Daily Life During the French Revolution (5 page)

Suspicion and discontent among the disenfranchised section
of the population grew. The non-propertied and working classes saw little in
the revolution that promoted their welfare and had no trust that the bourgeois government
would redress their misery. They steadily gravitated toward radical solutions
for their problems. This process was expedited by the highly organized and
powerful Jacobin clubs, among others.

The new Legislative Assembly began its sessions on October
1, 1791. It was composed of 750 members, all of whom were inexperienced, since
members of the Constituent Assembly had voted themselves ineligible for
election to the new body. This new legislature was divided into widely
divergent factions, the most moderate of which was the Feuillants, who
supported a constitutional monarchy as defined under the first constitution. In
the center was the majority caucus, known as the Plain, which was without
well-defined political opinions. The Plain, however, uniformly opposed the
republicans who sat on the left, composed mainly of the Girondins, who wanted
to change the constitutional monarchy into a federal republic similar to that
of the United States of America. The Plain and the Girondins opposed the
Montagnards (men of the mountain, because they sat in the highest seats),
consisting of Jacobins and Cordeliers, who favored establishment of a highly
centralized, indivisible republic.

Before these differences caused a serious split, the
Assembly passed several bills, including stringent measures against clergymen
who refused to swear allegiance to the government. Louis XVI exercised his veto
against these bills, however, creating a crisis that brought the Girondins to
power. Despite the opposition of leading Montagnards, the Girondist ministry
adopted a belligerent attitude toward Frederick William II and Francis II, the
Holy Roman emperor (who had succeeded his father, Leopold II, on March 1,
1792). The two sovereigns openly supported the
émigrés
and encouraged
the opposition of the feudal landlords in Alsace to the revolutionary
legislation. Sentiment for war spread among the monarchists, who hoped that
foreign armies would destroy the revolutionary government and permit the
restoration of the old order, as well as among the Girondins, who wanted a
final triumph over reaction at home and abroad.

REVOLUTIONARY WARS

On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly declared war on
Austria, beginning the series of conflicts known as the French Revolutionary
Wars. On June 13, 1792, Prussia declared war on France. Successive defeats for
France followed, threatening the revolutionary movement. As Austrian armies
invaded eastern France, this threat produced major repercussions in Paris,
where disorder erupted. On June 20, the sans-culottes and Paris mobs invaded
the Tuileries palace and forced the king to don the red revolutionary hat. On
July 22, the duke of Brunswick, commander of the combined Austrian and Prussian
armies, issued a declaration stating that if any member of the royal family
were harmed, Paris would be destroyed. Instead of fear, the Brunswick manifesto
inspired an outburst of patriotic fervor in the capital.

The Legislative Assembly proclaimed the country in danger,
and reserves were hurried to the hard-pressed armies while volunteers were
summoned to Paris from all parts of the country. The
fédérés
contingent
from Marseille arrived on July 30, 1792, singing the patriotic hymn thenceforth
known as the “Marseillaise.” On August 3, the militant sans-culottes of the
Paris sections (consisting mostly of the working class) demanded the overthrow
of the monarchy. On August 10, angry disturbances, combined with the threat
contained in the manifesto of the allied commander, precipitated a Parisian
insurrection. Radical elements in the capital, strengthened by national
volunteers passing through the city on route to the front, stormed the
Tuileries, massacring the king’s Swiss Guards. Louis and his family escaped to
the nearby hall of the Legislative Assembly, whose members promptly suspended
the king and placed him and his family in confinement.

During the first week of September, more than 1,000
royalists and suspected traitors who had been rounded up in various parts of
France were tried by mock courts in the prisons and summarily executed. These
“September massacres” were induced by popular fear of the advancing allied
armies and of rumored plots to overthrow the revolutionary government.

Louis XVI forced to wear the red
liberty bonnet of the revolution.

NATIONAL CONVENTION

On September 20, 1792, a French army, commanded by General
Charles Dumouriez, stopped the Prussian advance on Paris at the town of Valmy,
east of the capital. The same day, the National Convention (the third National
Assembly of the revolution) was elected by male suffrage.

This newly elected body convened in Paris, and its first
official move, on September 22, 1792, was to abolish the monarchy and proclaim
the establishment of the First French Republic. Agreement among the principal
convention factions, the Girondins and the Montagnards, went little beyond
common approval of these initial measures. In their euphoria, the Girondins
promulgated a decree, on November 19, that promised French assistance to all
oppressed peoples of Europe.

Reports arrived almost weekly from the army, which, after
the battle at Valmy, had now assumed the offensive, forcing the enemy back on
all fronts. In the meantime, however, strife steadily intensified in the
National Convention, with the Plain vacillating between support for the
conservative Girondins and support for the radical Montagnards.

In the first major test of strength, a majority approved
the Montagnard proposal that Louis be brought to trial before the Convention
for treason. On January 15, 1793, the monarch was found guilty as charged, but,
on the following day, when the nature of the penalty was determined, factional
lines were sharply drawn. By a vote of 387 to 334, the delegates approved the
death penalty, and Louis XVI went to the guillotine on January 21, 1793.

Girondist influence in the National Convention diminished
markedly after the execution of the king. The lack of unity within the group
during the trial had damaged its national prestige, already at low ebb among
the Parisian populace, which favored the Jacobins. Their influence was further
diminished as a consequence of the military reversals suffered by the
revolutionary armies after the French declaration of war on England and the
United Netherlands on February 1, 1793. The French situation was again becoming
desperate. Line regiments and volunteers were amalgamated on February 21, and,
three days later, the Convention voted to conscript 300,000 men, dispatching
special commissioners to the various departments for the purpose of organizing
the levy.

War was declared on Spain on March 7, 1793, and, along with
several smaller states, the Spanish entered the counterrevolutionary coalition.
A tribunal was established on March 10 in which Jacobin proposals to strengthen
the government for the crucial oncoming struggles met resistance from the Girondins,
while royalists and clerical foes of the revolution stirred up the anti-conscription
and pro-Catholic feelings of peasants in the Vendée, leading to open rebellion
on March 11, 1793. Civil war quickly spread to neighboring departments. On
March 18, the Austrians defeated the French army of General Dumouriez at
Neerwinden, and on April 5, the General, a Girondin, deserted to the Austrian
enemy. On April 6, the Committee of Public Safety was created as the executive
organ of the republic.

The defection of the leader of the army, mounting civil
war, food riots due to mediocre harvests, the falling assignat, and the advance
of enemy forces again across the French frontiers inevitably led to a crisis in
the Convention, the factions with the more radical elements stressing the
necessity for bold action in defense of the revolution. On April 29, 1793, a
Federalist uprising (by those against centralized authority in Paris) took
place in Marseille. The political situation was going from bad to worse.

To keep prices down and the people calm, the first Maximum
(price controls on wheat and flour) was decreed on May 14, 1793, and, desperate
for money, the government forced the rich to contribute. Following
anti-Girondist uprisings in Paris, the Girondins were purged from the
Convention on June 2. In the meantime, Federalist revolts spread to Bordeaux,
Lyon, and Caen, while the rebels of the Vendée captured Saumur. The 1791
constitution creating a limited monarchy was defunct, as was the monarch, and a
new constitution of 1793 was accepted on June 24.

Leadership of the Committee of Public Safety passed to the
Jacobins on July 10, 1793. On July 13, Jean-Paul Marat, a radical politician,
was assassinated by the aristocrat Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer.
Public anger over this crime considerably enhanced Jacobin influence, and
Federalism (the objective of the Girondins) was declared illegal on July 17. By
now, the food shortage was desperate, and the death penalty was decreed on July
26 for hoarders. The next day, Robespierre, a lawyer from Arras, joined the
Committee of Public Safety.

On August 23, 1793, the National Convention, facing a
dwindling supply of recruits for the army and under pressure from the
sans-culottes of Paris, decreed a
levée en masse,
or total mobilization
of the populace for the war effort. Unmarried men and childless widowers
between the ages of 18 and 25 were ordered to enlist. Married men were ordered
to work in the manufacture of arms, while women were to volunteer for work in
military hospitals or make uniforms and tents for the army, which now had grown
to 750,000 men. Meanwhile, on September 8, 1793, the French army scored a
victory at Hondschoote, near the Belgian border, raising morale, but the levy
further alienated the Vendean rebels, as well as inhabitants of large parts of
the west and other rural districts who were already angry over the treatment of
their priests and who needed their sons, destined for the army, to help work
the land.

Death of Louis XVI, January 21,
1793, in the Place de la Révolution (renamed the Place de la Concorde in 1795),
Paris. To the left is the pedestal of the toppled statue of Louis XV.

GOVERNMENT BY TERROR

Functioning as the executive power of the government once
held by the king, the Committee of Public Safety was endowed with immense
authority. The Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre, the dominant power on the
Committee, aided by Louis Saint-Just, Lazare Carnot, Georges Couthon, and other
prominent Jacobins, instituted extreme policies to crush any possibility of
counterrevolution. Their mandate was renewed monthly by the National Convention
beginning April 1793.

The committee began implementing government by terror on
September 5, followed by the Law of Suspects, which was passed on September 17.
The law, vague and draconian, decreed that all suspect persons were to be
arrested and tried by the tribunal. Suspect persons were defined as anyone who,
by thought, word, or deed, had opposed the revolution. So-called enemies of
liberty could also be arrested if they could not prove that they were engaged
in some civic duty. Relatives of the
émigrés
were the first to be
rounded up for trial. The sentence was usually death with no benefit of appeal.
Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, the prosecutor for the Revolutionary Tribunal,
earned a reputation as a bloodthirsty extremist and became the most feared and
hated man in France.