Case Study: The Meaning of the French Revolution 1793
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 19 World War and Republican France (pgs. 572 - 578) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
The Reign of Terror was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between two rival political factions, the Girondins and the Mountain, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France. Compared with the rights outlined in 1789 the theory of circumstance will see the rights outlined in 1789 to be basic and individual while those of 1793 to be radically different. The alternate interpretation would view the rights outlined in 1793 as only an intensification of the same political ideology present in the Declaration of 1789.
Key Concept:
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 19 World War and Republican France (pgs. 572 - 578) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
The Reign of Terror was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between two rival political factions, the Girondins and the Mountain, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution". The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France. Compared with the rights outlined in 1789 the theory of circumstance will see the rights outlined in 1789 to be basic and individual while those of 1793 to be radically different. The alternate interpretation would view the rights outlined in 1793 as only an intensification of the same political ideology present in the Declaration of 1789.
Key Concept:
- After the execution of Louis XVI, the radical Jacobin republic led by Robespierre responded to opposition at home and war abroad by instituting the Reign of Terror, fixing prices and wages, and pursuing a policy of de-Christianization.
- To what extent and in what ways was the French Revolution during the period 1793: Reign of Terror, an attempt to create a government based on Enlightenment ideals?
- The Convention put Louis XVI on trial for treason in December 1792. On January 15th it unanimously pronounced him guilt, but on the next day, out of 721 deputies present, only 361 voted for immediate execution, a majority of one. Louis XVI died on the guillotine forthwith.
- The sans-culottes demanded price controls, currency controls, rationing, legislation against the hoarding of food, and requisitioning to enforce the circulation of goods. They denounced bourgeois traders as profiteers and exploiters of the people.
- On May 31st, 1793, the Commune of Paris, under pressure from the sans-culottes assembled a host of demonstrators and insurrectionists who invaded the Convention and forced the arrest of the Girondin leaders.
- Robespierre was determined, in 1793 and 1794, to bring about a democratic republic made up of good, virtuous, and honest citizens.
- The Convention would prepare a democratic constitution and initiate legislation for the lower classes, but it would not yield to the Paris Commune and other agencies of direct revolutionary action. To conduct the government, the Convention granted wide powers to a Committee of Public Safety, a group of 12 members of the Convention who were reelected every month.
- To repress the “counterrevolution” the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety set up what is popularly known as the “Reign of Terror.” Revolutionary courts were instituted as an alternative to the lynch law of the September massacres.
- In June 1793 the Committee produced, and the Convention adopted, a republican constitution that provided for universal male suffrage. But the new constitution was suspended indefinitely, and the government was declared “revolutionary until the peace,” “revolutionary” meaning extra constitutional or an emergency character.
- The Constitution was inspired by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, to which it added several rights: it proclaimed the superiority of popular sovereignty over national sovereignty; various economic and social rights (right of association, right to work and public assistance, right to public education); the right of rebellion(and duty to rebel when the government violates the right of the people); and the abolition of slavery written in what is known as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793.
- The Committee busied itself also with social services and measures of public improvement. It issued pamphlets to teach farmers to improve their crops, selected promising youths to receive instruction in useful trades, opened a military school for boys of all classes, even the humblest, and certainly intended to introduce universal elementary education.
- At the climax of the Revolution within France itself, in 1793 – 94, the Committee of Public Safety was determined to concentrate revolutionary initiative in itself. It had no patience with unauthorized revolutionary violence. With its own plan for a democratic program, it disapproved of the turbulent democracy of popular clubs and local assemblies.
- Led by the extreme example of Jacques Hebert, Hebertist believed all religion to be counterrevolutionary, they launched the movement of Dechristianization and strongly supported the creation of a new republican calendar. The Convention adopted this calendar as part of its campaign to strengthen popular allegiance to the republic and to establish a new national organization of daily life that would replace the Christian cycle of Sundays, saints’ days, and holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
- Dechristianization also contributed to the development of the cult of reason, which sprang up all over France at the end of 1793. In Paris the Commune put on ceremonies in the cathedral of Notre Dame, in which Reason was impersonated by an actress who was the wife of one of the city officials. In June 1794 Robespierre introduced the cult of the Supreme Being, a deistic natural religion, in which the Republic was declared to recognize the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.
- On 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1974) Robespierre was guillotined with some of his associates. Many who turned against Robespierre believed they were pushing the Revolution farther forward, as in destroying the Girondins the year before. Others thought, or said, that they were stopping a dictator and a tyrant. All agreed, to absolve themselves, in heaping al blame for the recent revolutionary excesses upon Robespierre. The idea that Robespierre was an ogre originated more with his former colleagues that with conservatives of the time.