor Bailly on 12 November 1793 (on a special scaffold on the Champs de Mars to emphasise his responsibility for the massacre)
  • Antoine Barnave on 29 November 1793
  • the Marquis de Condorcet on 29 March 1794 (he had successfully hid until 25 March, he died in his cell — it is unclear if he was murdered or committed suicide)
  • François Buzot and Jérôme Pétion escaped and led an insurrectionist force in the Normandy forests for many months. They probably killed themselves, or might have been killed by wolves, in May or June 1794
  • Thomas Paine was sentenced to death but managed to drag out his imprisonment long enough for the American ambassador James Monroe to intercede on his behalf and secure his release

The end of the year saw victory in the war in the Vendeé in December 1793 followed by unauthorised, but perhaps not discouraged, massacres of civilians and prisoners led by General Westermann and Agent Carrier.

The tensions caused by the continuation and escalation of the Terror saw the emergence of new factions:

  • on what was now the right were the Dantonists or Indulgents. They were led by Desmoulins with Danton as the power behind the scenes. They felt that the terror had now gone too far, and had started to execute faithful allies and innocent people, and called for it to be stopped. They also wanted a new liberal economic policy based on the abolition of price controls which they felt were stifling the market and leading to the creation of bread which was very cheap but had almost no nutritional content. They also protested the takeover of the revolution by what they felt were young upstarts like Saint-Just. The name of Desmoulins new newspaper, Le Vieux Cordelier, was an implicit rebuke to these new voices — Desmoulins (like Robespierre and Danton) was now 34 years old which made him positively ancient by the standards of the revolution
  • in the centre were Robespierre and his close allies like Saint-Just. Robespierre retained a close friendship with Danton and Desmoulins, and may even have been personally sympathetic to their attitude to the terror, if not their economics. But his policy was based around the need to balance the left and right factions both of whom were demanding the arrest and extermination of the other.
  • On the left were the Hebertists led by Jacques Hébert and supported by many of the sans-clouttes. They were militant atheists, wanted the terror to be further expanded and pursued with yet greater vigour — particularly against the clergy — and wanted even stricter price controls and cheaper bread.
  • On the very far left were the Enragés led by the radical priest Jacques Roux and his small but powerful faction of sans-clouttes. They were proto-Communists, and wanted an economically equal society.

The committee moved against Roux first. He was arrested in September 1793, and put on trial in January 1794. He attempted suicide and was unsuccessful, but a month later, on February 10, he tried again and succeeded.

The Committee then moved against Hébert. He had been riding his luck for a while, and Robespierre had wanted rid of him ever since he had absurdly accused Marie Antoinette of incest during her trial. Then on 10 November 1793 Hébert presided over a Festival of Reason — a celebration of atheism in Notre Dame. This infuriated the vaguely spiritual Robespierre but he decided not to act. However, over the winter of 1793 Hébert and sans-clouttes associated with him started to directly challenge Robespierre’s authority. In response Hébert was arrested on 13 March 1794 and executed on 24 March alongside Anacharsis Cloots and other prominent Hebertists. A potentially apocryphal story suggests that Hébert repeatedly screamed and fainted on his way to his execution and that this so amused his jailers that they staged three or four mock executions of him without a blade, before finally guillotining him. If this story is correct it would be one of the very few examples of a Parisian executioner demonstrating gratuitous cruelty during the Terror (almost all these executions were conducted by the 4th and 5th generations of the six generation long Sanson family of French executioners: father Charles-Henri and son Henri)

Saint-Just and others then made repeated demands for Robespierre to rebalance the factions by striking against the Indulgents, but Robespierre continued to publicly defend and privately associate with Danton and Desmoulins. This however made the situation all the less tenable as the emboldened Indulgents further criticised Robespierre’s leadership, and committee members asked if the famously “incorruptible” Robespierre had allowed personal friendship to corrupt his feelings.

Indeed it was corruption that finally tipped the balance, or at least provided the pretext for the fall of the Dantonists. Various Dantonists, particularly Fabre d’Eglantine, and peripherally Danton himself, became embroiled in the East India Company Liquidation Scandal. In response on 30 March 1794 Robespierre acted with dramatic vigour: arresting 15 senior Dantonists, refusing them their traditional right to a hearing before the Convention to waive their immunity, and severely curtailing usual arrangements for a fair trial.

Despite these extraordinary measures a conviction was far from certain: Danton was certainly corrupt but evidence with respect to these particular crimes was thin, and others among the 15 were scarcely implicated at all. All were also charged with political crimes for which it was very hard to construct an argument for their guilt. Popular sentiment appeared uncertain and could have gone either way.

Robespierre therefore acted once again, declaring midway through the trial that Desmoulins wife, Lucille (a formidable activist in her own right and leader of the campaign for the innocence of the Dantonists) was leading a foreign backed coup attempt. On 5 April, with the trial still underway, he therefore arranged for a decree to be passed by the Convention ending the Dantonist’s defence with immediate effect. The accused were found guilty and all 15 were executed that very same day, among them Danton, Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelles, Fabre d’Eglantine, General Westermann, other deputies (Chabot) and former members of the Committee for Public Safety (Delacroix). Lucile Desmoulins was executed just over a week later on 13 April.

Robespierre’s power was now almost entirely unchecked and he used this authority to force through policies that were very dear to his heart. The legislation for the first of these, the abolition of slavery, actually passed at the height of the interfactional struggle on 4 February 1794. Abolishing slavery had long been one of Robespierre’s greatest wishes, but he had found only limited and occasional support for it from his colleagues and it had taken him until this moment to complete his objective.

The second was the creation of a new state religion, the esoteric Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre had long being a critic of both the Catholic Church, an instrument of aristocratic oppression, and the atheist Cult of Reason of Hébert which he felt deprived the poor of a hope which he did not yet feel able to provide for them in this life. The cult of the supreme being was a religion entirely of Robespierre’s invention and was a deist mix of Voltairean ethics, limited rationality, and an almost Calvinist moral commitment to the notion of “ vertu”. The cult was launched with much fanfare on 8 June 1794 with a Festival of the Supreme Being, which sounds like it was pretty naff and megalomaniacal, and left many wondering of the “supreme being” at the centre of the cult was a deity or simply Robespierre himself. Others just wondered if Robespierre was losing the plot.

Robespierre’s health also started to fail and he started to absent himself from the Committee and the Convention for weeks at a time. On his intermittent returns to public life his commandments terrified other senior politicians. On 10 June 1794 he passed the Law of 22 Prairial, which gave the Committee sweeping powers to summarily execute political opponents. Moderates were concerned that those powers would be used against them, the Police Committee were furious that they hadn’t been consulted. Tensions were further raised by the fact that the war with Austria appeared on the verge of being won, and with peace at hand Robespierre’s Constitution could finally be adopted — and yet no moves were made in this direction.

For a while it appeared that there was an uneasy truce between Robespierre and his critics. But on 26 July 1794 Robespierre gave an angry speech to both the Convention and the Jacobin club, heavily implying that further purges were needed. This resulted in a coup and subsequent period of turmoil known as the Thermidorian Reaction.

July 1794 — November 1795: Thermidorian reaction

Robespierre and Saint-Just regrouped at the Hôtel de Ville where he received the backing of the Paris Commune and many sans-clouttes once again under the notional control of Hanriot. For three days (the 8–10 Thermidor or 26–28 July) there was a tense standoff between Army and sans-clouttes, and between Convention and Commune. But ultimately when, on 28 July, Paul Barras led a column of the army towards the Hotel the sans-clouttes scattered. Robespierre was shot in the jaw; whether by his own hand or another is disputed.

Later that same day Robespierre, his brother, Hanriot, Saint-Just, Couthon, Lebas, 15 other Robespierreists, and the Mayor of Paris (Jean-Baptiste Fleuriot-Lescot) were executed without trial. The very next day, in the single bloodiest day of the Terror in Paris, 70 members of the Commune and 38 other Robespierreists (mostly members of the Convention) were executed without trial. The Jacobin Club was also closed down.

With that the revolution pretty much ends. Those that came next, the Thermidorians, adopted some of the language of the revolution — the calendar stayed the same — but there was not the ideological commitment to equality. Indeed, there was a significant backlash against Jacobin ideas and a number, probably in the low thousands, of Jacobins were killed in the “White Terror” that followed: massacred in prisons, summarily executed, or beaten to death in acts of mob violence. Many of these attacks were carried out by “Muscadins” (meaning perfumed men), dandyish roaming street gangs who took their revenge on the sans-clouttes by ostentatiously flaunting a (mostly faux) aristocracy as they conducted their attacks. Former Montagnard Stanislas “Rabbit” Fréron became a prominent Muscadin leader.

The Terror itself formally ended, although the Revolutionary Tribunal remained in existence, and would occasionally pass sentences on prominent Jacobins such as Martial Herman (executed 7 May 1795), Jacques-Louis David (imprisoned for the better part of 2 years), Billaud-Varenne (exiled to Guiana where he lived for some 20 years) and Collot d’Herbois (also exiled to Guiana where he immediately set about organising a revolution but died of yellow fever after only a year).

It is quite hard to track where formal power lay in the 18 months that followed Robespierre’s fall: the Committee of Public Safety still existed but had nothing like the same clout, likewise the National Convention. Of the political forces still around Paul Barras had the control of the army and so soon became the most powerful figure in the new regime. Jean-Lambert Tallien also had significant influence for a while but faded off the scene over the course of 1795.

There were almost constant upheavals and minor rebellions. The three most prominent were the Insurrection of 12 Germinal on 1 April 1795 (an unsuccessful Jacobin popular revolt against the collapse of the economy caused by the abrupt ending of price controls), the Revolt of 1 Prairial on 20 May 1795 (a much larger and initially more successful Jacobin revolt — tens of thousands of rebels held much of Paris for three days — the response to which was the utter destruction and suppression of the remaining sans-clouttes) and the 13 Vendémiaire on 5 October 1795 (a much much smaller royalist revolt, (albeit potentially dangerous due to its links to a more serious royalist insurrection in Brittany earlier in the year) which gained in significance in the short term because Paul Barras’ effective command of the army in response to the revolt cemented his position, and in the long term because of the rapid advancement it afforded his artillery general whose “whiff of grapeshot” had broken the rebels — Napoleon Bonaparte).

November 1795 — November 1799: the Directory

Executive power, including the authoritarian emergency powers now guaranteed by the constitution, rested with “The Directory” — a group of five individuals chosen by the Ancients. Barras was elected to the Directory, and thereby cemented his power. The Abbé Sieyés made a surprise return to public life, having lain low during the Terror, and was also elected, but declined the role, preferring to exert power behind the scenes, and in his stead nominated that other great survivor Lazare Carnot.

The Directory oversaw a period of economic and military upheaval. The war with the other European powers was going well, and indeed France briefly won a peace between 1797 and 1798, but as a consequence the government moved to a policy of waging aggressive wars in Italy, Ireland and Spain. Meanwhile the runaway inflation in the economy and the crippling national debt was resolved and the economy stabilised through extreme measures that significantly increased poverty and famine. In response to this there was an attempted proto-Socialist revolution in May 1796: “The Conspiracy of the Equals”, led ostensibly by the political theorist Gracchus Babeuf. The plot was uncovered before it could be put into effect and Babeuf was executed in May 1797.

In the elections of 1797 royalists did incredibly well, picking up many of the 1/3rd of seats on offer in the Council of 500. Members of the Directory started to be concerned that it would only take one more round of elections before there was a royalist majority. Three members, led by Barras and his army, therefore preemptively launched the Coup of 18 Fructidor on 4 September 1797. The military briefly seized control of Paris and under the somewhat flimsy pretext of rooting out foreign plots, expelled most of the royalist members of the Council, exiling over 50 of them. Remaining Jacobins were swept away at the same time, including Lazare Carnot, who briefly fled the country. The Directory’s reputation as a Barras-led military junta in all but name was thus cemented.

In 1799 it became an Abbé Sieyès led military junta. Sieyès finally accepted election to the directory early in the year and then cemented his power in the bloodless Coup of 30 Prairial VII on 18 June 1799 when aggressive troop maneuvers coerced several directors into resigning and being replaced by those loyal to Sieyès. Barras didn’t resign and they shared power uneasily until the Coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799.

November 1799 — May 1804: the consulate

The Constitution envisaged a complicated structure of checks and balances, which Sieyès felt he could play like a fiddle, at the top of which sat a triumvirate of Sieyès, Bonaparte and the biddable Roger Ducos. However, Sieyès rapidly found himself outwitted, sidelined, and ultimately forced out of the triumvirate by Napoleon Bonaparte, ably aided by Talleyrand. Napoleon soon worked himself in a position of virtually unchecked power, which he formalised by declaring himself “first consul for life” in 1802, and ultimately, in 1804, Emperor, bringing the French revolution to a definitive close.

May 1804 onwards: aftermath

Napoleon served as Emperor of the First French Empire from 1804–1814 when he was forced to abdicate by the British. This led to the Bourbon Restoration as Louis XVIII (the previous King Louis XVI’s brother) was crowned king of France (they skipped over XVII in deference to Louis’ son who had died in the meantime). He reigned until his death in 1824 with the exception of the hundred days — a period of around three months in 1815 when Napoleon escaped exile, retook control of France, and was then defeated at Waterloo and exiled again.

Louis XVIII was replaced by his brother Charles X. He served until he was forced to abdicate in the July Revolution of 1830. In the period of turmoil that followed our old friend Lafayette, now 70 and back from exile, effectively took command once again. Overruling younger rebels who wanted a republic he established a constitutional monarchy with Louis Philippe I, the son of Orleans, as King. Louis Phillipe narrowly survived being toppled in the radical republican June Rebellion of 1832 (this is the rebellion Les Mis is about) and two attempted coup attempts by Louis Napoléon Bonapart (Napoleon’s nephew) in 1836 and 1840 but was eventually forced out in the French Revolution of 1848 (part of the wave of revolutions that swept Europe that year).

This revolution led to the creation of the French Second Republic but the initial radicalism of the rebels petered out and in the subsequent presidential elections Louis Napoléon Bonapart triumphed becoming France’s first President. At the end of his term he then staged a coup and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1851 (he chose the III in deference to the concept that at the end of the hundred days Napoleon had initially abdicated in favour of his four year old son, making his son Napoleon II even though he never ruled as such). This coup happened to occur on 18 Brumiere, and prompted Marx’s quip that history repeats the first time as tragedy the second as farce.

Napoleon III ruled until he was captured by the Prussians at the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. At this point there was another rebellion in Paris which established the Paris Commune — a socialist government of Paris which controlled the city during the spring of 1871 until being utterly crushed by a joint attack from Napoleon and the Prussians. The victorious Prussians then established the parliamentary Third French Republic which lasted until the Nazi invasion of 1940. They established the client state of Vichy France until 1945 at which point, post liberation, the Fourth French Republic was established. This was much like the third and lasted until 1958 when Charles de Gaulle won a mandate to rewrite the constitution. This created the presidential Fifth French Republic, which — aside from the two month quasi-revolution of May ’68 — has lasted to this day.

Fred’s blog

My name’s Fred Carver. I used to work in politics, now I work in human rights. This is a private blog, not linked to my day job, where I write about world politics, electoral systems, or anything else that occurs to me.

Fred Carver

Written by

Fred’s blog

My name’s Fred Carver. I used to work in politics, now I work in human rights. This is a private blog, not linked to my day job, where I write about world politics, electoral systems, or anything else that occurs to me.

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