Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory

by Isser Woloch

Overview

Professor Woloch shows that Jacobinism survived and forcefully developed into a constitutional party under the conservative Directorial republic. The Jacobin legacy was a mode of political activism—the local political club—and a constellation of attitudes which might be called the "democratic persuasion." By focusing on the nature of this persuasion and the way that it was articulated in the Neo-Jacobin clubs, the author provides a fresh perspective on the history of Jacobinism, and on the fate of the Directorial republic.

Originally published in 1970.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691621388
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2015
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1658
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

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Jacobin Legacy

The Democratic Movement under the Directory

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By Isser Woloch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06183-2

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Jacobin Clubs, 1792-95

The fact that Jacobinism in the French Revolution developed through the medium of political clubs is by no means incidental. This was its most generic quality and constitutes a logical starting point for analysis. By Jacobins — not simply the leadership in Paris, but the rank and file across France — I mean people who banded together in clubs in order to support and advance the Revolution. Once established, these clubs underwent significant changes in their social composition, political practices, and in the kinds of attitudes that they represented. Decisive turning points like the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of a government "revolutionary until the peace" left a permanent impact on them, though the ambiguities and local variations in these changes were enormous. In the face of such complexity it is still possible to describe the principal characteristics of Jacobinism in its classic phase after 1792, and to highlight in summary fashion the main steps in its development. The question then remains to be posed: what was likely to have abiding relevance after the climactic achievements of the Year II? Were the most striking features at that time necessarily the most enduring ones? If not, what were the other qualities of Jacobinism whose persistence marks them as equally fundamental?

‡ I ‡

The original Jacobin clubs were created by the middle-class reformers or "Patriots" of 1789. Known as Societies of the Friends of the Constitution, the clubs were organized to support the transition to a constitutional monarchy in a progressive fashion. Hoping to avoid violent upheavals, but also unnecessary concessions to the old order, the Jacobins of 1789 believed that discussion and education at the local level would facilitate the acceptance of a new constitution. Their original purpose, then, was primarily didactic; their original emphasis was on constitutional liberalism. Their libertarianism, however, was frustrated by the grip of tradition over vast segments of French society, and by the rapid development of overt counterrevolution.

Even in its initial phase, when the leadership was limited to locally prominent individuals, the clubs were potentially disruptive, as far as the royal authorities and the moderate majority of the National Assembly were concerned. Almost from the beginning the clubs agitated public opinion and exerted pressure on the government, as they passed from reading newspapers and discussing issues to drawing up petitions with which they assaulted the Assembly and the new departmental authorities. The Assembly reacted harshly to this trend by declaring in April 1790 that the right of petition — a sacred right, to be sure — belonged only to individuals and could not be delegated: "Consequendy, that right may not be exercised collectively ... by clubs of citizens."

This pronouncement was largely ignored. On the contrary, the clubs continued to stimulate an increasingly alert and articulate body of opinion that put great pressure on the Assembly. Moreover, in Paris and elsewhere a few clubs effectively conducted mass agitation during the crisis provoked by the king's flight to Varennes in June 1791. And so as early as that year the Assembly moved to curb the clubs definitively by legislating limits on their organization and activities. The bill, reported out of committee by Le-Chapelier and passed in September, was supported by Rousseauistic arguments as well as conservative principles, for it attacked the clubs as intermediary corporations that obstructed the general will. Though the clubs had been useful early in the Revolution, Le-Chapelier maintained, their growing system of affiliation and their incessant petitions were becoming dangerous. The bill stipulated that no society or club "may assume a political existence under any form whatsoever, nor exert any pressure on the acts of the constituted powers and legal authorities. Under no pretext may they appear under a collective appellation, either to draw up petitions, or to form deputations to attend public ceremonies." In addition to petitions, deputations, and public political manifestations, the decree also prohibited deliberations, presumably meaning resolutions and votes at club meetings. The legislators clearly sought to reduce the clubs to a passive, apolitical role. At most the clubs should work to educate the citizenry by reading newspapers aloud and by publicizing legislative enactments. No longer would they be permitted to act as pressure groups upon the authorities.

This decree was one of the National Assembly's last acts, for it was about to dissolve and give way to a newly elected Legislative Assembly under the Constitution of 1791. The September decree was apparently lost in the shuffle and was never enforced, so that in April 1792 the same question was raised once again. Opposition to the clubs was as strong as ever, but this time the committee's report, delivered by Français de Nantes, concluded that they were more useful than dangerous in a free society. The clubs continued to be attacked by conservatives but their survival seemed assured. Meanwhile, as the religious question became more divisive and as the original Patriot Party crumbled under the strain of new conflicts, the firm supporters of revolution became increasingly embattled in their clubs while the more conservative members tended to drop from the rolls. The formation of the conservative Feuillant Club following a mass defection of deputies from the Paris Jacobin Club in the summer of 1791 was symptomatic of this development.

After the overthrow of the monarchy in the second revolution of August 1792, the clubs became an essential part of the revolutionary effort. From their ranks cadres were ready to assume local leadership and to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the monarchy. The clubs were no longer Friends of the Constitution, for there was none, but became instead Friends of Liberty and Equality — a change in name that would soon become substantive. For as Marcel Reinhard has suggested, the resort to violent, sweeping revolution in 1792 could be justified and sustained only if complemented by a democratization which would cement the loyalty of politically conscious citizens from many levels of society. To this end the clubs became more congenial places for the "common people" who, in many towns, had already been attending their meetings but had held a back seat before August 1792.

The atmosphere at the clubs came increasingly to reflect the presence of these men who worked with their hands, who were of low status, and who lacked much formal education. Plebeians or common people in normal times, they were the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. Though they were often referred to as ouvriers (a loose and misleading contemporary term), most were not daylaborers or even wage earners, and they most assuredly were not from the bottom rung of the indigent. The sans-culottes, rather, were master craftsmen, journeymen, artisans, small shopkeepers, minor clerks and functionaries, and common soldiers. These types in growing numbers joined those citizens of the middle class — lawyers, bureaucrats, teachers, merchants, landed proprietors — who were already well installed in the clubs; and what is more, in the months that followed they often emerged as local leaders.

The evolution of the clubs towards both a broader social base and a more decisive political role was interrupted in the spring of 1793 by the factional conflicts revolving around the Girondin-Montagnard schism. This struggle for leadership in the capital had a paralyzing effect in the departments. In the wake of dissension and confusion the clubs lost their momentum. Only after the triumph of the Mountain and the isolation of "federalism" as a counterrevolutionary heresy did they come to life again with renewed vigor. In most of those resuscitated clubs there was no trace of the earlier elitism. Amalgams of bourgeoisie and sans-culottes — of politically conscious citizens from many occupational and status levels — they called themselves appropriately enough sociétés populaires.

As sentinels of revolution — and often as isolated bastions of patriotism — the clubs won the wholehearted endorsement of the Convention after the Mountain's triumph. Now the Convention decisively reversed the tendency of the two earlier Assemblies to fault the clubs and to restrict their activities. Instead, local officials (often federalist sympathizers at this point) were forbidden to interfere with clubs or to prevent them from meeting. In the autumn of 1793 the sociétés populaires won unparalleled power when they were officially invited to denounce all disloyal citizens, and also to designate competent patriots to fill public offices. They were even directed to hold their meetings in public so that they might have greater influence in the community.

The clubs, in short, were markedly transformed. Having started as educational and propagandistic associations of middle-class reformers in 1789, they had gradually evolved into socially heterogeneous political action groups. Finally in the Year II (1793-94) the sociétés populaires became the arms of a triumphant Montagnard government. Not only were they to be the Convention's "arsenals of public opinion"; by late 1793, in Crane Brinton's words, the clubs were functioning as auxiliary administrative bodies in the departments, working with the local revolutionary committees whose members were recruited from the clubs and scrutinized by them.

During the ensuing months, as the clubs increasingly came under the control of Paris, the movement became the highly centralized affair often referred to as the "Jacobin Dictatorship." This centralization had two roots: first, the system of affiliation with departmental clubs that the Paris Jacobin Club had extended by the Year II into a procedure for maintaining orthodoxy in the provinces; and second, the tightly structured institutions of the gouvernement révolutionnaire which were codified in the law of 14 frimaire Year II (December 1793). The revolutionary government, whose hub was the Committee of Public Safety, attempted to coordinate everything, and to repress what it could not control. The autonomous and unaffiliated clubs in the Paris sections, which were exclusively sans-culotte in composition and more militant than most clubs, were eventually suppressed by Robespierre because they resisted this centralization. A few provincial "ultras," and the battalions of the terroristic armée révolutionnaire in the interior were eliminated for the same reasons. But most local sociétaires fell into line, and accepted their position in what amounted to an unpaid revolutionary bureaucracy.

Once this revolutionary government was firmly in place, general political debate was taken as pointless by those in power. As Richard Cobb has pointed out, the Jacobins placed their faith in the Convention with astonishing credulity. The fall of Danton, Hébert, and Robespierre alike were accepted with relative equanimity; issues of national policy were rarely discussed, and the ground rules laid down by Paris were generally accepted. This development of orthodoxy was emphasized by repeated purges of most clubs carried out under the auspices of the revolutionary government, but also influenced by local rivalries. So, while the base of the Jacobin clubs was broadened socially, it had become extremely narrow politically by the time Robespierre was overthrown.

‡ II ‡

In the course of the clubs' transition from the vanguard of revolutionary agitation to the bulwarks of an established government, certain well-known Jacobin characteristics developed. Some of these were transitory, stemming primarily from the imperatives of the crisis situation that confronted France at the time or from derivative circumstances that depended on that situation. Other attitudes and practices, it can be argued, had a more durable significance.

The political centralization was by its very nature a provisional state of affairs. The Convention, it must be remembered, ruled explicitly by temporary revolutionary fiat as opposed to fixed constitutional law. For the duration of the crisis its leaders were authorized to forge a single center of political opinion and a single source of administrative control. All the classic elements of liberty (elections, freedom of expression, checks and balances, local autonomy) were lain aside "until the peace." The rigid system of affiliation maintained by the Paris Jacobin Club — and used eventually to help destroy the popular movement in the Paris sections — was consistent with this theory of revolutionary government. It was only in this context that the popular societies were converted from private political associations attempting to mold public opinion, into quasi-official governmental organs.

Jacobins of this period are familiar to posterity as terrorists, but this too was an extension of their role as instruments of revolutionary government. In the Year II terrorism was an official policy of the French republic, designed to accomplish certain specific objectives. This remains true despite the fact that the popular movement in Paris, which was instrumental in having terror placed "on the order of the day," may have conceived of it in a more sweeping and deep-seated fashion, or at any rate was more intensely committed to it than the hesitant Convention. In any case, terrorism in the form of perfunctory political trials, capital economic crimes, overflowing jails, the guillotine, and the mitraillade, was the most striking aspect of life in the Year II in those areas of France torn by civil war. Certainly too the victims and the imagined victims were motivated by revenge in the years that followed, and acts of revenge in turn created countercurrents, so that terrorism remained very much alive as an issue. But the actual need for and resort to terror, though a distinguishing feature of Jacobinism at the time, was a crisis phenomenon.

The same may be said of the extreme exaltation or fanaticism that seems to have marked Jacobinism at the height of its power. Faced with enormous dangers — with a multifaceted and armed counterrevolution — the Jacobins were aggressive, distrustful of outsiders, and prone to believe in conspiracies. Being a tiny minority of the population (almost never more than 5 percent of any community), and surrounded by a sullen, hostile peasantry, the Jacobins of town and village shared the conviction that the Revolution depended on their action in the clubs. Their sense of being embattled understandably produced exaltation, as well as a tendency to verbal exaggeration and self-righteousness. All of this was compounded by the premium that the revolutionary leadership placed on orthodoxy and conformism.

Some historians and contemporaries have seized upon these traits in order to create a derisory stereotype of the revolutionists — reaching in Taine's exalted prose such images as "monkeys led by crocodiles." More temperately, Crane Brinton has discerned in their state of consciousness the makings of a secular, messianic religion. He describes the Jacobins in terms of their Ritual and their Faith, an undemonstrable conceptualization that has been stimulating but has been resisted by most French scholars. Recently Richard Cobb has attempted a more straightforward description of what he calls the "revolutionary mentality" — accounting for its bizarre manifestations in terms of crisis circumstances and the popular social milieu of the clubs. And it was a state of mind, he argues, that was bound to pass when the dangers as well as the novelty of political activism diminished.

By germinal Year II the crisis created by inflation and scarcity of subsistence, as well as by invasion, treason, and general insecurity was mastered. The invasion was repulsed; the food supply seemed assured (though in fact it was not); internal opposition was quelled in most areas. As a result exaltation was turning into routine. Repeated purges, a narrowing political orthodoxy in which some of the Revolution's warmest supporters found themselves outside the pale, and a rigid control centered in Paris had achieved impressive results, whatever their toll: the Revolution was defended, consolidated, and broadened in its social consequences. But there was a paradox in this. Success had been achieved by channeling patriotic enthusiasm into a prescribed framework. This in turn eventually sapped the spontaneity of the Revolution's support among the sans-culottes. In some places, notably the Paris sections, this situation produced open breaches between the Robespierrist government and the sans-culotte militants. More commonly it produced not conflict but a mounting apathy, which caused the clubs to contract in membership and activity even while the Montagnards seemed at the pinnacle of their influence. Several months before Thermidor, attendance at the meetings of the sociétés populaires had begun to fall off perceptibly.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Jacobin Legacy by Isser Woloch. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• PREFACE, pg. vii
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xi
• CONTENTS, pg. xiii
• Concordance of the Republican and Gregorian Calendars, pg. xv
• PART ONE. ORIGINS AND TESTING, pg. 1
• PART TWO. RESURGENCE, pg. 81
• PART THREE. CONFRONTATION: THE ELECTIONS OF 1798, pg. 239
• PART FOUR. TOWARDS BRUMAIRE, pg. 345
• APPENDICES, pg. 401
• NOTE ON SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 417
• INDEX, pg. 441