In accordance with the constitution, the
National Assembly disbanded itself. Power passed to a newly elected Legislative
Assembly (parliament), 745 deputies strong -- mostly youthful lawyers of
moderate wealth. Amnesty was offered those who had fled the revolution, and, on
October 15, the king asked émigrés to return to help make the
constitution work. Improved relations followed between the king and the public.
But it did not last long.
Few émigrés returned. Instead, they continued expressing their hostility toward the revolution. The Legislative Assembly debated and then voted in favor of declaring that all émigrés were plotting against the revolution. An ultimatum was sent to Austria, demanding the expulsion of those Frenchmen hostile to the revolution, and the Legislative Assembly declared that those who did not return by January 1, 1792, would be considered guilty of a capital crime. Accommodating public opinion and the Legislative Assembly, the king came to parliament in December and announced an ultimatum to the elector of Trier (in the German Rhineland) to put an end to hostile émigrés activity in his realm, to long applause from the delegates.
Some deputies were optimistic about sending troops into neighboring countries, believing that people there would be eager for liberation in the form of French-style political and social changes. With support of local peoples, they believed, defeat of old-world monarchs by French soldiers would be easy. Adding to the support for war were military men, including Lafayette, who thought that war would reinvigorate the army. The leading spokesman for those in the Convention favoring war, Jacques Brissot, had his mind not on fraternity but on weeding out terrorists. Brissot was a passionate speaker who represented the educated middleclass and the interests of the provinces over Paris. He had been impressed by the American Revolution. He was absolutist in his approach to loyalty to the French Revolution. The war, he believed, would help expose traitors.
The brother of Marie-Antoinette, Leopold II of Austria, and the Holy Roman Emperor, had hoped to avoid war with France, but he had also stated his readiness to defend Louis XVI and was now ready to defend Trier. The National Convention could easily have avoided war with Leopold, but on April 20, 1792, it declared war and launched an offensive into the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium).
The French offensive fell apart when it met its first resistance, and patriotic enthusiasm for the offensive turned into a search for scapegoats. More intense now was the belief that France and the revolution had to be defended and enemies of the revolution defeated. It was goodbye to the kind of reconciliation that was being applied in the United States regarding former loyalists. France's Legislative Assembly rapidly passed laws to combat treason. All foreigners were to be under surveillance. Priests that had not taken an oath to the state were suspected of disloyalty and to be deported, and on May 29, the king's special bodyguard was disbanded and replaced by National Guardsmen thought to be loyal to the revolution.
In a letter to Lafayette, dated June 16, Thomas Jefferson spoke of his support for France and its "exterminating the monster aristocracy," prefacing this with "May heaven favor your cause."
Amid the patriotic fervor, volunteers were joining the military, and from the provinces they passed through Paris, fraternizing with the revolutionary Parisians and singing patriotic songs, including the Marseillaise -- later to be the revolution's anthem.
Believing that King Louis was insufficiently loyal to the revolution, on June 20 a mob invaded his palace, threatened and humiliated him but left him physically unharmed. Then in July the commander of the Prussian-Austrian army, the Duke of Brunswick, threatened violent punishment if the Parisians were disobedient toward Louis. This support for the king from abroad offended the Legislative Assembly, and some of them called for the king's removal. A mob of several thousand Parisians sacked the king's palace and killed a few of the king's Swiss guards. Louis escaped, but the Legislative Assembly gave in to the passions of the Parisians, voted for the removal of all the king's powers and declared him a prisoner. France was to be a republic. Newspaper support for the monarchy was prohibited. And it was decided that the constitution of 1789 had to be replaced by a constitution for a republic.
European monarchies withdrew their ambassadors from Paris, while the administration of George Washington also considered withdrawing. Washington's friend, Lafayette, who had been the commander of the National Guard in Paris, was hostile to development of the new radicalism in Paris, and the Legislative Assembly passed a decree of impeachment against him. Lafayette -- an American as well as French citizen -- fled northward, hoping to reach the United States by way of the United Netherlands, but he was captured by Germans hostile to the French and put in an Austrian prison.
Responding to passions for action against treason, in August the Legislative Assembly set up a Revolutionary Tribunal. Legal guarantees in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were superseded by what was considered emergency measures. There was to be no appeal of sentences handed down by the tribunal -- sentences that were frequently death by a new mechanical device called the guillotine.
Prussia had joined the war against France in May, and, on August 23, the Prussians captured Longwy, just inside France and south of the Austrian Netherlands border. On September 2 the Prussians captured Verdun, 50 kilometers to the southwest. Rumors spread that nobles and priests were plotting with the invaders. Parisians went on a five-day rampage, to monasteries and from prison to prison, killing political prisoners, priests and nobles, as they went. And the dead were counted at around 1,500.
The Legislative Assembly had been the creation of the constitution of 1789, and, with the constitution and its monarchism now dead, the Legislative Assembly voted itself out of existence, and elections were held for a new governing body: the National Convention.36
Deputies of the National Convention debated issues concerning a new constitution and pursued the nation's war effort. A great number of volunteers were mobilized, and, on September 20, France's regular army artillerists won one of the great battles of the decade by blowing to bits an advancing Prussian and Austria force 50 kilometers west of Verdun, at Valmy. The following day, a happy National Convention declared France to be a republic.
Following their defeat at Valmy, the invaders withdrew from France. In late September, the French advanced in the southwest, occupying the coastal town of Nice (pronounced neece) -- a town that had been under Sardinian rule. The French pursued the Austrians into the Netherlands, and on November 6 a force of 45,000 French defeated an army of 13,000 Austrians near Jemappes, 50 kilometers southwest of Brussels. Then on November 14 the French overran Brussels. By now the French had annexed the Kingdom of Savoy, whose king had been hostile to the revolution. (The year before, France had annexed Avignon.) And on December 2 the French captured the German city of Frankfurt.
These victories calmed France, but on December 11 the trial of Louis XVI began. Some in the National Convention joined with the Parisians in their belief that the death of the king would advance the revolution. Louis XVI, once known to his people as Louis the Beneficent was now called Louis the Last. Tom Paine, respected in France for his role in the American Revolution, was back in France and had been chosen to be a member of the National Convention, and he voted against execution, seeing no point in it and favoring exile for the king to the United States. On January 20 the National Convention voted 380 to 310 in favor of execution, and the following day, in public in downtown Paris, Louis climbed the wooden stairs to the guillotine, and with calm and dignity he submitted to his execution.
Much of Europe outside France was revulsed by the execution of Louis XVI. Britain joined Holland, Spain, Russia, Sardinia, Naples, Portugal, Prussia and Austria in an alliance against France, with small Germans states eager to give soldiers, for a price, to the British. France's National Convention declared war on Great Britain and Holland. There were food shortages again, and food riots. The French assignat plunged in value and prices were skyrocketing.
To meet the challenge from abroad, the National Convention, on February 24, 1793, decreed military conscription, which was met with hostility in places outside Paris. On March 1, the Austrians began an offensive in the Netherlands (Belgium), throwing back the French.
In the United States, Thomas Jefferson threw his support to France, Alexander Hamilton gave his support to England, and President George Washington chose neutrality -- a proclamation of neutrality to be issued on March 4.
An anti-draft rebellion by peasants arose in the west, around the area called Vendee, and it grew in intensity in the coming weeks. The rebels proclaimed a war to restore the monarchy and the Church.
In Paris the desire to strike at enemies intensified. Among deputies, the renewed reverses brought fear of more massacres like those of the previous year. Taking the side of moderation were the followers of Brissot (also called the Girondins). They accused the more radical deputies (called Montagnards) of having encouraged the earlier, prison, massacres. Divisions within the Conventions were widening, with Parisians most hostile toward the Girondins.
The general who had led the victories against the Austrians and Prussians, the year before, General Dumouriez, had been in sympathy with the moderates in Paris. He disliked the more radical deputies and wanted to re-establish the constitution of 1791. He failed in his attempt to enlist his forces in marching on Paris. Then, on April 5, under threat from the convention, he fled to the Austrians. The day after the defection of Dumouriez to the Austrians, the National Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, a body of twelve with emergency, or dictatorial, powers. Having been associated with Dumouriez, the Girondists came under greater suspicion. The Girondists accused their more radical colleagues of joining with the people of Paris to purge the Convention.
Parisian activists believed that the Convention had to be cleansed of moderates. Moderation was seen as counter-revolutionary. Suspicion was a patriotic duty, and anger was a virtue. The "people" of Paris stormed the convention. Deputies sided with the mob, some perhaps fearing them. The National Convention voted in favor of expelling 31 moderates, who were charged with treason and arrested. This shifted the National Convention further to the Left. Outside Paris, various governments withdrew recognition from the purged Convention. On June 10, the National Convention passed a law that deprived the accused of counsel and of calling witnesses. And, to make prosecution easier, juries were allowed to convict on the basis of rumor.
On June 24, the National Convention approved its new, republican constitution. The new constitution proclaimed the people's right to employment and to an education. It extended voting to universal manhood suffrage, and it declared the right to insurrection against a government that was violating the "rights of the people." A nation referendum on the new constitution was to be held on August 4.
There was to be no such national referendum. Elsewhere in France, moderates had turned against Paris and were demanding decentralized government. By July only the area around Paris was firmly under the control of the National Convention. From Lyon (France's second largest city) and from Marseille came accusations that the National Convention had become puppets of the Paris mob. Some had spoken of raising an army to march on Paris, but this was not to happen, as various localities remained weakened by a lack of unity.
On July 13, an admirer of the bourgeois (middleclass) revolutionaries (the moderate Girondists), Charlotte Corday, assassinated one of the more prominent of the radical revolutionaries -- Jean Paul Marat, a man who believed in the redistribution of wealth, a dictatorship representing the poor, and was a passionate supporter of terror. Charlotte Corday believed that in killing Marat she had saved the revolution. Instead, it intensified the passions and fears of the more radical members of the National Convention (the Montagnards), now less inclined to compromise.
In August, the Committee of Public Safety was pursing its aim of eliminating all counterrevolutionary elements within France, raising new armies, and making sure that food was supplied to the armies and cities. The economy was put on wartime controls. Wages were regulated. Hoarding was now a capital offense. Price controls were created that left retailers little or no profit. Some would soon stop ordering more goods, putting themselves and wholesalers out of business. Ration cards were distributed to assure that limited supplies, including bread, were shared fairly. White bread and pastries were outlawed in favor of making more of the nutritious brown bread. An illegal (black) market developed in the sale of wood, meat, eggs, butter and vegetables. In market places, women who complained of prices that were higher than the law were cowed by market women who showered insults and vulgarities upon them. All horses and public buildings were drafted into the war effort. Workshops were compelled to make making arms and munitions and told when their orders were to be completed. All unmarried men capable of bearing arms were subject to the draft.
On France's Mediterranean coast on August 27, the citizens of Toulon gave control of their harbor, arsenal and French ships to a Spanish and British military force. Paris sent troops to Toulon in early September and retook the city. Mobilization was paying off for Paris, and in the north its ground forces forced the British to withdraw from Dunkirk.
These successes were followed on September 5, by an armed mob surrounding the National Convention and demanding more arrests. The deputies accommodated them, announcing that terror was "the order of the day. And the deputies created a new force: six thousand men, 1,200 artillery pieces and guillotines-on-wheels, which went into the countryside in search of hoarders, spies and counter-revolutionary priests.
On October 3, seventy-three deputies of the National Convention who had voted against the expulsion of the 31 moderates earlier in the year were accused of conspiring against the French people. One of them, Thomas Paine, was spared because he was not French. Paine was imprisoned. The search for traitors found some others in Paris, and persons were arrested for violating price controls. People were tried in batches and sent to the guillotine the same day. On October 16, Marie-Antoinette was guillotined. From October through December, 177 persons were executed in Paris.
By the end of the year the revolts outside Paris were largely crushed, with a lot of bloodshed. In the city of Lyon, 1,800 were sentenced to death. In Marseille and Bordeaux, hundreds were executed. Revolutionaries had imprisoned thousands, and many of them were to die between the first of the year and early 1795.
France's army was winning victories again outside France, their large numbers enhancing their morale and courage, the French generals using mass attacks at bayonet point to overwhelm their enemy. By the spring of 1794 the French were victorious on all fronts. But in Paris the terror continued. Differences of opinion existed also among the radicals of the National Convention.
One of the prominent members of the National Convention, and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, was Maximilien de Robespierre. He was a former lawyer, now almost 36, and had been active in the revolution for the past five years -- since having been chosen as a delegate for the Third Estate back in early 1789. Before 1792, Robespierre had urged the emancipation of Jews and slaves and the abolition of the death penalty. In late 1791 and early 1792 he had been opposed to France going to war. He had distrusted the wisdom of the Parisian mobs and had often sided with moderation, but when the mob began exercising more power over government he belonged, he had swung to their side, deciding that they represented the real engine of revolution.
Robespierre was devoted to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like Rousseau, Robespierre believed in a personal god, in divine providence and the immortality of the soul, and, like Rousseau, he saw morality and virtue as rising from the faith and hope of religious people. Robespierre described the revolution as grounded in virtue. He found fault with those in the convention associated with Jacques René Hébert. He identified them as atheists and anti-Christians. Robespierre saw anyone who did not believe in a Supreme Being as subversive, and he saw atheism as corrosive, morally offensive and a useless provocation against the sensibilities of common people. Also, Hébert led that faction in the Convention that was most closely identified with the will of the Paris mob. Robespierre joined others on the Committee of Public Safety in judging the Hébertists as anarchists guilty of conspiracy and of collusion with foreign powers, and on March 24, Hébert and nineteen of his colleagues were guillotined.
Robespierre than came into conflict with another prominent deputy, Georges Jacques Danton. Initially, Danton had supported executing suspected enemies of the revolution, but in 1793, Danton did not want a repeat of the massacres of 1792, and he was having second thoughts about continuing the war. His fellow deputies spoke of his opposition to the terror as encouraging those opposed to the revolution. Danton was an outstanding orator, and still had a following among some of the deputies, and the Committee of Public Safety feared that he might be able to rally the convention against their positions. In the eyes of Robespierre, the Hébertists had wanted to push the revolution too far and Danton had wanted to stop the revolution before it had gone far enough in eliminating its enemies. Also, Robespierre found Danton repulsive. Danton rejected Robespierre's talk of virtue. The only virtue I know, said Danton, is the virtue I practice at night with my wife. And, using the toughest language possible, he accused Robespierre, who lived alone, of not knowing this kind of virtue. Robespierre asked how a man "with so little notion of morality ever became a champion of freedom." 37
On March 29, Danton and a few of his allies were arrested. A phony trial was conducted, the judge himself fearing accusations against him by the Committee of Public Safety. Danton and his friends were accused of conspiring against the French people, of dealings with the Girondists, of attempting to restore the monarchy, embezzling state funds and other charges. They were guillotined on April 5.
Robespierre's idea of virtue was devotion to the revolution, exemplified by those volunteering to risk their lives by joining the military. He continued his celebration of the Supreme Being and acknowledgment of the immortality of the soul -- to the applause of the Convention. He was one of those who thought in absolutes and was soon to say that he recognized only two parties: "virtuous citizens and bad citizens." By his fellow deputies he was being called the incorruptible because he was uninterested in money and could not be bought. Robespierre appeared to be giving his all to the welfare of the revolution, and whatever he did he justified in the name of serving France.
Robespierre was elected president of the National Convention, but by the other deputies he was not really popular or well liked. And now that they had been killing each other more were asking themselves about the need for limits -- while Robespierre was apparently interested in demonstrating his certainty that the terror was still the right thing to do.
A law passed by the National Convention on June 10, 1794 gave Robespierre the power to indict anyone on the flimsiest of charges. No witnesses were to be allowed. Court proceedings were reduced to mere condemnations. Between June 12 and July 28, 1285 persons were guillotined in Paris -- the greatest period of work for the executioners in that city.
In late July, Robespierre announced to the Convention that more cleansing was to come, without saying whom the targets were to be. He spoke of having "trembled" lest he be "soiled by the impure neighborhood of wicked men." The Convention held its applause. Delegates feared their own imperfections, or perceived imperfections, and that they might be targeted. (It had happened with the bloodiest of Roman Emperors before their doom -- those around the emperor afraid for their own lives.) The following day, when Robespierre rose to speak again to the deputies they howled him down. Robespierre responded with demands that he be allowed to speak. Instead, the deputies voted overwhelmingly that he and several of his supported be arrested. He was charged with crimes against the republic. Robespierre and his supporters escaped and tried to rally Parisians to their support. That night there were marches and counter marches. In an exchange of gunfire, Robespierre received a shot to his jaw, and his jaw was tied shut with a bandage made from a torn sheet. His speaking days were over. Those with guns who opposed Robespierre triumphed, and the following day, July 28, 1794, it was the turn of Robespierre and 21 of his associates to have their heads chopped off by the guillotine.