The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

The events on the frontier reacted immediately upon politics in Paris. Danton at last succeeded in convincing the Assembly of the absolute necessity of a strong Executive. In the end of March and the beginning of April, a series of decrees passed the Convention, establishing, for the first time since the outbreak of the Revolution, a powerful Government in France, and founding or re-organising at the same time the three chief instruments of the Terror. One decree created the Revolutionary Tribunal, a court with summary process and extraordinary powers, to try conspirators against the State; another, the famous Committee of General Security, to hunt down and punish political crime; and a third, the still more famous Committee of Public Safety, soon to become the most redoubtable despotism in the history of the world. With these decrees went other energetic measures—fresh powers for the commissioners, the 'Representatives on Missions,' sent into the provinces to execute the orders of the Convention; a fresh levy of 300,000 men for the campaign, to be raised, if necessary, by conscription; fresh decrees entailing penalties on Emigrants and non-juring priests, outlawing all enemies of the Revolution, and establishing in every Section of Paris a Committee of Supervision, armed with despotic powers, to watch, disarm, arrest, and tax all politicians on the other side. The national danger once again called to the front the vigilant minority, which created a despotism to save the Revolution and dragged the reluctant majority behind.

How far in all these measures the Jacobins were acting from patriotic motives, and how far they were merely working for the advantage of their party, it is hardly possible to say. Danton's motives stand above dispute, and many others, it may be, deserve to be associated with him in their love of France. Probably the Jacobins, like other politicians, believed or could easily persuade themselves, that the cause of the country and their party interest were the same. But whatever the motive may have been, there is no doubt that the result of all these measures was to strengthen the Jacobins and to weaken their rivals, although in most of them, the Gironde joined.

There were, however, other measures passed in the spring of 1793, which were little in harmony with Girondist ideas, and which owed their origin to the Jacobins alone. Economic causes were at work to increase the agitation in Paris. In spite of the sale of the Church lands and of the property of the Emigrants, the financial position of the Government was most unsatisfactory. The taxes were ill-paid. The credit of the State had sunk very low. The expenses of the war and of the administration were increasing every day. Specie was very difficult to obtain. The Government, in consequence, fell back upon fresh issues of Assignats, and the value of the Assignats steadily fell. At the same time prices rose with alarming rapidity. Trade, already dislocated by the confusion of the time, tended to leave Paris, where the Assignats were most abundant. Speculation naturally increased. Large dealers, contractors and capitalists made considerable profits by laying in stores, by holding back commodities, and by turning the fluctuations of the market to account. It is true that, early in 1793, wages began to rise rapidly as well, because of the large drafts of men drawn from Paris to the seat of war. But the wages of the working class were paid not in money, but in depreciated Assignats; so that, while the poor felt the rise in prices and the scarcity of food, and while they resented the apparent prosperity of the dealers whose machinations their leaders denounced, they did not feel the full advantage of the rise in wages, and their angry discontent increased. The economics of the destitute are always blind. They were easily persuaded that the rich were profiting by a system which brought only suffering to them.

The result was an outcry in the poorer districts of the city against all speculators and capitalists. Demands were raised for the rigid regulation of trade, for cheap food, for the fixing of prices, and for imperative laws to keep up the value of the paper money. The Commune took up the popular cry, and demanded with success large grants from the Treasury, in order to provide the capital with bread. Marat, as usual, denounced his opponents and incited the people to help themselves; and at the end of February, Marat's encouragement produced a somewhat formidable riot, in which many tradesmen who were not Jacobins suffered serious loss. The leaders of the Mountain, that is the leaders of the Jacobins in the Convention, who had little economic knowledge, and who, seeing distress and scarcity, believed it possible to end them by arbitrary laws, supported the demand for exceptional measures. The indifferent members of the Centre, whose acquaintance with economic laws was probably no wider than that of the Mountain, gave their consent to proposals which they hoped would quiet Paris and avert insurrection. Danton suggested that the price of bread should be regulated by the rate of wages. In April and May a series of summary decrees were passed by the Convention entailing the most severe penalties on all who trafficked in the currency, establishing a Maximum price for grain, and imposing a heavy tax in the shape of a forced loan upon the rich.

These measures, again, damaged the Girondists in Paris. They had as a party a clearer conception than their opponents of the danger of arbitrary interference with prices and with trade. Some of their leaders opposed the proposals of the Commune, and even ventured to protest against the grants spent in providing cheap bread for the capital. But their protests only increased their unpopularity in Paris, and led to demands for their punishment and removal, to fresh threats and denunciations. On the 10th March, a fresh insurrection was set on foot in some of the Sections, with the object of marching on the Convention and getting rid of the Girondists by force. But it was discountenanced by the Jacobin leaders, and it ended in an ineffectual riot. The alarm, however, created by the bad news from the frontier tended to heighten the political fever, and with that the risk of insurrection. In March and April the danger was increased by the serious rising in La Vendée, which, beginning in a series of isolated outbreaks occasioned by the conscription and by local causes, developed into a widespread political movement on behalf of monarchical ideas, and by its spirit and its successes seemed to threaten the safety of the Republic.

While the Girondists wavered and lost ground, the Jacobins were organised and were preparing for the battle. They had behind them all the authority of the Commune of Paris, the prestige of the well-known leaders of the Mountain, and the forces of the two great Clubs. They had, owing to the apathy of their opponents, obtained the control of most of the Sections. They had practically the military power too. After the 10th August, the National Guard had been organised afresh into forty-eight battalions, one for each Section. The artillery of the Guard had been separately organised, and the artillerymen, recruited from the poorest class, formed a body on whom the Jacobins could generally depend. The old bourgeois members no longer appeared, but paid Sansculottes to do their duty for them; and the nucleus of a fighting force was formed by the men of the 10th August and of the 2nd September, who could be relied on to act as the Commune required. Besides that, in the middle of May, the Commune ordered the enlistment of a special force of Sansculottes, which was organised later as the Revolutionary Army. Further, the Jacobins had the control of the police. Each Section had its elected police-commissioners, acting under the direction of the Commune, and as a matter of fact police-commissioners became in many Sections insurrectionary leaders. Thus the forces which existed nominally to protect the friends of order, had become the active agents of the other side. The Committees of Supervision lately instituted by the Convention, and known before long as Revolutionary Committees, sat in every Section, denouncing, disarming, and fining their enemies, dealing out certificates of 'civism' to their allies, forming ready centres of Jacobin intrigue, and arranging plans for a general rising. If ever the Moderates dared to assert themselves in the Sections, the Jacobins could call in the authority of the police, and thus secure the arrest of their opponents. All that they wanted was time to organise their forces, so as to make the success of an insurrection certain.

To these preparations Girondists had nothing to oppose. They too must have realised that the question had come to be one of force, and yet they took no steps to gather forces for themselves. They inspired no enthusiasm in the capital. There was no class in Paris on whom they could rely. The National Guard would not rise to defend them. They had no guard or organisation of their own. Neither the aristocrats nor the bourgeois recognised them as leaders, and they made few efforts to rally the partisans of order round them. The Girondists, it is true, had eloquence and parliamentary battalions, and they were probably right in believing that the majority of citizens preferred their policy and conduct to those of their opponents. But these advantages were of little weight or value when physical force lay in the other scale.

At last, however, the Girondists began to recognise their danger. In April they attacked Marat, and sent him before the Revolutionary Tribunal. But Marat was triumphantly acquitted. They denounced the insurrectionary plots in the Sections. But the plots went merrily on. They refused to listen to Danton's overtures of conciliation. They obtained addresses of confidence from the departments. They proposed to appeal to the country against Paris. They suggested that the Convention should be moved to Versailles or Bourges. But all these proposals were without result. Later still, as their apprehensions increased, they boldly talked of dissolving the Commune, and on the 18th May they carried a motion appointing an extraordinary Commission of Twelve, to enquire into the conspiracies against the Convention. At the end, though they lacked unity, they did not lack vigour. The Commission intrepidly challenged the plotters, and struck at the chief by arresting Hébert. Hébert's arrest precipitated the crisis, and the alarm which it caused in the camp of the Commune showed that the Jacobins felt the gravity of the Girondist attack. But in order to make their attack effective, the Girondists must have had a force behind them, and this they had not the penetration to perceive or the power or resolution to create.

Yet it cannot be said that their leaders were unwarned. Garat, their principal representative in the Ministry, complacently shut his eyes to the danger, and to the last moment assured his colleagues that Paris was quiet and that nothing need be feared. And yet Garat had at the time in his service a small staff of secret police, who were daily reporting to him on the condition of Paris, and among them one, Dutard, an observer of singular acuteness, whose reports the minister apparently laid on the shelf unread, but whose name and counsels deserve to be rescued from oblivion. In Dutard's reports we have striking evidence of the apathy of the great mass of the Parisians, of their indifference to Girondists and Jacobins alike. If Dutard's opinion is to be trusted, most of the small traders and working people, who had welcomed the Revolution with enthusiasm and who had acquiesced in the downfall of the throne, had since passed into the ranks of disaffection. The butchers, the tailors, the shoemakers, the wine-dealers, even the market-women and the better artisans had ceased to belong to the advanced party. The recruits of the Commune in May were drawn from a lower and more reckless class, from unemployed or idle workmen, from porters, hucksters, foreigners and domestic servants, reinforced by criminals and outcasts, and swelled by the social refuse of great cities, which no legislation or philanthropy has yet been able to remove. This ignorant and undisciplined body, easily led and easily misled, very sensitive to want and panic, not very sensitive to principle or order, formed a force on which the party of violence could depend, and the agents of the Commune were busily appealing to its interests, drilling it into battalions, and rousing it to act. But after all, compared with the population of Paris, this force was small. The great mass of Parisian citizens dreaded and disliked it. They hated its doctrines. They shuddered at the recollection of its outbreak in September, and were cowed by the fear lest that outbreak should recur. The aristocrats held themselves aloof, provoked opposition and made mischief. The bourgeois declined all public duties, and shunned the assemblies of the Sections, the debates of the clubs, the gatherings and demonstrations in the streets, the political discussions in the cafés. They only wanted to be left alone, to amuse themselves, to gather in the Champs Elysées or in the Gardens of the dismantled Tuileries, to enjoy the sunshine and the summer breezes, to attend to their own small affairs, and to escape the bewildering and dangerous vicissitudes of public life. They had no union, no rallying-point, no leaders. Worst of all, they had for the most part little courage, and had not learned, as they learned later, that if they wished to be delivered they must assert themselves and act.

Yet at times there were traces of a better spirit among them. The first attempts made to raise the forced loan from the rich and to compel them to enlist for service in La Vendée seem to have stirred them to resistance, and in the course of May, Dutard reported signs of a rally of moderate politicians, and the reappearance of the majority in the Sections. Could the Girondists have taken advantage of this spirit, could they have used their influence in the Government and in the Convention to bring troops to Paris, to shut the clubs, to overawe the Commune, to enlist and draft off to La Vendée some of the destitute and unemployed, to appeal to the instincts of property and order which every civilized community retains, and to encourage those instincts to assert themselves by an adequate display of force, they might yet have won the day. But the Girondists could not seize the opportunity. Very few of them saw as clearly as Garat's clever agent what was wanted. They had not the authority, the union or the promptitude to induce the Convention to take the necessary steps. So the majority relapsed into submission, and the minority, helped by force and terror, secured the lead again.