A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (38 page)

The division of society around these rival poles was not, in the first place, brought about by the bourgeoisie, but by the aristocratic reaction. As with the English and American revolutions, it was not the mass of people demanding something new which produced the initial upheaval, but the attempt of the old order to push things backward.

Money had become the central preoccupation of the French monarchy in the 1780s. It had spent enormous sums on the Seven Years War with Britain and Prussia, and more again during the American war with Britain. Bankruptcy threatened if it did not find ways to increase its tax revenue. But it found this almost impossible. The exemption of the nobles and clergy from taxation meant the burden fell on the lower classes, and the point had been reached where most of them simply could not pay more. Average living standards in the countryside were falling, while wages in the towns had risen by only 22 percent against price rises of 65 percent.
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What is more, the method of raising tax was hopelessly inefficient, with considerable sums being siphoned off by the ‘tax farmers’ who collected it.

The king was briefly brought to see how serious the situation had become. He appointed a ‘reforming’ ministry in 1786 which presented a plan to rationalise the tax system and extend it to the huge landholdings of the nobility and the church. The aristocracy were outraged. An assembly of ‘notables’ picked by the king rejected the proposals. When further reforms were brought forward, the
noblesse de robe
in the provincial
parlements
refused to implement them—and when the ministers tried to proceed in spite of them, they organised public protests which turned into riots in some places. In these protests, the nobility still found it possible to win the support of many members of other classes. After all, the talk of higher taxes could seem like a threat to some members of the bourgeoisie and peasantry.

The nobility, seeing themselves as the natural leaders of society, had the illusion that they could use popular support to bend the government to their will. Their central demand was for an
Estates-General
—an assembly which had last been convened in 1614. In agreeing to this in May 1789, the king was conceding to the reactionary demands of the aristocracy, not some progressive movement of the bourgeoisie or the lower classes.

Yet this concession to the aristocracy forced the other classes to organise. They were required to choose representatives of the ‘third estate’. In the towns this meant assemblies to choose ‘electors’ who in turn would vote for delegates. In the countryside it meant villagers deciding who to send to an area meeting which would take decisions. The mass of people had no experience of such things and usually put their trust in those best able to speak. The result was that the assembly of the third estate was dominated by lawyers and other well heeled members of the middle class. But the process of choosing delegates encouraged many millions of people to think for the first time about what they wanted from society. In villages and towns across France they drew up
doléances
—lists of demands they wanted the
Estates-General
to implement. The discussion led to the activist groups beginning to crystallise in the poorer quarters of Paris, which were to storm the Bastille in July and march on Versailles in October. It also encouraged ferment among the peasants, which boiled over into revolt against local nobles in the summer of 1789.

The reactionary offensive of the aristocracy roused the middle class and created the mood of self assertion among its representatives as the
Estates-General
assembled. They were not revolutionary in intent. They were still enamoured with the monarchy and, rather than abolish it, wanted to cut the aristocracy down to size, so that there would be an end to arbitrary privilege and bullying. But they were not prepared to be dictated to, and they felt emboldened by the ferment in society. Hence their defiant gestures—their assertion of ‘human rights’, and declarations about the end of feudalism—could be followed by a compromise which left the king with considerable power and the aristocracy with their property.

But the aristocratic reaction was not going to be brought to an end so quickly. So long as the aristocrats were in control of their fortunes, their country estates and the officer corps of the army, they were going to try to re-establish their old positions of privilege.

Reformers, revolutionaries and
sans-culottes

The popular movements which had backed the middle class assembly in the summer of 1789 had roused the lower classes to challenge their miserable lot for the first time. They had begun to see that the wealth of the few and the poverty of the many were two sides of the same coin. At first they identified wealth with the aristocracy. But it was not long before they were turning their attention to those sections of the bourgeoisie who aped the aristocracy or who enriched themselves as ‘tax farmers’, landowners and speculators.

The agitation of 1789 had thrown up many thousands of new political activists among the middle classes. It was they who attended the political clubs, read the mass of pamphlets and newspapers, and took part in electoral meetings. They were exultant at first. It seemed that history was offering them a chance to realise the dreams of the Enlightenment, to right the wrongs castigated by Voltaire, to introduce the society imagined by Rousseau. They adopted heroic postures, imagining themselves as reincarnations of figures from ancient Rome like Brutus.

But they were in danger of being trapped between aristocratic reaction on the one side and the popular ferment on the other. For although 1789 had shown that popular unrest could defeat the aristocracy, peasants burning landowners’ title deeds did not stop if the landowners were from the bourgeoisie, and townspeople did not stop attacking food speculators who had bourgeois credentials.

It was this which led to the repeated splits within the ranks of the middle class political activists. Typically, the majority opted for security, property and conciliation of the monarchy and aristocracy. Only a radical minority were prepared to risk rousing the masses. But then reaction, emboldened by the concessions made to it, would make moves which threatened the majority and they would swing behind the radicals—although with a section splitting away to join the counter-revolution.

This was what happened in 1791 and 1792. It was to happen again in 1793.

The crisis of 1792, which culminated in the proclamation of the republic and the execution of the king, had involved the overthrow of Lafayette by the Jacobins and the Parisian masses organised through the
sections
. The Girondins had gone along with this action, but were still reluctant to go further and agree to the execution of the king. They feared ‘the mob’—the ‘hydra of anarchy’ as Brissot called it.
³⁴
Against a background of growing hunger in town and countryside alike, they resisted demands from the Parisian
sections
to control prices, to requisition grain supplies to feed people and to take exemplary action against ‘hoarders and speculators’.

Instead they attacked the masses in much the same way as the previous government. ‘Your property is threatened’, one of their leaders warned the wealthy bourgeoisie in April, ‘and you are closing your eyes to the danger…Chase these venomous creatures back to their lairs’.
³⁵
The Convention voted overwhelmingly to send Marat before the revolutionary tribunal on a charge of subversion, only to see him acquitted. Hébert was arrested and the president of the Convention declared—in language similar to the notorious statement of the Duke of Brunswick—that unless ‘recurrent insurrections’ in the city stopped, ‘Paris would be destroyed’.
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The army suffered a new series of defeats as its commander, Dumouriez, deserted to the enemy. Disaffected peasants in the Vendée region in the west of France joined a bloody monarchist rising.

Finally, on 29 May ‘moderates’ and royalists together seized control of Lyons and imprisoned the Jacobin mayor, Chalier, before executing him in July.

Robespierre’s Jacobins were as middle class as the Girondins, although many historians argue they came mostly from a lower layer of the middle class. They were just as devoted to the ‘rights’ of property, as they repeatedly declared in their public statements. Robespierre was personally incorruptible, but many of his supporters had no compunction about trying to benefit financially from the revolution—after all, they were members of, or aspirants to, the bourgeoisie. Danton had personally enriched himself, at one point accepting money from the king. Marat and Hébert did agitate among the Parisian masses—but from the point of view of those who were small artisan or traders, with no objection to profit.

But in the early summer of 1793 they could see that the alternative to the revolution going forward was a carnival of reaction which neither they nor the gains of the previous four years would survive. They could also see the only way to push the revolution forward was to ally with the Parisian masses once more and make concessions to the peasantry, even if that meant taking measures which clashed with bourgeois interests. Robespierre wrote in his diary, ‘The dangers come from the middle classes, and to defeat them we must rally the people’.
³⁷
In other words, the radical bourgeoisie in the Jacobin club had to unite with the revolutionary
sans-culottes
of the Parisian
sections
against the moderate Girondin bourgeoisie. The revolution’s third great turning point had arrived.

On 26 May 1793 Robespierre issued a call for the people to revolt. On 29 May, 33 of the Parisian sections met together and chose an insurrectionary committee of nine members to organise a
journée
—a new uprising. On 31 May and 2 June the ringing of the
tocsin
(alarm) bell and the firing of cannon summoned the masses onto the streets. They surrounded the convention with 80,000 armed people and compelled it to issue orders for the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies. The Parisian
sections
were now the centre of power in the capital and the Jacobin leadership was, in effect, the government of France.

The defeated Girondins fled the city to stir up revolt in the provinces. They had friends in the officer corps of the army, allies among the big merchants, sympathy from middle class landowners afraid of the rural revolt, the allegiance of all those who saw any ‘mob’ as a threat—and, of course, support from an aristocracy which would rejoice in a victory against the revolution. Within weeks, much of the south and west of the country was in Girondin hands. The Vendée was held by royalists, the anti-Jacobins had handed the southern port of Toulon and ships of the Mediterranean navy over to the British, and foreign armies were still marching towards Paris. The counter-revolution had even shown it could strike in the capital when a young woman from the Girondin town of Caen, Charlotte Corday, gained access to Marat by claiming she needed his help, and stabbed him to death as he sat in his bath.

The Parisian
sans-culottes
masses urged the Jacobin leaders to take further revolutionary measures to stop the rot, and that leadership soon saw it had no choice. A Committee of Public Safety—which reported at least once a week to the convention and was subject to reelection each month—was empowered to take whatever emergency measures were appropriate. A ‘law of the maximum’ imposed price controls on bread and speculation in people’s hunger became a capital crime. There was a forced loan on the rich to pay for the war and a progressive tax, starting at 10 percent and rising to 50 percent, on all income over the minimum needed to keep a family.
³⁸
The economy became increasingly subject to central direction, with an important nationalised sector producing war supplies. The land seized from émigrés and the church was divided into small plots to placate peasant anger. The volunteer revolutionary units and the old army units were merged at the front, so that the volunteers could enthuse the regulars while learning military skills from them, and they jointly elected their officers. Suspect officials were purged from government departments. Revolutionary commissioners were sent with full power to put down the counter-revolutionary risings in the countryside. All single men between the ages of 18 and 25 were required to do military service, without the old exemptions which allowed the well-to-do to pay substitutes to take their place. Finally, after further
journées
in September, the convention and the Committee of Public Safety agreed to a policy of severe repression—terror.

The Jacobins and the terror

The impetus for the terror came from below—from people who had suffered under the old regime, who knew they would suffer even more if it came back and whose friends and relatives were already dying daily at the front as a result of betrayal and corrupt profiteering. It combined the emotional desire for vengeance with the rational understanding that, under conditions of civil war, opponents of the revolutionary regime would seize every opportunity to do it damage. Prison would not deter them, since they would expect to be released once their plots were successful. People like Hébert on the ‘terrorist’ fringe of the Jacobins fanned these feelings. But the main Jacobin leaders were slow to embrace the call. Far from being the ‘callous butcher’ of legend, Robespierre had been almost alone in calling for the abolition of the death penalty in the early days of the revolution. By contrast, the Girondins supported its use for ordinary ‘criminals’ from the lower classes but had qualms when it came to the king.

Only 66, or one quarter, of the 260 people brought before the revolutionary tribunal before September 1793 had been condemned to death. From October the pace accelerated. The execution of the queen, Marie Antoinette, was followed by the condemnation of the Girondins and the Duke of Orleans (who had tried to advance his own cause by parading as a Jacobin). In the last three months of 1793, 177 out of 395 defendants were sentenced to death, and by December the number of people in Paris prisons had risen to 4,525—from 1,500 in August. Nevertheless, the number of executions at this stage was much smaller than might be believed from popular accounts in novels and films which suggest scores going to the guillotine every day.