5.4 Emergency measures or revolutionary violence?

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The French Revolution

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The University of Melbourne

The French Revolution

283 ratings

The French Revolution was one of the most important upheavals in world history. This course examines its origins, course and outcomes. This course is designed for you to work through successfully on your own. However you will not be alone on this journey. Use the resources included in the course and take part in the suggested learning activities to get the most out of your learning. To successfully complete this course, it is recommended that you devote at least six hours to every module over the six weeks of the course. In that time you should watch the video lectures, reflect and respond to in-video pause points, and complete the quizzes. As part of the required reading for this course, during each week of this course you will have free access to a chapter of Peter McPhee's textbook, The French Revolution, which is also available for purchase as an e-book. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/gstw4vv

From the lesson

Week 5 - Ending the Terror and Ending the Revolution

This week we look at the ideology and culture of the 'Terror' and the nature of the Jacobin and sans-culottes alliance. We will consider possible explanations for the increasing intensity of revolutionary violence and ask whether such violence was a proportionate, emergency response to the growing counter-revolutionary threat. This module also deals with the end of the 'Terror', and the overthrow of Robespierre and the ensuing 'Thermidorian reaction'. Finally we look at the 'settlement' of 1795 and ask whether the Revolution was indeed over.

5.1 Robespierre and 'virtue'9:56

5.2 The ideology and culture of the Terror13:07

5.3 The Jacobin and sans-culottes alliance12:25

5.4 Emergency measures or revolutionary violence?11:07

5.5 Thermidor Year II - 27 July 179410:33

5.6 The 'settlement' of 1795: the end of the Revolution?15:02

Meet the Instructors

Peter McPhee
Honorary, Melbourne Graduate School of Education

In my previous lectures I've been exploring the emergency measures that

the republican government took in 1793, 1794 to deal with the great military and

political, and economic crisis facing the new republic.

And I've been outlining the values, the ideology, the culture of the Jacobins and

Sans-culottes that underpinned that extraordinary year, but

which also caused divisions between militant republicans.

What I want to do in this lecture,

is to explore what is really the big question about this year of The Terror.

And that is, to what extent can we understand the repression the violence,

the actions of government in this year as

really emergency measures to deal with crisis.

Or, was there something particularly and unnecessarily violent about them?

Certainly in 1793, we know that the New Republic faced

an extraordinary challenge in terms of the invasion of Austrian, Prussian,

Spanish, and other forces across the boarders of France,

the English Naval blockade, massive counter revolution in the West of France.

Civil disobedience if you like by,

administrators in many of the big cities, in the south in particular.

And in response to that the national convention had established an emergency

wartime government, under the Committee of Public Safety, and

given it sweeping powers to deal with that crisis.

Powers which were manifested in the mass mobilization of the nation's resources and

its people in August, 1793.

A willingness to turn economic production in urban,

in urban factories towards production for the war effort.

Extraordinary, extraordinary mobilization for war.

But, the goals of the convention, of the Committee of Public Safety,

of the Jacobins, and their leadership, are always more than that.

Remember that great speech of Robespierre's in February 1794, where

he juxtaposed virtue and terror as the mainsprings of government.

In this situation, he said In this critical situation, the first maxim of

your policy ought to be to lead people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

If the main spring of popular government in peace time is virtue and

mid-revolution, it is, at once, virtue and terror.

Virtue, without which, terror is fatal.

Terror, without which, virtue is impotent.

Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice.

Robespierre has a vision.

Which is shared by many people, that the goal of all of

these emergency measures is not simply the winning of the war, crucial as that is,

it is also the creation of the of a new republic which would

be based on the virtues that he elaborated in that speech of the 5th of February.

It's one of the reasons, as I pointed out last time that he and others

create the cult of the Supreme Being at its great festival on the 8th of June,

1794, as a way of inculcating into the people,

instructing the people in the importance of the civic virtues,

represented by worship of the Supreme Being, the importance of virtue.

But similarly, the importance of terror.

If the people need virtue, the people's enemies have to be ruled by terror alone.

Two days after the Festival of the Supreme Being, the Committee of

Public Safety and the Convention passed the Law of the 22nd Prairial.

The Law of the 10th of June.

The most infamous of the legislation of the French Revolution.

The following are deemed enemies of the people, it declares.

Those who've sought to disparage or dissolve the National Convention,

have sought to inspire discouragement, have sought to mislead opinion…

to impair the energy and the purity of revolutionary and republican principles.

Enemies of the people are those who criticise the government.

The penalty provided for

all offences under the jurisdiction of the revolutionary tribunal is death.

Virtue for the people, uncompromising terror for the people's enemies.

And it's the great dilemma, the great question about this

extraordinary period of the French Revolution.

This is a map of executions during this year, 1793,

1794, when perhaps 30,000 people put before the Revolutionary Tribunal,

and found guilty of capital offenses.

In many parts of the country, the areas that are shaded in black,

where the highest execution rates occur, these are areas where there has

been massive counter revolution or invasion and collaboration, and where

many people are found guilty of having taken up arms against the revolution.

They're effectively counter-revolutionaries,

armed traitors to the revolution, they're put on trial and executed.

There are many other parts of the country untouched by invasion or

counter-revolution, where there are few, if any, executions during this year.

There are a lot of executions, about 30,000.

It's about eight to ten times the rate

of deaths on roads in most countries in the world today.

It's not a period of mass killing on a scale that we've become sadly familiar

with in our own times, but it has always horrified people for a couple of reasons.

One is that this occurs in a land where in 1789,

the highest desperations were voiced in the declaration of the rights of man and

the citizen that there could be no restraints on liberty, except for

respect for the liberty of other people.

A revolution which had begun in the name of freedom.

Freedom of expression, of thought, of opportunity.

By 1793, 1794, has had to resort to repression on this scale.

Can the military crisis of invasion and

counter-revolution explain all of that sufficiently?

One of the other things that's so bothering, is that across the year 1793-1794

the death rate accelerates.

And in Paris in particular, the small black dot,

towards the north, it's dramatic.

Because, before the Law of 22nd Prairial, of June 1794,

there'd been 1100 executions in 15 months.

An average of a three executions a day.

Horrific, but nothing like what happens after the introduction of

the Law of the 22nd Prairial,

in the six weeks after that there were 1500 executions, a rate of about 30 a day.

Why should the the rate of execution accelerate so

dramatically, when the military situation is improving.

And never forget that when we're talking about people who are executed,

that we're not only talking about people, prominent aristocrats who've

organised counter revolutionary armies who are killing republican troops.

We're sometimes talking about people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Such as this woman,

Noirette Blancheton, who gets involved in an anti-Jacobin riot in May 1793.

When she's put on trial nine months later, she's sentenced to death,

because that is a riot against against the government against the policies

of the government, which logically, according to the revolutionary tribunal

had undermined the unity of the republic's self defense during this year.

She writes to her partner.

I beg you to concern yourself with the fruit of our love,

our children, your friendship is sufficient to make you do so.

Please convey my last farewell to my brother, my parents, and my friends.

My strength of character is such that I believe, I shall be missed.

Receive my last embraces,

share them with our brothers and be certain of my friendship to my last hour.

While the vast majority of those who are put on trial and

put to death by the revolutionary tribunal in the year of the terror.

Are so because they have taken up arms against the Republic,

they are counter revolutionaries, there are many people who die because they're in

the wrong place at the wrong time, or because of their opinions.

And there are also too many cases of what we would today call wartime atrocity.

When the great federalist revolts in Leon, Bordeaux or

Marseille are suppressed that are done so with the loss of thousands of

lives of people who were swept up in the oppression.

Nothing is worse than however in what happens over here in the Vendee,

as the Vendee insurrection is effectively repressed and punishment has made it out.

In that city of Nantes, there is a deputy on mission from the National Convention,

a man named Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who's given sweeping powers to punish

counter-revolutionaries who'd been caught during the repression of that civil war.

On the advice of local Jacobins, he decides that something like

90 priests who've been captured, will be put to death by drowning in the

river Loire, as being an easier form of mass execution than the guillotine.

There were about 1800 of the Vendeean troops, who were also caught and

put to death if not by being shot or guillotined, also by drowning.

The Committee of Public Safety and

the convention in general, is horrified when it starts

receiving reports of these atrocities that are being perpetrated in the provinces.

But the question therefore remains, why the level of violence and

who is going to be held account for it?

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