The Time Traveler: The French Revolution Turns Radical

The revolution in France, during the era of European enlightenment was not one that had its origin in the ideas of great thinkers or the writing of academics, this armed movement, at its core, was basically because the inhabitants of France, specifically the members of the Third Estate, were tired of the abuses of monarchy, nobility and clergy and demanded a change. But because they were not heard by the government, peasants and bourgeois took matters into their own hands and changing the course of the revolution to a more violent face.

Leopold II

William Frederick II

European monarchies feared the French example would destabilize their power and rule in their own countries. Monarchs like Leopold II the Holy Roman Emperor, who was the brother of Marie-Antoinette, and King Willian Frederick II of Prussia took the side of Louis XVI and promised him they would help restore his power in France with the Declaration of Pillnitz. But, little did this men know, King Louis had already planned, along with the French National Assembly, an attack on Austria (Part of the Holy Roman Empire) looking to gain control over the countries grain supply’s. This would be the downfall of the French monarchs rule in this way, France now had to worry not only about the revolt of its people, but also had to dedicate efforts in facing a war against both Austria and Prussia.

On the domestic front, meanwhile, the political crisis took a radical turn when a group of insurgents led by the extremist Jacobins attacked the royal residence in Paris and arrested the king on August 10, 1792. The following month, amid a wave of violence in which Parisian insurrectionists massacred hundreds of accused counterrevolutionaries, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by the National Convention, which proclaimed the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of the French republic. On January 21, 1793, it sent King Louis XVI, condemned to death for high treason and crimes against the state, to the guillotine; his wife Marie-Antoinette suffered the same fate nine months later.

The Jacobins

Officially called the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, the Jacobin Club in the period of Maximillien Robespierre embodied the most radical response to the revolutionary crisis; to defeat the forces of reaction, they found themselves compelled to take radical measures — including price controls, food seizures, and the period of tactical violence that would come to be known as the “Reign of Terror.” While in early periods the Jacobin Club had included more moderate actors, the radical wing that cohered around Robespierre — known as the Montagnards — ultimately became the dominant tendency within the Jacobins’ ranks.

Jacobins, were bourgeois who moved the stirngs of the Revolution

Politically, these Jacobins were radically different from the forces that held power in the earlier stages of the revolution — constitutional monarchists like Lafayette (who despised the Jacobins, calling them “a sect that infringes sovereignty and tyrannies citizens”). In fact the Jacobin Club — along with the networks of fraternal organizations that sprung up to disseminate revolutionary teachings — had been instrumental in producing the very layers of radicalized working people who would later come to be known as the sans-cullottes. In the absence of political parties as we understand them today, the sans-culottes received their political education from revolutionary societies like the Jacobins, who produced newspapers and called gatherings where revolutionary propaganda was read aloud.

Above all else, the Jacobins were intensely concerned with translating the revolutionary fervor of 1789 into a durable and sustainable revolutionary society. They saw their role as to strengthen and deepen the radical ideals of the Revolution while protecting it from attack.

Who were the Sans-Cullotes?

They were the insurrectionary “movement of the laboring poor” who, in historian Eric Hobsbawm‘s words, “provided the main striking-force of the revolution.” Named for their lack of the distinguished breeches worn by elites, the sans-cullottes inhabited the political terrain of the street and the square as the bourgeois revolutionaries performed their political work in assembly halls and from within legislative bodies.

Sans-cullotte

Most fundamentally, the sans-culottes were concerned with establishing a system of direct, local democracy which could guarantee a consistent price of for vital provisions — the poor craved the same food security as the nobles, and resented the profound difference between the bread consumed by rich elites and the bread available to common laborers.

Often armed only with pikes — useful for parading the severed heads of food-hoarders or monarchists through the street, as was their habit — the sans-cullottes did more than just pose a grave threat to the old hierarchies of the monarchy. They also forced formal revolutionary bodies like the Legislative Assembly to adopt more radical positions to meet the expectations of the unsatisfied and insurgent poor.

Sans-cullotte is as sans-cullotte does. Constant confrontation with the privileged, often violently and in the street, demanding a world in which food is easily available and democracy simple and direct — this orientation, more than anything else, makes a sans-culotte.

Reign of Terror

Following the king’s execution, war with various European powers and intense divisions within the National Convention ushered the French Revolution into its most violent and turbulent phase. In June 1793, the Jacobins seized control of the National Convention from the more moderate Girondins and instituted a series of radical measures, including the establishment of a new calendar and the eradication of Christianity

The Reign of Terror was a period of 10 months of intense violence led by Robespierre’s Jacobins, during which the guillotine became the most potent political tool of expression, any suspected enemy of the revolution would face death. Though far fewer than the millions who lost their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, 17,000 people counter-revolutionaries as well as dissident thinkers within the revolution — were executed by the guillotine. Tens of thousands more were killed without trial or died in jail historian Timothy Tackett estimates a total death toll closer to 40,000.

Many of the killings were carried out under orders from Robespierre, who dominated the draconian Committee of Public Safety until his own execution on July 28, 1794. His death marked the beginning of the Thermidorian Reaction, a moderate phase in which the French people revolted against the Reign of Terror’s excesses.

The legacy of this period is still much debated. But it is hard to dispute that the terror emerged in response to the urgent need for political and military defense. The old figureheads of the ancien regime were more than mere symbols of opulence or historical tyranny; many were active antagonists of the revolution, working to dismantle its progress and assassinate its soldiers precisely at the time when the revolutionary transformation was most vulnerable.

French Revolution Ends: Napoleon’s Rise

Napoleon Bonaparte became the

Emperor of France and extended

French territory during the 19th

century

On August 22, 1795, the National Convention, composed largely of Girondins (one of many political groups in France) who had survived the Reign of Terror, approved a new constitution that created France’s first bicameral legislature. Executive power would lie in the hands of a five-member Directory (Directoire) appointed by parliament. Royalists and Jacobins protested the new regime but were swiftly silenced by the army, now led by a young and successful general named Napoleon Bonaparte.

The Directory’s four years in power were riddled with financial crises, popular discontent, inefficiency and, above all, political corruption. By the late 1790s, the directors relied almost entirely on the military to maintain their authority and had ceded much of their power to the generals in the field. On November 9, 1799, as frustration with their leadership reached a fever pitch, Bonaparte staged a coup d’état, abolishing the Directory and appointing himself France’s “first consul.” The event marked the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Napoleonic era, in which France would come to dominate much of continental Europe.

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