Topic Nine Section 44: The Emergency Republic 1792-1795 The Terror

1. The National Convention 9/1792

a. Military successes Expanded France

i. The Rhine and Austrian Border

ii. Abolished privileged position of the nobility as it expanded

iii. Poland issue and mutual distrust weakened the emerging coalition against France

b. The convention becomes more radical

i. Jacobins

1. Girondins

a. Favored Paris

2. Mountain

a. More radical group

3. Sans-culottes – working class interests

a. Promoted military engagement to protect the revolution

b. Denounced the king and queen

i. 1/1793 the king is executed

c. Denounced the Girondins as moderats and counter revolutionary

d. Look to the Mountain for leadership

2. Background to the terror

a. Military events turn against the French 4/1793

b. Wages, prices, food shortages

i. Activated the sans-culottes

1. Price controls

2. Currency controls

3. Rationaing

4. Control against hoarding food

5. Requisitioning

6. Denounced the bourgeois as exploiters and profiteers

ii. Mountain sides with Sans-culottes against Girondin

c. Mountain faces many difficulties

i. Enemy at the boarders

ii. Insurrection in the rural areas

iii. Cities rebelling

iv. Rebellions serve émigrés and clerics against the revolution

v. Robespierre comes to the leadership

d. Robespierre

i. Unselfish, honest, integrity, “the Incorruptible”

3. The Program of the Convention 1793-1794

a. Repress anarchy and counterrevolution

b. Win the war

c. Prepare a democratic constitution

d. Committee of Public Safety

i. Reign of Terror

1. Revolutionary courts

2. Committee of General Security – police

3. Victims included: Marie Antoinette, royalists, old Jacobins, Girondin, Mountain, peasants (70 percent)

a. Atrocities left feelings of antipathy to the Revolution and to republicanism

e. The Committee of Public Safety

i. Joint dictatorship or war cabinet

ii. Conscripted all able bodied men

iii. Enlisted scientists to develop technologies for the war

iv. Economic controls

v. Produced a constitution but held off implementing it because of the military “emergency”

vi. Manorial regime is done away with

vii. Public improvements and social services

viii. Abolished slavery in the French colonies 1794

1. Toussaiant L”Ouverture had led the slave revolt in 1791 in Haiti

ix. Repressed “ultra-revolutionary” voices “enrages”

1. Radical elements committed mass drownings

a. Dechristianinzation

i. Republican calendar (decade)

x. Committee of Public Safety orders tolerance

1. Robespierre: cult of the Supreme Being

a. Recognizes the existence of God and the immortality of the soul

b. Turns Catholics and freethinkers against him

xi. Committee fights Hebertists (leading the working class)

xii. Committee declares the right of the Mountain (Dantonists) as counterrevolutionaries and they are executed

f. The French Military

i. 800,000 strong and more motivated than their opponents

ii. Coalition is distracted (third partition of Poland)

iii. 6/1794 France invade Belgium, Netherlands,

iv. Military victories make France less tolerant of Committee of Public Safety’s strict leadership

g. National Convention was afraid of the ruling committee

i. Group in the Convention votes to outlaw Ropespierre

1. 7/27/1794 Ropespierre is executed with his associates

2. Troubles of France are blamed on Ropespierre to protect themselves from public criticism

4. The Thermidorian Reaction

a. The Terror subsides

b. The Convention Reduces the power of the Committee of Public Safety

i. Price controls are removed and inflation resumes

ii. Disoriented and leaderless working class erupts into insurrection

1. Barricades in Paris – army comes

2. Foreshadows the social revolution to come

c. Reaction is led by bourgeois

i. Element of the Old Regiem

1. Lawyers, officeholders, some land holders

2. self serving and disreputable

ii. Still believed in

1. individual rights

2. written constitution

5. Produced the Constitution of the Year III (1795)