B First French RepublicBetween August 10, 1792, and the meeting of the convention on September 20, revolutionary furor grew. Power shifted from the Legislative Assembly, now a lame duck, to the Paris Commune. The Commune was a city assembly made up of representatives elected from 48 neighborhood districts called sections. Because nearly universal male suffrage had taken effect on August 10, the sections and the Commune became increasingly dominated by the sans-culottes, a group composed mostly of artisans and shopkeepers fiercely devoted to the Revolution and direct democracy.
In this unstable period, Georges Jacques Danton, who had probably helped organize the massacre of August 10, became a dominating political figure. Danton, who was appointed minister of justice by the assembly, encouraged fears that counter-revolutionary forces loyal to the king were undermining the Revolution. He used these fears to promote further measures against counter-revolutionaries. On August 17 a special court was created to try political suspects, but it did not convict enough defendants to satisfy the sans-culottes.
Fearing military defeat and believing that counter-revolutionary prisoners were about to break out and attack patriots like themselves, sans-culotte mobs attacked Parisian jails from September 2 to 7. They murdered and mutilated more than 1000 inmates—most of whom were guilty of nothing more than having enjoyed some privilege or committing ordinary crimes. These September Massacres were so gruesome that no revolutionary leader, not even those with bloody agendas of their own, claimed responsibility for them.
B1 The National ConventionThe National Convention first met on September 20, 1792, the same day the French army won a major victory against Prussian forces at Valmy in northeastern France. The convention was composed of three major political groups: the Jacobins, a fairly well disciplined radical minority; the former Brissotins, now called Girondins, a less disciplined group of moderates; and a large group of individuals called the Plain who were not associated with either party. On September 21 the convention voted to establish a republic in place of the monarchy. The founding of the first French Republic represented so important a milestone that, when the convention adopted a new revolutionary calendar, it made September 22, 1792, the first day of Year I (see French Republican Calendar).
The convention took much longer to decide the fate of the king, who was now imprisoned with the royal family in an old fort just outside Paris. The more moderate Girondins maneuvered to keep Louis a prisoner. The Jacobins, who were allied with the sans-culottes, argued that the people had already judged Louis guilty of treason when they had stormed the palace on August 10. The convention compromised, deciding that it would try the king.
On January 15 the convention overwhelmingly found Louis guilty, and then voted (by a margin of one vote) for immediate execution. Louis was executed on the new invention for beheading called the guillotine on January 21, 1793, protesting his innocence. If ever there was a point of no return in the Revolution, this was it, for enemies of the Revolution now sought to avenge the king’s death more vigorously than they had tried to preserve his life.
Executing the king did little to solve the convention’s other problems, the main one being the war. The convention declared war on Britain and the Netherlands in early February and on Spain in March, thus adding to France’s military burdens. The French forces were on the defensive through most of 1793, and in April France was stunned by the desertion of one of its chief commanders, General Dumouriez, to the Austrians. Facing loss after loss, the convention voted to raise an army of 300,000 men. It sought volunteers, but instituted a draft to provide additional soldiers. The draft touched off rebellion in western rural areas, notably Brittany and the Vendée. Many people in these areas already opposed the Revolution because of the church reorganization and the clerical oath. Pacifying them would take years and cost an estimated 100,000 lives.
Revolts also occurred in other areas, particularly the large cities. These revolts protested the domination of the local affairs by Paris and the Jacobins. Local elites favored federalism, a policy that would have allowed them to maintain power over their own regions. Meanwhile, prices rose because of a poor harvest and the declining value of the assignats, which fell to half their stated value in January and then fell further. Higher bread prices led the sans-culottes and associated women’s groups to demand state-imposed price controls, a demand that the Jacobins could not refuse because they depended on the political support of the sans-culottes. In May the convention fixed maximum prices for grain and bread.
B2 Reign of TerrorIn this general crisis, revolutionary leaders began to turn on each other. The Girondins, who favored federalism, fought a battle to the death with the Jacobins, who denounced the Girondins for lacking revolutionary zeal and for aiding, intentionally or not, counter-revolutionary forces. The Jacobins already dominated the convention, but on June 2, pressured by the sans-culottes, they consolidated their power by arresting 22 Girondin leaders.
During the following months, the government put down the federalist revolts, sometimes with great severity. A new democratic constitution was drawn up but never implemented: In Robespierre’s view, constitutional government would have to wait until fear and repression had eliminated the enemies of the Revolution. The Jacobins operated through the existing convention and agencies responsible to it. They used the Committee of Public Safety, composed of 12 men led by Robespierre, to provide executive oversight; the Committee of General Security, to oversee the police; and the Revolutionary Tribunal to try political cases. Additionally, the Jacobins sent representatives from the convention with wide-ranging powers to particular areas to enforce Jacobin policies.
The most urgent government business was the war. On August 17, 1793, the convention voted the levée en masse (mass conscription), which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. To further that effort, the convention quickly enacted more legislation. On September 5 it approved the Reign of Terror, a policy through which the state used violence to crush resistance to the government. On September 9 the convention established sans-culotte paramilitary forces, the so-called revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On September 17 the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined “crimes against liberty.” On September 29 the convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods and fixed wages. On December 4 the national government resumed oversight of local administration. On February 4, 1794, it abolished slavery in the colonies.
Beyond these measures, the convention and sympathetic groups like the sans-culottes began to create and spread a revolutionary and republican culture. These groups sponsored the use of revolutionary and republican propaganda in the arts, public festivals, and modes of dress. In this way, they gradually began to spread and gain acceptance for their ideals among the common people.
The most notable achievement of the Reign of Terror was to save the revolutionary government from military defeat. The government feared invasion, which might have allowed counter-revolutionary forces to undertake a terror of their own. To preserve the Revolution, it reorganized and strengthened the army. The Jacobins expanded the size of the army and replaced many aristocratic officers, who had deserted and fled abroad, with younger soldiers who had demonstrated their ability and patriotism. The revolutionary army threw back the Austrians, Prussians, English, and Spanish during the fall of 1793 and expelled the Austrians from Belgium by the summer of 1794.
The military success of the Jacobin-led government was undeniable. However, the repressive policies of the Reign of Terror that enabled the government to form and equip its large army did so at the expense of many French citizens’ security: about 250,000 people were arrested; 17,000 were tried and guillotined, many with little if any means to defend themselves; another 12,000 were executed without trial; and thousands more died in jail. Clergy and nobles composed only 15 percent of the Reign of Terror’s approximately 40,000 victims. The rest were peasants and bourgeois who had fought against the Revolution or had said or done something to offend the new order. The Reign of Terror executed not only figures from the Old Regime, like the former queen Marie-Antoinette, but also many revolutionary leaders. Some victims of the Reign of Terror, like Georges Danton, seemed too moderate to Robespierre and his colleagues, while others, like the sans-culotte leader Jacques René Hébert, seemed too extreme.
The Reign of Terror was the most radical phase of the Revolution, and it remains the most controversial. Some have seen the Reign of Terror as a major advance toward modern democracy, while others call it a step toward modern dictatorship. Certain defenders of the Revolution have argued that the Reign of Terror was, under the circumstances, a reasonable response to the military crisis of 1793. Others have rejected this idea, pointing out that the military victories of early 1794, far from diminishing the intensity of the Reign of Terror, were followed by the Great Terror of June and July 1794, in which more than 1300 people were executed in Paris alone. The Reign of Terror, they have argued, resulted from an ideology already in place by 1789 that put national good above personal rights. To this argument, others have replied that in 1789 no revolutionary leader seriously imagined establishing anything like the Reign of Terror.

VI SEARCH FOR BALANCEThe Jacobin government lasted barely a year. Although effective in the short term, in the long run it destroyed itself—in part because no one really controlled it. Victory on the battlefield had removed the pretext for maintaining the Reign of Terror. At the same time, the killing frenzy of the Great Terror convinced people—even allies of the Jacobins—they might be next on the guillotine. Furthermore, by killing off the likes of Danton and Hébert, Robespierre’s faction had narrowed its base of support and had no one to lean on when challenged. Thus the end was simply a matter of time.
A The Thermidorean ReactionAs it happened, the coup against Robespierre and his associates was led by a group of dissident Jacobins, including members of the Committee of Public Safety. They had supported the Reign of Terror but feared Robespierre would turn on them next. On July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II, in the revolutionary calendar), Robespierre and his close followers were arrested on the convention floor. During the next two days, Robespierre and 82 of his associates were guillotined.
Although the conspirators of 9 Thermidor, who came to be known as Thermidoreans, could hardly have known it, the removal of the 83 Robespierrists represented a major turning point in the Revolution. Ever since 1789, counter-revolutionaries, who enjoyed support from many peasants, had tried to reverse the Revolution. But it had continued to become more and more extreme in nature, due to the increasing participation of urban radicals with whom the Jacobins had formed political alliances. Only after 9 Thermidor did the Revolution reverse its radical direction, and more moderate politicians came to dominate the government.
While these moderates wanted to preserve the Revolution’s achievements and tried to repress counter-revolutionaries, they also feared and repressed the radical groups on whose backs the Jacobins had ridden to power. In order to maintain control over both the radical left and the counter-revolutionary right, the Thermidoreans consolidated their power and began to limit democracy. These limitations led eventually to the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte (see Napoleon I).
Immediately after 9 Thermidor an assortment of political groups began to use their influence to dismantle all vestiges of the Reign of Terror. Although the convention continued in power until October 1795, the teeth of the Reign of Terror were pulled one by one. To limit their power, the committees of Public Safety and General Security were restructured; the operations of the Revolutionary Tribunal were curtailed; thousands of prisoners were released; and in November 1794 the Paris Jacobin club was closed. People associated with the Reign of Terror were harassed in Paris by reactionary youth groups known as the jeunesse d’orée (French for “the gilded youth”) and even killed in strongly counter-revolutionary regions.
The last major popular rising of the Revolution occurred in the spring of 1795, when the near-total devaluation of the assignats produced a price rise that devastated the poor. But this rising was put down so effectively that the counter-revolutionaries imagined the monarchy might soon be restored, and their activities escalated. In response, the Thermidoreans now struck against the counter-revolutionaries, defeating and executing a group of émigré soldiers landed by the English at Quiberon Bay in Brittany during the summer of 1795.