Chapter 21. Terror and Thermidor

The power gained by the Montagnards as a result of the June 2 journie was considerable and increased with every passing month. Even before the insurrection, the central government had already vastly expanded its authority over France by means of the February conscription decree, the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the imposition of the maximum price for bread, and the formation of a powerful executive, the Committee of Public Safety, which worked in tandem with the Committee of General Security. Once the Jacobins were the dominant faction in the Convention, the government became even more centralized than it had ever been in the past, and commensurately more authoritarian.

Perhaps the most immediate problem the government faced was to counter the revolt in the countryside. Throughout the provinces, the news that the people of Paris had intimidated the legitimate, elected Convention and driven out the Girondins met with widespread outrage. “Federalist” uprisings had already displaced republicans in Marseilles and Lyon in the spring; they now spread to Bordeaux in June and Toulon in July. Lyon fell under the control of Royalists, who initiated a “white terror” by executing their republican predecessors. By mid-June, sixty out of the eighty-three departments were in varying degrees of open revolt against Paris, and civil wars raged around Lyon, Marseilles, and Toulon as well as in the Vendee, where the counterrevolutionary peasants, priests, and nobles gained notable victories.

Eager to gain peasant support, which had been dwindling steadily after 1792, the Convention on June 3 confiscated the lands of imigris and divided them up into small lots for sale on fairly advantageous terms to the rural poor—a policy that had been previously avowed but not enforced. On July 17 it finally abolished what remained of seigneurial dues, without compensation to the landlords.

Moreover, to assure the sans-culottes in Paris and the provinces generally that a dictatorship was not in the offing, the Convention rapidly completed its work on a new republican constitution and accepted the final document on June 24. Given the era, this famous “Constitution of ’93” was an enlightened document indeed. Echoing the American Declaration of Independence, it declared that society was instituted for the happiness of the people, and it expanded the original Declaration of Rights by including the right to worship and to acquire gainful employment. The state, so the Constitution declared, had a duty to provide work to those who could not acquire jobs, even public assistance to disabled persons. It affirmed the universality of public education for all the children of citizens and established annual national elections based on universal manhood suffrage. When the “Constitution of ’93” was submitted to a national plebiscite in July, it was approved overwhelmingly by the voters.

But the Convention was patently troubled by this constitution, which, had it been put into effect, would have meant the dissolution of the Jacobin republic. Indeed, it is doubtful whether national elections during the hectic years of 1793 and 1794 would have made the Mountain the majority in the proposed assembly. Thus Robespierre and his fellow Montagnards saw to it that the Constitution was stored away in a place of honor in the Convention and discreetly held in abeyance as long as various crises continued to beleaguer the country. Nor was it ever put into effect. Its authors were only too eager to retain the highly centralized state and emergency decrees that kept them in power. The Constitution thus became little more than a symbol for militant sans-culottes who increasingly opposed the Jacobin government and sought to replace the Convention by a sectional democracy.

THE ASSAULT AGAINST THE ENRAGÉS

Although the Girondin deputies were gone and the Jacobins had agreed to some enrage demands, most of these demands remained unfulfilled. No additional measures against hoarding and speculation were taken by the Convention, nor was price-fixing extended to all staples of life, as the enrages had called for. On June 25, Jacques Roux led a deputation of the radical sections to the Convention, where he scathingly denounced all the deputies for their failure to take action against hoarders and speculators, singling out the Montagnards for behaving much like their now-overthrown Girondin predecessors. To Roux the Jacobins were all the more treacherous because, unlike the Girondins, they opportunistically appealed to the sans-culottes with radical rhetoric but little action. Somberly warning that the Convention was ignoring the material needs of the sans-culottes, he stridently declaimed to the Mountain: “Do not end your career in ignominy!”[335] The threat particularly unnerved the Montagnards, who were acutely aware of public unrest over Paris’s economic difficulties. Once again, the poorer women of Paris were sacking soap suppliers and selling off the merchandise, while other sans-culottes broke into the shops of grocers, demanding lower prices for the means of life.

By the summer of 1793, such expropriate taxations populates, as the pillaging was called, aroused the Convention’s fears that the radical sans-culottes were regaining their political vigor, and the jacobins made a concerted effort to remove Roux and other enrages from the political scene. On the initiative of Robespierre, the Committee of Public Safety instituted a massive propaganda campaign against them, maligning Roux and discrediting his supporters. Roux was expelled from the Cordeliers Club and from his position as the Paris Commune’s news editor. Rather ineptly, he tried to countervail this attack after Marat was assassinated (July 13) by laying claim to the martyr’s mantle (although Marat had attacked him vituperatively while he was alive) through the adoption of the sobriquet “friend of the people.” Theophile Leclerc, in turn, started up a newspaper of the same name. Appealing to Marat’s memory, the enrages generally demanded that granaries be constructed in each district of Paris and that funds be allocated to the people to purchase from it. Further, they called upon the Committee of Public Safety to extend price controls to all basic articles for general consumption: a maximum giniral.

Nor were the enragis the only contenders for Marat’s mantle. The Jacobins too tried to exploit the memory of the revered “friend of the people” by crudely memorializing his name. Streets were designated in his honor, and his bust was placed in the Convention, together with David’s memorable painting of his dead body. Marat’s companion, Simone fivrard, was trotted out to denounce Roux before the Convention for perpetrating the “murderous calumny” that Marat had been “an insane apostle of disorder and anarchy”[336] comparable, as they saw it, to Roux himself.

To effectively wage a propaganda campaign against the enragis without alienating the sans-culottes, the Jacobins were obliged to make concrete concessions to at least some of their demands, which they did in an attenuated form. The two great executive committees, the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee for General Security, introduced some experimental economic measures that contravened the doctrine of free trade and the sanctity of property, to which the Jacobins were normally committed. Some efforts were made to see to the needs of the indigent, and they even proposed to turn a number of enterprises owned by “enemies of the republic” into state-run industries. These initiatives were clothed in radical rhetoric, which vaguely suggested overall visions of economic justice.

However, the two committees refused to depart entirely from the laissez-faire economics of the Physiocrats or to adopt the enragis’ more radical demand for a maximum giniral. Here, the Montagnards balked; general price controls were too blatant a violation of their free-trade principles. The price of bread continued to be a major bone of contention, and the city remained restive. Rather than imposing the dreaded maximum giniral[ the Montagnards chose the less distasteful alternative of establishing public granaries and allocating a hundred thousand livres so that the public could purchase it. “In this way,” observes Albert Goodwin, “the committee managed to avoid a renewal of sectional disturbances in the capital without capitulating completely to the economic demands of the Enrages.”[337]

Yet the growing attacks upon them notwithstanding, the enrages continued to press for Jacques Roux’s demand that the Convention make it a capital crime to hoard food and speculate on the price of items necessary for life, which the Convention was Anally obliged to do on July 26, even establishing municipal commissions to enforce antihoarding measures. It was a poorly written law: not only were its terms ill-defined, but death still seemed like an unduly harsh punishment for speculators. Moreover, the law was difficult to enforce, and many arrested merchants were ultimately acquitted, with the result that the embarrassed and conflicted Jacobins had essentially tried to co-opt the enragés’ demand with legislation that was largely ineffective. The sans-culottes, for their part, demanded that the law be resolutely enforced. Juries, they enjoined, should be composed entirely of sans-culottes, who presumably would not flinch at imposing the death penalty. To the hesitant Jacobins, they firmly responded: “The sans-culottes are rich in virtue, and hence can best apply the law.”[338]

Nor did it add to the credibility of the Jacobins that the Convention passed a sweeping Law of Suspects, in which all individuals who were under suspicion of being counterrevolutionaries were to be arrested and tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Yet not even the much-hated Marie Antoinette, as the ettragis noted, had been tried and sentenced, let alone the Girondin leaders. After Claire Lacombe scathingly attacked the Montagnards in the Convention for their lax treatment of counterrevolutionaries, on August 12, Danton, now president of the Convention, finally introduced a motion that all suspects be indiscriminately arrested and tried, which the cowed Convention duly passed. But again the definition of a suspect remained troublingly vague, with the result that this law was also difficult to enforce.

While the Jacobins were cynically playing carrot-and-stick with the enragis and their sans-culotte allies, the military situation worsened seriously following Dumouriez’s defection in the spring. Alsace and Lorraine as well as Savoy were now highly vulnerable to invasion, and the possibility that Paris would fall to the Austrians loomed once again. The Committee of Public Safety under Danton’s leadership had been following a fruitless policy of conciliation toward the enemy, with the result that the great orator, who had rallied France a year earlier against foreign invaders, was suspected of seeking a compromise with France’s enemies. He was finally removed, and in mid-August retired to a semi-private life at his country home in Arceis with his young new wife, to be replaced by the more implacable Robespierre. The reconstituted Committee now prosecuted the war with renewed vigor and eventually reversed its course, which made it possible to move a sizable number of troops from the foreign front to the Vendee, where they laid waste to large areas of the department. Republican battalions also marched on Lyon and finally deposed the royalist counterrevolutionaries who controlled the city. The Revolution was thus scoring military successes on all of its fronts, diminishing the dangers of foreign invasions and internal counterrevolution.

The radical sections, in turn, had been waging a petition campaign for a law to require the permanent and universal enlistment of the French people in defense of the republic. On August 23 the Convention acceded—this time fully—to the sans-culotte demand and declared the levde en masse, a decree that was to enter into history as the most revolutionary mobilization of an entire people against invaders and counterrevolutionaries. With the levee, the Convention could requisition the entire adult population, male and female, as well as all material resources whatsoever, for the military defense of the Revolution. Not only were all able and single young men conscripted into the army, but the republic could call up for service anyone in any occupation, and commandeer any resource it needed to defeat enemies on the frontiers and counterrevolution at home. Funds were authorized to construct armaments factories in the city, where married able-bodied men were expected to produce a thousand muskets daily, while women were called upon to sew, old men to give inspiring republican speeches, and their children to collect rags. The levie, to be sure, was more sweeping on paper than it could possibly have been in practice, but its scope satisfied the sans-culottes, while simultaneously filling the military needs of the army. At length, French forces prevailed at the Battle of Hondschoote on September 8, 1793, replaying the major defeat of the invaders at Valmy at year earlier and vastly raising republican morale.

On September 17, an all-embracing Law of Suspects was passed, according to which vigilance committees could now arrest anyone who “by their conduct, associations, talk, or writings have shown themselves partisans of tyranny, of federalism and enemies of liberty.”[339] In fact, they could arrest anyone who seemed to oppose the Revolution even passively, including individuals who had not been able to obtain a “certificate of good citizenship (civisme)” from their section’s vigilance committee. This sweeping law soon became a mandate for trying anyone who might express the least complaint against Jacobin rule.

At the same time, the Montagnards in concert with the H6bertist Commune united their efforts to finally crush the enragis. Not only had the Cordeliers been persuaded by Robespierre and Hubert to expel Roux, but two days later, a resolution by the Commune’s General Council expressed its strong disapproval of his activities. Attacks upon him now followed one after another, including denunciations by Marat and others. Following Marat’s assassination on July 14, Roux was temporarily arrested as part of a roundup of “suspects,” and was arrested again on August 22 for a few days as a warning against his agitation on food shortages in Paris. In September, after still further persecution by the authorities, Roux found himself in prison, from where he continued to publish his criticisms of the Jacobin regime. When, at length, it became clear that even his supporters at the section Gravilliers were being imprisoned, he humbly petitioned the Robespierrists for release, asserting his good intentions as a patriote, but his appeal was ignored. As the Terror began to reach its height, the Robespierrists, who had finally taken full control of the state, seemed determined to crush the enrage movement definitively. On February 10, 1794, Roux succeeded in mortally stabbing himself in Bicfltre prison rather than face a humiliating trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

The other well-known enrages, notably Varlet, Lederc, Pauline Leon, and Claire Lacombc, barely managed to survive the Terror. On September 18, only one day after the Law of Suspects was passed, Varlet was arrested for openly opposing new limitations on the sectional democracy, and he remained in prison for nearly two months before he was released as a result of Hubert’s attempt to curry favor with the radical sections. When Lacombe publicly denounced the Committee for General Security for its “infamous policy of imprisoning the best patriots” (a clear reference to Roux and Varlet), she too was temporarily arrested.

While nearly all the enrages were to fade from the scene as the Terror intensified in 1794, Varlet was to reenter revolutionary politics with the fall of Robespierre—again trying to revive his cherished sectional democracy when it seemed less perilous to do so. But as the waning Revolution was finally replaced by triumphant reaction, and his efforts brought him only extended and tormenting imprisonment, Varlet seems to have lost all hope for the Revolution. Although broken and penniless, he remained a political suspect as late as 1813, living well into the nineteenth century as a relic of a bygone era rather than the prophetic voice that he really had been.

In this respect, Varlet stands almost alone among the leading enrages of his time. Jacques Roux’s vision of social justice rarely went beyond a simplistic, leveling impulse to correct the gross economic inequalities that the Revolution never resolved and, in this respect, was not unlike that of radical agitators in previous and later social conflicts who demanded a hazy “equalization” of the necessities of life. Varlet, by contrast, educated in what he construed to be the social egalitarianism of Rousseau, looked far beyond the formal republicanism of even the most extreme Jacobins and called for a revolutionary social democracy based on the direct participation of all citizens in political and economic affairs.

THE HÉBERTIST INTERLUDE

By undermining the enragt opposition, the Jacobins were producing a political vacuum, particularly among the bras nus, that Hubert and his circle were eager to fill. The Hébertists were not particularly close to the sections; their main strength lay in the Paris Commune’s executive bodies, in the War Ministry, and in the Jacobin and Cordeliers clubs. Indeed, Hubert himself had even joined in the clamor against the enrages and helped to suppress them. His radicalism found its expression more in rambunctious oratory and journalism than in serious measures to mobilize popular support for a coherent goal. But having been defeated in an electoral bid to become Minister of the Interior on August 20, he began to turn for support to the sections—an effort in which he was aided by serious revolutionaries like Antoine Momoro and Francois Vincent, who led the left wing of the Cordeliers.

Thus, Hubert now took up many of the enrage demands, such as the enactment of harsh measures against speculators, suspects, the Girondins, and the queen. He also called for the maximum general and the formation of a Parisian “revolutionary army,” or militia, to go into the countryside to punish hoarders and confiscate their grain. Having incorporated these enrage goals into his own program, his Pbre Duchesne succeeded Marat’s L’Ami du Peuple as the bestselling newspaper among the sans-culottes.

Hébertist policies were faced with a serious challenge in the summer of 1793, when a severe drought brought the flour mills in the countryside to a virtual halt, and a severe shortage of bread produced widespread discontent in the capital. The price of all basic goods rose sharply during July and August. By September, the bras nus and poorer sans-culottes held massive, almost, insurrectionary, demonstrations, demanding bread and higher wages. The shortages were blamed on the “moderates” in the municipal establishments, and demands for the establishment of a Parisian “revolutionary army” to get more grain for the capital from the countryside intensified sharply.

Addressing demonstrators at the Hotel de Ville in September 4, Hubert and his supporters in the Commune called upon them to march to the Convention on the following day, where a delegation of Hdbertists from the Jacobin Club pointedly declared that terror was the order of the day. Moreover, they called upon the Convention to accept the sans-culotte agenda, notably, that the Girondins be tried, that suspects be thrown in prison and speedily judged, that a maximum gdndral be established. They also called for a huge forced loan to be levied on the rich. Although Robespierre, who was now president of the Convention, tried to mollify the delegation by proposing diluted versions of these demands, the Convention’s deputies were so intimidated that they assented to most of the proposals precisely as they were submitted.

Nor was it lost on anyone that the frightened Convention, for the second time in only a few months, had yielded to popular demands under crowd pressure— so much so, in fact, that two Hlbertists were elected to the Committee of Public Safety. Once a Parisian “revolutionary army” was organized and departed for the countryside, other “revolutionary armies” surfaced in different parts of France as well. These “armies” were militias rather than professional military forces; they contained the most zealous of patriots who, apart from requisitioning supplies for the cities, were empowered to arrest any provincial whose activities, in their view, seemed hostile to the Revolution.

At length, at the end of September, the maximum g&ntoral was enacted. The Convention imposed price controls on a wide range of basic goods including food, fuel, clothing, and even wine and tobacco, placing the “sacred Terror,” as it was to be called, on the agenda of the regime.

AGAINST THE SECTIONS

Even as the Hébertists tried to benefit from the elimination of the enrages, the Jacobin regime took advantage of the same opportunity by moving resolutely against the sectional democracy. In the autumn of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security transformed volunteer or elected sectional officers and commissioners into salaried bureaucrats answerable to the centralized bodies of the nation-state and decided to pay the revolutionary committeemen a daily three-livre salary.

As Soboul observes:

Payment of revolutionary commissars transformed the job. Until now they had been elected by the general assemblies, and seemed to be agents of the sections, acting independently of administrative authorities. Now they became salaried officials, responsible to the Commune; on September 5, at the same time that the Convention gave the commissars the three-livre payment, it ordered them to submit to an investigation of the General Council [of the Commune], which was authorized to dismiss and replace them if necessary.[340]

In fact, elected officials soon came to be appointed by the state, and powers that were once exercised by sectional committees were transferred to agencies of the Jacobin republic.

As in the case of the enragis, the Montagnards now adopted a carrot-and-stick technique for dealing with the sections. On September 5, Danton proposed that all sans-culottes who attended the sectional assemblies be indemnified for losing time from work. Taken by itself, this proposal might have increased sans~culotte participation in sectional activities, but his proposal contained a highly restrictive proviso: their assemblies—which had heretofore been meeting en permanence, for consecutive evenings and even days at a time—were not permitted to meet more than twice a week, and their hours were limited to between five and ten in the evening. This ploy was patently designed to trim the activity of the assemblies and effectively reduce the participation of the bras nus in public affairs.

In fact, before Danton’s proposal could be adopted, the Convention restricted its forty-sou indemnity exclusively to poor citizens, “notably those who have nothing to live on but their daily work,” or, as the recording secretary of the Convention put it: “every citizen who has no other source of income save his daily wages was entitled, in case of need, to an indemnity.” [341] (Original emphasis.)

This indemnity was given with patent disdain for its recipients. The Convention even appointed sectional commissioners to determine “the eligibility of those citizens” who qualified for the forty sous, often challenging the eligibility of sans-culottes who were clearly in need of the indemnity. Others were obliged to obtain certificates or letters or cards that attested to their poverty, making the indemnity process all the more humiliating. Indeed, some sans-culottes who were eligible to receive the indemnity flatly rejected it, refusing to become what was disdainfully known as “forty-sou patriots,” “quarante sous.”

Considerable tension developed during the following months between the nonpaid and therefore presumably more “patriotic” citizens, and the “ quarante sous,” who seemed to benefit materially from attending sectional assemblies. Lists of recipients were prepared, revised, curtailed, and repeatedly purged until the Committee of Public Safety finally treated the forty-sou stipend more as a form of charity than as a modest recompense for public activity. The Hebertists, it is worth noting, offered only limited resistance to the antisectional drive.

Thus, after Danton’s law was passed, sectional meetings were hardly flooded with indigent sans-culottes ; in fact, behind the welter of revolutionary decrees, the sectional militants could clearly see a concerted attempt by the authorities to limit their powers. The section Th6atre-Fran<;ais, which had led the others in eliminating the barrier between active and passive citizens, provided the forty sous for only eighty-four recipients, although nearly 850 citizens were known to be indigent. Some sections, to be sure, paid the stipend to a large number of citizens, but this figure rarely exceeded more than a third of the indigents who were entitled to the forty sous. Radical sections such as Varlet’s Droits de l’Homme and Jacques Roux’s Gravilliers petitioned the Convention to abolish the two-meeting restriction and the forty-sou stipend, which they regarded as an insult to genuine patriots, but the Jacobin regime, intent on weakening the sectional democracy, insisted on retaining the humiliating practice.

Thereafter, the sans-culottes’ later battles were mainly defensive ones. With each passing month their power waned steadily, despite the formation of the “revolutionary armies” and the general arming of the people. The winter of 179394 saw the marked eclipse of the sans-culottes as a major force in the Revolution.

TERROR

At the same time, the centralization of the state proceeded at a rapid pace. For some time the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre had been usurping the authority of the Committee of General Security to summon and arrest people. Finally, on October 10, the Committee of Public Safety, advancing the excuse that mounting emergencies required a government that had to function quickly and efficiently, declared that it would take over the entire state structure and be accountable only to the Convention. By December, the Committee had gained complete control over all the ministries of the government and acquired the power to choose the army’s generals (subject to the Convention’s approval) and the right to conduct foreign policy.

Perhaps most portentously, during the same month the Committee gained the power to purge local authorities. The departments of France were reduced to mere administrative entities, while the local districts were limited to the job of executing “revolutionary” decrees. Like every other commune in France, Paris now had to submit to the Committee of Public Safety, obey its decrees, and issue a report on municipal affairs to it every ten days. In fact, the leading officials ( procureurs ) of the districts and communes, including those in Paris, were replaced by “national agents,” who were essentially functionaries of the Committee. Thus, all the municipal gains that the towns and cities of France had made from 1789 onward were essentially undone, and France was now governed by an administrative system that was even more centralized than any structure that had existed under the monarchy.

Ironically, Robespierre, who did much to centralize the republic, ordinarily respected governmental legality almost to a fault. He had played no active role in the journies that pushed the revolution in a leftward direction, and he seemed to respond to the insurrection of June 2 with outright fear. The opinions he normally voiced had been moderate and appeared eminently reasonable to bourgeois Paris. That he seemed more like an ideologue than a demagogue— indeed, his demeanor was puritanical and he modestly boarded at the home of the master joiner Duplay—earned him the sobriquet of “the Incorruptible.” If his moral zeal reached lofty dimensions, even during the bloodsoaked heights of the Terror, he appeared nevertheless to be thoroughly imbued with a deeply felt and lofty sense of “republican virtue” and idealism.

This outlook, in many respects, may have been his undoing. He tended to respond to the material demands of the sans-culottes with almost blind disdain, extolling the claims of virtue over those of survival. Nor did he accede to the egalitarian currents that flowed through the Revolution; indeed, his idealism notwithstanding, he seems to have regarded equality as little more than a utopian human condition. He never decried the ownership of property as such, however much he dismissed a concern for material things. His speech on property on April 24, 1794, before the Convention represents a traditionalist contempt for wealth even as it subtly accepts it. “You souls of mud who value nothing but gold,” he declaimed, “I am not going to touch your treasure, however foul its source. You should know that this agrarian law”—which notoriously, at the time, called for the equal or common allotment of land for all in France—“of which you have spoken so much is only a bogey raised by knaves to frighten fools.”

What dispensation, then, did he propose to the “souls of mud” whose “gold” he simultaneously vowed to protect? His message was basically a moral one. “Certainly, a revolution is not necessary to convince us that the extremes of wealth and poverty are the source of many evils and many crimes,” he declared. “For myself I think it even less necessary for private good than for public happiness. It is much more important to make poverty honorable than to proscribe riches.”[342]

But these accolades to virtue and poverty did not put bread on the table of the poorer sans-culottes and peasants. Although many sans-culottes adhered to strong republican views, even rejecting the forty-sou indemnity despite their need for it, they were hardly prepared to sacrifice themselves and their families for moral ideals that left them hungrier than ever, especially as economic conditions worsened almost daily. To the last, Robespierre maintained his distance from these bras nus, however much they all but revered him in the early years of the Revolution. He retained the costume and bearing of the ancien regime: a powdered wig, meticulously tailored clothing, and traditional knee breeches. We have no pictures of “the Incorruptible” in the long trousers and wearing the bonnet rouge of the sans-culottes, nor is there any evidence that he adopted the more familiar personal mannerisms initiated by the Revolution.

As hunger became more widespread, moreover, the Terror grimly continued through the autumn of 1793 and into the winter of the following year, bringing some three thousand people to the guillotine in Paris and about fourteen thousand in the provinces. The Committee of Public Safety incessantly justified these executions by declaring they were needed to eliminate the intrigues of royalists and “federalists.” Louis de Saint-Just, an astute but icily unfeeling young man, who by this time had become Robespierre’s alter ego, now regarded all “dissidents” as criminals and treated them as such, while another Jacobin, Brichet, wanted the Law of Suspects to apply to everyone who was well-to-do. In each village, he argued, the richest farmer should be identified, detained, and guillotined immediately.

By the spring of 1794, the Terrorist government had created an atmosphere of fear so far-reaching that in many respects it anticipated the terror produced by the Stalinist regime a century and a half later. Ordinary citizens, not to speak of politically prominent ones, were afraid to speak their mind on any public issues that might antagonize the Jacobin authorities—even to behave in a manner that might cast suspicion upon them as lacking in civisme. A general fear, in which each person suspected another as a possible informer, permeated Paris and extended in diminishing degrees to outlying areas of the capital. Even the enragds, such as Jacques Roux, who had been an advocate of stringent, frankly terrorist measures against counterrevolutionaries and the wealthy, were to turn against the Robespierrists for the fear they generated by the “sacred Terror.” Varlet was outspoken in denouncing its scope and the paralyzing effect it had on public life.

In practice, moreover, the poor were no less victims of the Terror than the rich, whether they were young or old, women or men. Suspects were guillotined for “depraving public morals,” for failing to “testify properly,” for provisioning soldiers with sour wine, or even for losing their temper at the wrong moment. Some were executed through clerical errors, when their names resembled those of actual prisoners, and, typically, others were denounced by neighbors who had personal grudges against them.

Although the Terror embraced all potential counterrevolutionaries, its largest numbers of victims were in areas of the so-called “federalist revolt.” At Lyon, three hundred condemned suspects were executed by cannonfire. Thousands died in overcrowded prisons at Nantes, while two thousand were drowned in barges in the Loire. The many thousands who perished in the provincial cities by far outnumbered the thousands who died on scaffolds at the Place de la République and other squares of Paris. In all, only a small percentage of those executed in the Terror were nobles, well-to-do, or clergy; most were members of the former Third Estate, often speculators, tradesmen, dissidents, and ordinary working people.

THE FALL OF THE HÉBERTISTS

The Hébertists, having triumphed in September 1793 as champions of the sansculottes , in November and December now shifted their attention from menacing economic issues to fairly safe ideological ones by launching a campaign to eliminate Christianity. That the Church was not popular among the Parisian sans-culottes was understandable in view of its collusion with the aristocracy, but Hubert’s denunciations of its “superstition and hypocrisy” were more of a distraction than an attempt to address the real material problems of the ordinary people. Accordingly, the Hlbertists began publicly to destroy crucifixes and church monuments, advancing a cult of reason and replacing statues of Mary by busts of Marat. Streets that bore names of saints were secularized, as were those of entire towns and villages, and notices were placed outside cemeteries saying that “death is an eternal sleep.”

The Revolution had tried to modernize the calendar to reflect seasons, fruits, and flowers, and, following the introduction of the decimal system, weeks were changed from seven to ten days. Ironically, in fact, de-Christianization reduced the number of free days because the Sabbath now fell every ten days instead of every seven, and the abolition of religious holidays added to the grinding work the sans-culottes, had to perform. No less disturbing, the H6bertists closed churches, where they could, or converted them into temples of reason. Indeed, the de-Christianization campaign assumed such extravagant proportions that it did more to alienate the incurably Catholic French peasantry than to secure the Hebertists the support of the sections, whose afflictions in early 1794 were overwhelmingly economic.

Mindful that many of the French, certainly in the countryside, were still devout Catholics, the Jacobins, viewing the Hebertists as troublesome rivals, denounced de-Christianization in increasingly harsh terms. At the same time, Saint-Just proposed the famous Laws of Ventdse, enacted on February 26 and March 6, 1794, which called for the sequestration of property owned by detained and convicted “enemies to the Revolution,” which were then to be distributed among “indigent patriots.”

Neither Saint-Just nor Robespierre, to be sure, was a socialist in any presentday sense of the word. They were not prepared to challenge property as a basic human right; nor did they advance views that opened so radical a prospect. The Ventdse laws, which have been celebrated by certain socialist historians of the Revolution, might very well be interpreted as a stratagem on the part of the Robespierrists to wean radical sans-culottes, who supported the Hebertists, to their own camp. In no way did the laws propose to significantly alter the mode of production in France by collectivizing shops and land, which might have provided a definitive solution to society’s economic problems. Rather, it was directed primarily toward rendering access to the means of life somewhat more equitable or, at least, not too desperate a problem for the very poor. This secondary approach to the economic problems of the country was a typical strategy of even the most radical elements in the French Revolution, and it would require another generation to raise the key problem of rearranging the productive apparatus of the country along socialized lines.

Alternately wooing and circumscribing the sans-culottes, Robespierre opened his attack on the Hebertists, denouncing them as atheists and warning that their de-Christianization campaign would encourage hatred of the Revolution both within France and abroad. Nor did “the Incorruptible” hesitate to form an unsavory alliance with Danton and his supporters to eliminate the Hebertists, curb the powers of the Commune’s executive, and defang the Cordeliers Club. Using the customary wild charges of counterrevolutionary conspiracies that were now being leveled by one faction against another in the government, this alliance took steps to bring the de-Christianizing Hebertists before the Revolutionary Tribunal as agents in a “foreign plot” against the government.

Hebert seems to have been panicked by the prospect of seriously confronting the Jacobin leaders, even as he kept making reckless charges against them. He vainly called for the “completion” of the Revolution—that is, for a third revolution—and with the support of Momoro and Vincent attempted irresolutely to initiate a jourttie at the beginning of March 1794. This effort, faint as it was, miscarried completely. Badly planned and equivocal in its goals, its instigators made no serious attempt to determine the extent to which they could gain sansculotte support, of which they had very little.

Although the Cordeliers draped the Declaration of the Rights of Man in a black shroud, indicating their support for the upcoming enterprise, their more moderate members soon fraternized with the Montagnards and quickly subverted what support the Hebertists had in the club. Most of the sections did not respond to the insurrectionary appeal; only Momoro’s section showed any will to act.

A cowering Hebert, pushed to the forefront by his own rhetoric, retreated before the prospect of a conflict became real, typically defuzing his support by trivializing the journie as “hypothetical.”[343] Momoro and Vincent, who were made of sterner stuff, patently despised him. Before the journie could be initiated, the Jacobins used the effort, such as it was, as a pretext to move against Hebert and his supporters. In the early hours of March 14, 1794, Hubert, Momoro, and Vincent were arrested, brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on trumpedup charges, and guillotined on March 24, before a crowd of insulting spectators.

With the defeat of the leading Hebertists, the Jacobins stripped the Commune of Hebert’s remaining supporters and replaced them with Robespierrists. Now that the Commune was largely neutralized, the Jacobins were free to eviscerate the sections. By appointing sectional police commissioners, justices of the peace, and their secretaries, they further eroded the remaining elective functions of the general assemblies. The “revolutionary armies” were essentially disbanded, and all who were suspected of being too zealous by the Mountain’s standards were removed from their offices, if not jailed outright. The Left—or at least the popular movement—had been crushed, and the Robespierrists, who were now ascendant among the Jacobins, were obliged to turn to the Right to retain their credibility as a revolutionary group.

THE FALL OF THE DANTONISTS

The French Revolution now began to unwind in reverse order. Even the memory of Marat was so desacralized and defamed by the authorities that, as a police spy reported, a citizen warily declared, “Alas, who can one put one’s trust in now?”[344]

To the extent that it is possible to speak of a Right among the Jacobins, it was embodied by the figure of Danton, who had sought to compromise with the Girondins, conclude peace with France’s foreign enemies, and end the Terror. For some months during the fall of 1793 Danton had been living in the countryside with his new sixteen-year-old wife. He returned to Paris when he heard that the Girondins had been executed—wrongly, in his view—only to find himself in the midst of the de-Christianization campaign conducted by the Hébertists. Although he had allied himself with Robespierre and the committees to arrest the Hebertists as perpetrators of a religious terror, he was no less opposed to the extensive spilling of blood in the capital. His policies were distinctly conciliatory or “indulgent,” to cite the accusation that the Robespierrists were to direct against him and his supporters, although his views earned him considerable sympathy among moderate Jacobins and Conventionnels, who regarded the Terror and war as needless.

A clash between the Dantonists and the Robespierrists, who emphatically favored the Terror, was inevitable, even though some historians tend to reduce their differences merely to personal rivalries. “Having decided on the elimination of the Hebertists,” observes Goodwin, “the government could not have allowed the Dantonists to survive, for their acquittal would have meant its downfall.”[345] The destruction of the Left, in effect, had to be balanced by the destruction of the Right if the Jacobins were to retain popular support. The case that Robespierre could develop against Danton was considerable. Over the years Danton had notoriously tried to find common ground with constitutional monarchists, including Dumouriez, certainly with moderates, and possibly even with foreign agents to end the war. He made an effort to come to terms with the Girondins, only to be arrogantly rebuffed by them in the Convention. It was even suspected, perhaps not without reason, that he had offered advice to the royal family until their intransigence became too obvious to endure. And he had amassed a suspiciously large fortune in landholdings, whose sources were dubious. His shady financial adventures and sybaritic tastes during a time that favored republican simplicity and virtue opened him to charges of moral and financial corruption.

Yet the Dantonists were hardly an inconsequential faction politically. Both Danton and his close supporter, Desmoulins, had stood at the forefront of the revolution since 1789. It was Danton who, more than anyone else, had paved the way in the Cordeliers district for the sectional democracy that followed, and whose oratory rallied France against its invaders in September 1792. Now in 1794, Dan ton and his supporters gave expression to a growing sentiment within the Convention and among the people generally against the Terror, which seemed to be getting out of hand, and the hope for stability in the country. Wearied by Robespierre’s perpetual invocations of “revolutionary virtue,” Danton once exclaimed, “I’ll tell you what this Virtue you talk about really is. It’s what I do to my wife every night!” Such talk infuriated Robespierre, who declared: “Danton derides the word Virtue as though it were a joke. How can a man with so little conception of morality ever be a champion of freedom?”[346]

Nor could Danton’s vocal public objections to the present course of the Revolution fail to evoke the concern of the Robespierrists. His advocacy of a Committee of Clemency to reconsider the guilt of suspects already thrown in prison challenged the very integrity of the “sacred” Terror as an unimpeachable “purifying” endeavor that allowed for no compromises, while Desmoulins’s public expression against the demise of the Girondins constituted a flagrant reproach of Robespierre. “Love of country cannot exist when there is neither pity nor love for one’s fellow countrymen,” Desmoulins boldly declared, “but only a soul dried up and withered by self-adulation.”[347] Given the undisguised description of Robespierre that the closing lines of this passage contained, these words amounted to an open declaration of war against “the Incorruptible.” Saint-Just responded in kind by virtually calling Danton a traitor. “A man is guilty of a crime against the Republic when he takes pity on prisoners,” he stated pointedly. “He is guilty because he has no desire for virtue. He is guilty because he is opposed to the Terror.”[348] In time, Robespierre himself concluded that the “Indulgents” were overt counterrevolutionaries and that Danton, who was always distasteful to “the Incorruptible,” would have to be eliminated together with his supporters.

On the night of March 30, scarcely more than two weeks after the Hébertists had been dispatched, the Dantonists were rounded up and arrested on charges largely fabricated by Saint-Just. Upon learning that his arrest was forthcoming, Danton is said to have remarked, “It was at this time of year that I had the Revolutionary Tribunal set up. I pray to God and men to forgive me for it.” But he made no attempt to escape, despite the pleas of his friends. “A man cannot carry his country away with him on the soles of his shoes,” he is reported to have resolutely declared. [349]

That the “Indulgents” would be found guilty seemed like a foregone conclusion; but the charges brought against Danton himself were so flimsy that his oratory nearly turned the tide against a seemingly predetermined verdict. Denied the opportunity to call witnesses and explore the evidence against him, he nevertheless nearly succeeded in winning the crowd inside and outside the Tribunal against his accusers. It is said that his voice could be heard across the very banks of the Seine. “You are murderers,” he cried out. “Murderers! Look at them! They have hounded us to our deaths! ... But the people will tear my enemies to pieces within three months.” [350] So forceful was his defense that the Robespierrists had to peremptorily cut the trial short and, lest he be rescued by the people, were obliged to sentence the defendants to death in absentia.

The verdict was returned on April 5, 1794. As the tumbrels took Danton and Desmoulins—both only thirty-four years old—to the guillotine, they passed the Duplays’ home, where Robespierre boarded. “You will follow us, Robespierre,” Danton cried out prophetically. They were executed at the end of the day, before a crowd that clearly admired them. Danton’s last words to his executioner were characteristic of the man. “Don’t forget to show my head to the people,” he said peremptorily. “It’s well worth having a look at.”[351]

Thereafter, the Robespierrists began to execute people less for specific acts than for being potential opponents—indeed, for failing to live up to the vague republican moral standards advanced by Robespierre himself. On April 16 the government decreed that all alleged conspiracy cases in France were to be tried exclusively in Paris, partly to close down the provincial revolutionary tribunals and pardy to dilute whatever tolerance for dissenters existed outside the Parisian courts. The jails became overcrowded with suspects brought to Paris from the provinces. On June 10, the Convention passed the notorious Law of Prairial to speed up the Tribunal’s proceedings, a law that broadened the definition of counterrevolutionary crimes enormously, often giving them a vague and ineffable character. The Revolutionary Tribunal was exempted from having to interrogate accused people before bringing them to trial, since, it was claimed, that only “confused the conscience of the judges,” and the accused were deprived of all defense counsel and virtually denied the right to call witnesses on their behalf. The Tribunal was no longer required to provide positive proof of guilt; “moral proof” was regarded as evidence for a capital sentence. In fact, the Tribunal could deliver only one of two verdicts: guilty or not guilty; and there was only one sentence for those whom it found guilty: immediate execution. No longer was the Tribunal even the semblance of a court of justice. As the Jacobin Couthon observed, it was “less a question of punishing” the “enemies of the Republic” than of “annihilating” them. [352] Accordingly, from June onward, the rate of executions soared, and fifteen hundred people were executed in the eight weeks before the end of July.

THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE

To strengthen their popular base, the Jacobins now adopted measures favoring the poorer strata of the population, among both the peasantry in the countryside and the sans-culottes in the cities. Church lands were sold off on terms more favorable to the poorer peasantry. And the Laws of Vent6se remained in effect even as Marat’s former Jacobin admirers were dragging his portrait through the mud and removing his bust from prominent places in the capital. Yet to the sans-culottes, the Ventdse laws were made less credible when the Robespierrist regime imposed wage controls on July 5, 1794, undercutting what popular support it had, while providing little consolation for its overall conduct to the well-to-do. Perhaps no maximum raised a greater furor among the bras nus and poorer sans-culottes of the city than the one that placed a ceiling on their already miserable earnings. Cries against it were to follow the tumbrels that later carried the Robespierrists to the scaffold, whose execution evoked hoots and shouts from a bitterly hostile crowd of poor and wealthy alike.

Indeed, less than three weeks after wage controls were established, Robespierre and his supporters fell, with virtually no support from the sections. To foresee the blow that finally came would not have been difficult, and Robespierre was not insensitive to the reaction he was producing. Yet he remained overconfident, even petulant, with respect to his authority. To counteract the atheistic reputation that the Hebertists had given to the government, he staged a public Festival of the Supreme Being on June 8, in which his pomposity was equaled only by his arrogance. To many Conventionnels, it now seemed that “the Incorruptible” had completely succumbed to the lures of power and aspired to be a dictator. Nor were they reconciled to the expulsion of the Girondin leaders and the execution of the Dantonists. The guillotine seemed relentless in its claims of victims, and never had the Terror seemed more intolerable than in the spring of 1794.

On June 26, after six weeks of a strange absence from the Convention, “the Incorruptible” appeared before the assembly and delivered a rambling speech including threats to unspecified counterrevolutionaries. The Convention, having recovered its own confidence while he was gone, was no longer docile. It responded with angry demands that he name the “enemies” who were apparently slated for the guillotine, which Robespierre adamantly refused to do, leaving the unruly hall in a cold fury. During the night of July 26 and well into the next morning, Jacobins and moderates alike from the two great committees desperately mobilized supporters to unseat him. When the following morning came, Robespierre and his supporters were furiously denounced, and “the Incorruptible” was even denied the opportunity to respond to his attackers.

It is ironical, perhaps, that Robespierre was still not prepared to violate republican legality. Even after the Convention voted unanimously for his arrest and execution, he procrastinated before calling upon the sections for support. Indeed, like many revolutionaries in periods of crisis that lead to their downfall, he seems almost to have been sleepwalking, roused to action only by his immediate supporters. Rescued from the Convention by the Commune, where he still had support, he withdrew to the Hdtel de Ville and almost indifferently permitted his aides to call for an insurrection against the Converttionnels. The response by the sections indicates that his support among them had virtually disappeared; scarcely seventeen out of forty-eight sectional battalions of the National Guard answered the calls of the Robespierrists, and even then only falteringly. During the night, most of the National Guards who responded simply drifted away. Even the sections that had been most strongly committed to the Left, like Roux’s Gravilliers and the H^bertist L’Unite, eagerly joined the Convention to attack the Hotel de Ville, which in the early morning hours was virtually unguarded. On the afternoon of July 28 “the Incorruptible,” his brother Augustin, Saint-Just, Couthon, Hanriot, and several others were led to the guillotine, where they were executed amid the hoots and insults of a huge crowd. The fall of the Robespierrist regime occurred on 10 Thermidor, according to the revolutionary calendar, a date that thereafter gave his moderate successors in the Convention the name of “Thermidorians”—a term that was to find a dishonorable place in the revolutionary vocabulary for generations to come.

THERMIDOR

Although the Thermidorian regime was politically moderate, the destruction of the Robespierrist regime allowed the Left to recover again. The journees of the sans-culottes and the conspiracies of the revolutionary societies revived, albeit on a scale much smaller than in the past. Worsening economic conditions, provocations by Parisian gangs of royalist gilded youth, the growing centralization of power in the ruling Directory (the small handful of men who increasingly became the principal governmental power in France) and the steady undoing of the gains that the masses had achieved during 1793 all served to foster popular unrest that culminated in two sans-culotte, largely bras nus, uprisings. The first, in April 1795, in which the Convention was briefly occupied by the masses, rapidly fizzled out into what Soboul has aptly called a demonstration rather than an insurrection. It served merely to alert the Directory to the more important one that followed a month later. This jourtide, organized by the radical sections, had all the trappings of the older, more organized uprisings of the past. On May 21, the tocsin and church bells sounded throughout the capital, followed by the alarm cannon and the march of sectional battalions to the Convention, which, after several skirmishes, was taken over by the armed masses. But apart from a good deal of oratory, simulated concessions by the frightened deputies, and the passing of resolutions demanding a return to the old revolutionary democracy, the Directory, and the great committees of 1793–94, which still remained in the aftermath of the Thermidor, were permitted to muster their own sympathetic troops. They finally drove the insurrectionary people back to their neighborhoods, where they soon surrendered their arms to the Directory’s better-disciplined and more determined military forces. Apart from limited riots and expressions of protest, the period of the jourtties had come to an end.

A “white terror” followed the May uprising, and the radicals who were not rounded up were now obliged to turn to secret conspiracies against the increasingly reactionary regime. Of these diffuse conspiracies, the most notable and legendary was the Conspiracy of Equals, led by Gracchus Babeuf, which tried to stage a communistic coup in 1796. Babeuf’s vision of communism has been aptly described as a leveling of the great economic disparities that the Revolution had not eliminated. The Babouvist ideal of a new society consisted of an economic order in which the distribution of goods would guarantee to all the satisfaction of the people’s needs under fairly spartan material conditions. This distributive communism was to be administered by a centralized system of nationalized property, not unlike the visions of a new society that were later advanced by the followers of Auguste Blanqui and by Karl Marx.

The execution of Babeuf and several of his supporters in May 1796, after a lengthy trial, might very well have passed as just another tragic episode had not Philippe-Michel Buonarroti, one of Babeuf’s collaborators who escaped the death penalty, written a full account of the event and the ideas that guided the conspiracy. Buonarroti’s account, published early in the nineteenth century, became a program and an organizational guide for conspiratorial movements that proliferated well beyond the Revolution and shaped the radicalism of the new century—the nineteenth—that was emerging out of the debris of the one that had passed.

Following the Napoleonic Wars and attempts to restore the ancien regime at the Congress of Vienna, radically new ideals began to replace the republican goals of the Jacobins: some, redolent of Varlet’s image of a confederation of communes, under the rubric of anarchism; others, inspired partly by Babeuf, turning to a new and highly economistic body of ideas under the rubric of socialism. These conceptual frameworks, however, belong to the century that followed, and were to live well beyond the mystique of the “republican virtue” propounded by the Jacobins.

Bibliographical Essay

GENERAL WORKS

The revolutions discussed in this book raise issues that are still alive today. Their histories shade into broad debates about the value, feasibility, and limitations of a direct democracy; alternative ways of owning, controlling, and sharing property; the institutionalization of expansive ideas of liberty and equality; and the importance of leadership in focusing the often inchoate feelings of an insurrectionary people. The number of books that deal with these and related issues are immense in number. The writings of major “left-of-center” thinkers such as Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, and John Stuart Mill provide a mere framework for dealing with these problems. The reader may gain a more complete understanding of the great revolutions and their importance from the immense number of contemporary pamphlets, broadsides, and programs written by revolutionary publicists and authors.

The French Revolution of 1789–94 immensely influenced revolutionary analyzes throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Several books of varying value—whose authors are not necessarily socialists— have attempted to interpret modern revolutions in its general terms, even schematically. Perhaps the best known is Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Random House, 1952). Since Brinton essentially adopted this approach, his book is valuable as a guide to revolutionary thinking in the first half of our century. Lyford P. Edwards’s The Natural History of Revolutions (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965) has a pattern very similar to Brinton’s.

Of a broader and more flexible nature is Mark N. Hagopion’s The Phenomenon of Revolution (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1974). E.H. Carr’s Studies in Revolution (New York: Universal Library Edition, 1964) should probably have been called Studies in Revolutionaries, since it fleshes out Brinton’s scheme with biographies of major revolutionaries. Howard Mumford Jones’s Revolution and Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974) is a highly stimulating discussion of the individualism that was emphasized in the Romantic movement generally as well as in the great eighteenth-century revolutions. Lawrence Kaplan and Carol Kaplan’s Revolution: A Comparative Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1973) is a useful compilation of papers on various revolutions, beginning with the English and continuing through more recent, largely nationalistic upheavals. The opening essay by the Kaplans is valuable. Revolutions: 1775–1830, edited by Merryn Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), opens with an informative introductory essay, then gets down to specific documents of major revolutions and revolutionaries. Socialist Thought , edited by Albert Fried and Ronald Sanders (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964) contains a wide range of revolutionary documents and introductory sketches. These overviews of the revolutionary era constitute only a small number of the many general books on revolutions and the ideas of outstanding revolutionaries.

PART I: PEASANT REVOLTS

The outstanding—certainly the most informative—book on the early revolutions is Perez Zagorin’s Rebels and Rulers: 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). It has no equal for this period, to my knowledge, and deserves the closest study. Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970, revised and enlarged) is highly tendentious but has become a hardy perennial emphasizing the so-called “anarchic” element in millenarian movements, including the English Revolution.

The radical historical literature often represents these important movements as “premature”—tragically, in my view, since they constitute suppressed potentialities that might have changed the course of Western history. The reader should not disdain Barbara Tuchman’s popular A Distant Mirror (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), which gives a vivid and informative account of the English and French peasant uprisings. Jean Froissart’s Chronicles is one of the principal original sources for the outlook of the ruling elites of the time. The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 2 (specifically the 1904 edition, “planned by Lord Acton”) and Anne-Marie Cazalis’s 1358: La Jacquerie de Paris: Le destin tragique du “maire” Etienne Marcel (Paris: Société de Production Literaire, 1977) are very valuable discussions, as is Rodney Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York and London: Methuen, 1977). The materials on late medieval peasant uprisings from recent years are too numerous to adduce, but the reader may wish to consult the pages of the distinguished British quarterly Past and Present.

Among the numerous books on the Reformation uprisings, Friedrich Engels’s classic The Peasant War in Germany (New York: International Publishers, 1926) incorporates the war into Germany’s revolutionary tradition but tends to subordinate it to the proletarian movements that he cherished. George H. Williams’s substantial overview, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962) covers various radical clerics and movements in considerable, informative detail, while Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism (New York, Seabury Press, 1974) has been unduly neglected. Notable in the most recent general literature are Peter Blickle’s The Revolution of 1525 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); The German Peasant War of 1525: New Viewpoints , edited by Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979 ); and The German Peasant War of 1525, edited by Janos Bak (London: Frank Cass, 1976).

PART II: THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

On the religious background on the English Revolution, Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints (New York: Atheneum, 1974), Robert Ashton’s Reformation and Revolution: 1558–1660 (London: Paladin Books, 1985), the opening chapters of William Haller’s Liberty and Revolution in the Puritan Revolution (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1955), and Christopher Hill’s Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolution England (New York: Schocken Books, 1972) are very valuable accounts. Early-seventeenth-century English thought is explored in Gerald R. Cragg’s Freedom and Authority (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975). Lawrence Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy: 15581641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967) is a balanced account of the social background of the elite classes.

The best short overview of the Revolution itself from a radical viewpoint is Christopher Hill’s pamphlet-size The English Revolution (London: Lawrence 8c Wishart, 1976), which takes the reader up to Cromwell’s establishment of the Commonwealth. Hill, a Marxist, tends to provide a rather simplistic “historical materialist” interpretation of the English Revolution as a “bourgeois” affair. But this able historian nonetheless often exhibits a sympathetic understanding of the “ideologies” of the Puritans and the cultural features of their revolution. His Puritanism and Revolution (New York: Schocken, 1964) is a superb account of early modern England and the ideas that nourished the revolutionary period, as is his Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Hill’s Century of Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton 8c Co., 1966) is a more detailed overview of the revolutionary period from 1603 to 1714. His memorable The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking Press, 1972) deals with the libertarian tendencies that surfaced in revolutionary England between 1640 and 1660. Hill and Edmund Dell have excerpted and collated a splendid collection of original documents under the title The Good Old Cause: Documents of the English Revolution of 1640–1660 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1969).

Lawrence Stone’s The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529 to 1642 (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1972) deals very ably and less schematically with the English Revolution than Hill’s major works. A number of papers written on the Revolution from a grassroots standpoint appear in History from Below, edited by Frederick Krantz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Although Eduard Bernstein’s Cromwell and Communism (New York: Schocken, 1963), written in 1895, is dated, it can still be read with considerable profit. (Its German title is Sozialismus und Demokratie in der grossen englischen Revolution.) The times of the Revolution are captured in David Underdow’s Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

The Levelers produced numerous tracts, manifestos, and broadsides, which appear in several collections. The Levelers in the English Revolution, edited by

G. E. Aylmer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975; London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), contains a good selection of original documents, as does A.L. Morton’s selection in Freedom in Arms (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975; New York: International Publishers, 1975), with a fine introduction. The best collection, however, is Don M. Wolfe, ed., Leveler Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (originally published in 1944, New York: Humanities Press, 1967).

H. N. Brailsford’s thorough study of the Levelers, The Levelers and the English Revolution (Nottingham: Spokesman University Press, 1976), is of outstanding quality, the best available account of this movement and its ideas. (Brailsford left it unfinished at his death, but it was completed by Christopher Hill.) On the Levelers in the context of English political thought, G.P. Gooch’s English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927) remains outstanding.

Undoubtedly the best detailed account of the New Model Army is C.H. Firth’s Cromwell’s Army (London: Methuen 8c Co., 1962). The transcript of the Putney Debates taken by William Clarke is found in C.H. Firth, ed., The Clarke Papers (London: Camden Society, 1891–1901).

A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters (London: Lawrence 8c Wishart, 1970) is an excellent and ably researched account, equaled by P.G. Rogers’s The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). Gerrard Winstanley’s often bittersweet writings appear in The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

On major figures in the Revolution, Jasper Ridley’s biographical sketches in The Roundheads (London: Constable 8c Co., 1976) are valuable, as are Christopher Hill’s God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and his superb account of John Milton’s ideas and activities, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979). The extent to which the elite classes retained considerable power after the Revolution is explored in Jerome Blum’s The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978) and Arno J. Mayer’s very readable The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon, 1981). The shading of the English Revolution into the American can best be understood by the papers assembled in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980).

PART III: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The question of whether the American Revolution was a war for independence or a revolution has long been subject to debate. Readers who care to explore conflicting views should examine the essays in The American Revolution: How Revolutionary Was It?, ed. George Athan Billias (Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1970) and The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution: 1763–1789, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

Among general histories of the American Revolution, the chapters devoted to the Revolution in Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan Co., 1949) are still insightful and eminently readable, despite the book’s economistic thrust. Outright Marxist works on the subject include Herbert Aptheker’s The American Revolution, 1763–1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960) and Jack Hardy’s The First American Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1937). The tendentiousness of these books should not cause us to overlook the considerable value of their accounts of class conflicts in the emerging United States. Nor should the reader overlook the section on the American Revolution in R. R. Palmer’s splendid The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).

The innovative, quasi-democratic town meetings of colonial New England are explored in several highly readable accounts. Sumner Chilton Powell’s pioneering Puritan Village (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1965) traces the social and political origins of New England towns to English villages from which the inhabitants emigrated. On the institutional origins of the Massachusetts town meeting, Edmund S. Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1958) is lucid and insightful. Kenneth Lockridge’s outstanding A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970) traces the development of one Massachusetts town, Dedham, over the course of the colonial period. Michael Zuckerman’s The Peaceable Kingdom: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Random House, 1970) overemphasizes the degree of consensus in New England town meetings but vividly conveys the remarkable autonomy that the town meetings enjoyed in the eighteenth century.

I cannot recommend too highly T. H. Breen’s Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) for its explorations of the commonalities and differences between the colonies and Britain. David S. Lovejoy’s The Glorious Revolution in America (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), an excellent and eminently readable account of early conflicts with Britain, provides fascinating material on republican ideology. The ideological ferment that led to republicanism in the colonies is discussed in detail in Ralph Ketchum’s From Colony to Country (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1974), while Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) lucidly expounds the importance of the True Whigs to American revolutionary thought. Nor can the reader ignore Staughton Lynd’s Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York: Random House, 1969).

The colonial drift toward conflict with Britain is well chronicled in Pauline Maier’s From Resistance to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1974). On the role of Massachusetts in the Revolution, Robert E. Brown’s Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691–1780 (New York: Harper & Row, 1955) is informative albeit neoconservative. The activities of the Boston Town Meeting and Boston Committee of Correspondence are covered in Richard D. Brown’s Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–74 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and Dirk Hoerder’s Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts: 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977). The agrarian revolutionary environment in New England is developed with considerable sensitivity in Robert A. Gross’s The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill 8c Wang, 1976). For the mid-Atlantic coast and southern colonies, Charles S. Snyder provides a pithy account of Virginia’s revolutionary politics in American Revolutionaries in the Making (New York: Collier Books, 1962). Elisha P. Douglass’s Rebels and Democrats (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Books, 1955) is highly recommended, ably covering class conflicts in all parts of the colonial America. The chapters on the southern colonies are particularly fine.

On the issues, passions, and conflicts that surged up in the Revolution, there is no substitute for Common Sense and The Crisis, works by the greatest polemicist and propagandist of the period, Tom Paine. Carl L. Becker’s study of the natural rights doctrines that imbued radicals in British America, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Random House, 1942) is insightful. Salient documents, declarations, and polemics of the time are gathered in Samuel Eliot Morison’s Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution and the Formation of the Federal Constitution: 1764–1788, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) and a Documentary History of the United States: The American Revolution, 1763–1783, ed. Richard B. Morris (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1970).

The revolutionary leaders come to life in a multitude of biographies and collections of their correspondence. Two of exceptional value are Pauline Maier’s The Old Revolutionaries (New York: Random House, 1982), which includes some of the lesser-known figures of the Revolution such as the admirable Thomas Young, and A.J. Langguth’s Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (New York: Simon 8c Schuster, 1988). For further studies into the living aspects of the Revolution, the reader may want to consult the American Archives, easily available in a respectable university library, and the papers that appear in the William and Mary Quarterly.

Essential for an understanding of the popular movement are Jesse Lemisch’s essays “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd ser., vol. 25, no. 3 (July 1968) and “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Towards a New Past, ed. Barton Bernstein (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968). Charles G. Steffen’s The Mechanics of Baltimore (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984) is an in-depth account of one city, as is Ronald Hoffman’s A Spirit of Dissension (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), on Maryland as a whole.

The literature on the Committees of Safety is regrettably sparse and scattered. Agnes Hunt’s slender The Provincial Committees of Safety of the American Revolution, originally published in 1904 (reprinted by New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1968), is still the most comprehensive account of this revolutionary engine, although its focus is on the committees at the provincial level rather than at the more local levels. The opening chapters of Margaret Burnham Macmillan’s The War Governors in the American Revolution (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965) also contain a valuable discussion of the formation of the Provincial Committees throughout the colonies. Ironically, the literature sympathetic to the Loyalists during the Revolution often tells us a great deal about the patriot committees that “persecuted” them. The best works of this kind are Alexander Clarence Flick’s Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution (originally published around 1900; republished by New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969) and Claude Halstead Van Tyne’s The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Macmillan, 1902).

The best source for the local committees is accounts of the popular revolutionary upsurges in the individual provinces. For Pennsylvania, Richard Alan Ryerson has explored in detail the social makeup and revolutionary role of the radical committees in Philadelphia in his remarkable The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978). This book, together with J. Paul Selsam’s The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942) and Robert L. Brunhouse’s The Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical Commission, 1942), gives a fine picture of the internal conflicts, grievances, and the committees that surfaced in that stormy province.

Robert J. Taylor’s Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1954, reprinted in 1967 by Kraus Reprint Corp.) provides a comprehensive background of the social changes that led to Daniel Shays’s rebellion. The latter event is presented very perceptively in David P. Szatmary’s Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), which details the significance of the uprising fully and sympathetically.

The conflicts and issues surrounding the Constitution of 1787 and its ratification in 1789 are vividly depicted in Merrill Jensen’s The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1964). The public debates that followed the convention are examined in the famous Federalist Papers of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, which are available in a large number of editions, most recently and outstandingly in The Debate on the Constitution, ed. Bernard Bailyn (New York: Library of America, 1993). Also essential for understanding the public consideration of the Constitution is Jackson Turner Main’s The Anti-Federalists: 1781–1788 (New York: W.W. Norton 8c Co., 1961), along with the fine documentary source The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, edited with a valuable introduction by Ralph Ketchum (New York: New American Library, 1986). Merrill Jensen’s The Articles of Confederation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), in conjunction with same author’s The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781–1789 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), is an outstanding study.

PART IV: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

An overview of the Revolution that covers its salient events is Albert Goodwin’s brief The French Revolution (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1966), which provides more valuable interpretative material than one might expect from so short a work. J.M. Thompson’s The French Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) is another fine introductory account and is particularly valuable because of the details it supplies on the popular sectional assemblies and the direct democracy of the Parisian sans-culottes. Georges Lefebvre’s two-volume The French Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962) is one of the best of the contentious narrations of the events. A highly absorbing account is William Doyle’s The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

The narrative events and important journies of the Revolution are well covered in Jacques Godechot’s The Taking of the Bastille, July 14, 1789 (New York: Charles Scribner 8c Sons, 1970); Christopher Hibbert’s The Days of the French Revolution (New York: William Morrow 8c Co., 1980); R.R. Palmer’s Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969); and Stanley Loomis’s Paris in the Terror (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1964). These narrative works also give serious interpretation to the Revolution’s events, but, most important, they bring the reader into the streets of Paris at various times during the Revolution.

The system of privileges, the various social and economic crises, and the declining legitimacy of the ancien regime prior to the Revolution are taken up in C.B.A. Behrens’s The Ancien Regime (London: Thames 8c Hudson, 1967; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967,1975); Franco Venturi’s The End of the Old Regime in Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and George Rudd’s Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Broadly social accounts of the Revolution include Alfred Cobban’s controversial The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), a “revisionist” account of changes in privilege and property relationships during the Revolution, that is of inestimable value and interpretive importance. Norman Hampson’s A Social History of the French Revolution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966) and Lynn Hunt’s Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and her The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) are outstanding. Linda Kelly’s Women of the French Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989) helps fill a major void in accounts of the Revolution, although a great deal can be found about militant sans-culottes women in works specifically on the enrages. The opening chapters of H. Sewell, Jr.’s, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) provide an exceptionally insightful, indeed bedrock discussion of the sans-culotte artisans. Gwyn A. Williams’s comparative study of popular movements in Britain and France during the Revolution, Artisans and Sans-Culottes (London: Edward Arnold, 1968) is a small but nonetheless immensely rewarding study. Yves-Marie Berce’s History of Peasant Revolts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990) provides a fine analysis of peasant revolts in the centuries before the French Revolution, while P.M. Jones’s The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) accounts for the Revolution in rural areas. Jacques Godechot’s The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971) shows the “other side” of the Revolution.

Albert Mathiez’s The French Revolution (New York: Russell 8c Russell, 1962), originally published in Paris in 1922, is favorable to Robespierre and was the progenitor of more radical histories of the Revolution later in this century. Other radical interpretations of the French Revolution include a Trotskyist version by Daniel Guerin, La Lutte de classes sous la Premiere Republique in two fully documented volumes (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1946); a highly abridged version has been translated into English under the title Class Struggles in the First French Republic (London: Pluto Press, 1977). For an anarchist interpretation of the Revolution, Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989) remains eminently readable, despite its datedness.

Albert Soboul, an outstanding Marxist scholar of the Revolution, has provided a veritable library of his own on the subject. His Short History of the French Revolution: 1789–1799 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977) qualifies less as a history than as five interpretative essays. His massive Precis has been translated into English under the title The French Revolution: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon (New York: Random House, 1974). But Soboul’s most pioneering work—a masterpiece by any political standards—is his monumental reconstruction of the Parisian sectional novement, Les Sansculottes parisiens en I’An II: Histoire politique et sociale des sections de Paris, 2juin 1793–9 thermidor An II (La Roche-sur-Yon: Henri Potier, 1958). Part II of this important work has been translated into English as The Sans Culottes by R6my Inglis Hall (New York: Doubleday 8c Co., 1972), along with the Marxist generalizations in the original French introduction and conclusion. Soboul and Walter Markov have assembled a remarkable set of documents from 1793–94, with the original French side by side with a German translation, under the title Die Sansculotten von Paris (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957).

The social background, lives, views, and activities of individual revolutionary leaders are sketched out in biographical surveys such as J.M. Thompson’s Leaders of the French Revolution (New York: Harper 8c Row, 1929) and Robespierre and the French Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1962). Thompson’s biography Robespierre (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) is expansive. Norman Hampson has also written a series of fine biographies, notably Danton (1978), The Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre (1988), and Saint-Just (1991), all of which are published by Basil Blackwell at Oxford. A modest biography of Marat is Louis Gottschalk’s Jean Paul Marat: A Study in Radicalism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

A stunning monographic literature on the Revolution has appeared in English in recent years. Particular note should be made of R. B. Rose’s The Making of the Sans-Culottes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983) as well as his The Enragis: Socialists of the French Revolution ? (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965). Morris Slavin’s The French Revolution in Miniature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984) is a remarkable reconstruction of the activities of the section Droits-de-l’Homme, where Jean Varlet served as secretary, throughout the Revolution. Slavin’s The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1986) explores in detail the abortive sans-culotte insurrection of June 2, 1793. Richard Cobb’s The People’s Armies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) is a fascinating, detailed account of the revolutionary militia that the Committee of Public Safety used to deal with its opponents in the countryside; Cobb’s The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) is also valuable. Marc Bouloiseau’s The Jacobin Republic: 1792–1794 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) is an up-to-date account of the interaction between the Jacobins, the Girondins, and the popular movement.

Recent revisions advanced by Francois Furet appear in his essay “The French Revolution Is Over,” in Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge University Press, 1981). Alfred Cobban provides a cursory survey of recent interpretations of the Revolution in the second chapter of Aspects of the French Revolution (London: Granada Publishing, 1971), while a selection of readings from different interpretive viewpoints appears in New Perspectives on the French Revolution, edited by Jeffrey Kaplan (New York: John Wiley 8c Sons, 1965).

Accounts of the period between Thermidor and the emergence of Napoleon appear in Albert Mathiez’s After Robespierre: The Thermidorian Reaction (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1965), which gives a good account of the sans-culottes’ last rising in the Prairal Insurrection of 1795. Georges Lefebvre’s The Thermidorians (New York: Random House, 1966) is more a summary account than Mathiez’s. On the Babeuf conspiracy, David Thompson’s The Babeuf Plot: The Making of a Republican Legend (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner 8c Co., 1947) includes a pertinent discussion of the ramifications of the conspiracy into the nineteenth century. R.B. Rose’s Gracchus Babeuf: The First Revolutionary Communist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978) is a detailed intellectual biography. Babeuf’s own statements from his trial appear direcdy in The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf, edited and translated by John Anthony Scott (New York: Schocken, 1972).

For documents, pamphlets, cahiers, articles and official documents for each phase of the Revolution in English translation, an outstanding selection is A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution, a massive work selected and annotated by John Hall Stewart (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965). Le Moniteur, the periodical that contained much of the official material and reports during the revolutionary period, is available in good university libraries.

VOLUME TWO

For my granddaughter Katya

Preface

This volume, the second of The Third Revolution, deals primarily with the major nineteenth-century uprisings of the French working class, from the Revolution of 1830 through the Revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871. It also necessarily examines the origins and history of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) or First International and the Second International, primarily a Marxist social democratic association heavily influenced by the German Social Democratic Party. The increasingly ideological nature of nineteenth-century workers’ movements and the emergence of a modem proletariat and an industrial capitalist class made it necessary for me to explore in some detail the transition from Jacobinism, a radical republican ideology and movement, to various socialisms oriented toward the working class. During the first half of the century a modem class conflict really appeared in both England and France and, with it, various socialist and anarchist ideologies that were already sprouting in the immediate aftermath of the Great French Revolution. Hence, in addition to covering the revolutions themselves, I provide summary accounts of the ideological transition from left-wing Jacobinism to outright socialism.

In a sense, this volume is not only an account of one of the stormiest periods of popular insurrections in modem history but also an account of nineteenth- century France, as seen through the lens of its great revolutionary movements and ideologies. The revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871 in Paris were, in great part, extensions of the Revolution of 1789 to 1794, which is also how many of their participants regarded them. In contrast to most conventional historians, I share Roger V. Gould’s view that the June 1848 insurrection of the Parisian workers was the most class-conscious of all nineteenth-century French revolutions, even more than the dramatic Paris Commune of 1871, which was by no means socialist or exclusively working class in character—it was actually less a class revolution than a municipal, political, and patriotic phenomenon, precipitated by the Prussian siege of Paris. But the June insurrection of 1848 can be seen, as many of its participants saw it, as the “third revolution” that the sans<ulottes had hoped to make in 1793.

This volume is also an account of the transition from artisanal socialism to proletarian socialism. The two forms of socialism, while overlapping in many respects, were also different in their goals and methods. Indeed, the book’s narrative pivots on this transition, as well as on the shift from the small handicraft workshop to the modem capital-intensive factory, with the differences in sensibility and politics that the transformation produced. In 1789 and 1830, the militants were primarily artisans, especially journeymen, and by trade were often carpenters, masons, furniture makers (particularly in the Saint-Antoine district of Paris), and printers, rather than factory workers. By the turn of the twentieth century, the leading militant members of the working classes were metalworkers, who retained the independent spirit of skilled artisans while simultaneously forming an integral part of the factory environment. Among the thousands of semiskilled or unskilled and poorly educated proletarians in factories, it was these “artisan-proletarians,” so to speak, who were the most educated, forceful, and independent and to whom the others turned for leadership. They begin to appear as early as June 1848, and as the reader of volume 3 will find, they played a very prominent role in the great revolutionary wave that swept over Russia and Germany between 1917 and 1921.

I share the view of Bernard H. Moss, William H. Sewell, Jr., and other recent historians of the nineteenth-century French working class that ideas of cooperative, indeed collective production and distribution (as distinguished from individualistic forms) became very widespread in Paris in the years after 1830, and especially following the 1848 Revolution. These ideas varied greatly and were often vague in conception, ranging from simple trade unions with guildlike features to cooperatives with egalitarian and collectivist methods of production and distribution. It is highly unlikely that Parisian artisans or even “skilled workers,” as Moss calls them, moved unerringly in the direction of developing collective forms of work. After all, about fifty percent of the enterprises in Paris during the 1840s were owned by artisanal masters, often aided by one or more assistants.

But many of these master craftsmen aspired to secure their independent status against the efforts of merchant capitalists to control them, and against the encroachments of the factory system which, judging from the unsavory English example, threatened one day to proletarianize them as well. The need to defend their trades, or etats, from merchant control and industrial competition alike made them eager to unite with their fellow masters in cooperative societies. But it is unlikely that most of these artisan masters aspired to create a full-blown socialist society based on the collective ownership of property.

On the other hand, a large number of artisans were employes rather than employers—indeed, only ten percent of the masters employed ten or more workers—and these ordinary workers or journeymen appear to have been far more open to radical egalitarian ideas about collective property ownership and cooperative production. Thus, the Parisian working class initially had no coherent, let alone shared concept of association and the “organization of work”; from masters to journeymen to outright unskilled proletarians who were little more than laborers, their demands probably varied considerably.

In the 1830s and 1840s, any attempt to establish a truly collectivist basis for industrial production would have encountered great difficulties. But many French artisans devised ingenious schemes for establishing productive associations of a socialistic kind based on their existing workshops. Hence their earliest calls for a new “organization of work” often came down to demands for shared resources for credit; insurance funds to tide individual artisans over in times of unemployment, illness, and old age; and legislation to protect their small workshops against competition from the growing factory system.

In time, however, and in growing numbers, the most sophisticated worker “militants,” comprising both artisans and journeymen laborers, did seek to collectivize most of the French economy. Many historians of the French labor movement maintain that nineteenth-century French craftsmen were genuine proletarians who were fervently committed to collectivist ideas of socialism based on free associations. Marxist historians, on the other hand, regard most of the Parisian craftsmen as “petty bourgeois” remnants of a preindustrial society, whose “associationist” ideas were based on the private ownership of small-scale property. 1 have accepted neither viewpoint in toto but have tried to steer a middle course between the two. Pace Marx, collectivist goals did emerge among many French artisans after the Revolution of 1830. But these goals were diverse, often confused, and ultimately unworkable within the context of the small-scale production that prevailed in French industry for most of the nineteenth century.

One wing of the collectivist ideology of artisanal socialism called for the nationalization of railroads, banks, and major industrial enterprises, to be managed by the men and women who worked in them. But in the main, French socialists, not to speak of anarchists, were generally more enamored of federalist ideas of association than centralist ones, an affinity that, well into the next century, in conjunction with their commitment to workers’ control of industry, would make them either conscious or intuitive supporters of anarchosyndicalism, with its creed ofbottom-up industrial management within the framework of libertarian trade unions. Hence the failure of French Marxists to establish a secure basis in the French working class or to consistendy abide by Marx’s views, either during or after his lifetime.

Unlike Moss, I have eschewed the appellations “skilled workers” and “skilled proletarians” in favor of “artisans” and “artisan proletarians.” I believe that what distinguished most Parisian workers from the emerging factory proletariat was primarily their characteristically strong sense of personal independence and self-reliance, not simply their possession of skills. Doubtless, the artisans’ independent sensibility was reinforced and partly formed by their skills. But theirs was also a culture and community that harked back to an older era, possessed of civic as well as class consciousness. Revolutions are very territorial events: the class antagonisms they express occur within distinctive communities, with their own cafes, civic halls, squares, and even streets as well as workplaces. In France in particular, a revolution would actually consist of many local revolts, each based in a particular neighborhood. Hence the fatal tendency of French workers, especially Parisians, to scatter to barricades in their own neighborhoods during times of insurrection, instead of organizing a citywide and regional coordination against counterrevolutionary military forces.

It had been my hope to encompass this history of the popular movements in the revolutionary era within two volumes. But as my preparation of the second volume continued, it became clear that a third volume would be required. To have limited The Third Revolution to only two volumes, I discovered, would have obliged me to omit crucial events, ideas, and developments within the revolutionary tradition. I can only hope that the reader finds that this three- volume book has been worth his or her attention and that it evokes a sense of the great events that are fading from memory today—and the lessons they have to teach present and future generations.

The writing of this volume was very often burdened by the formidable problem of factual discrepancies among the various histories upon which I drew. Many accounts, I found, differed on everything from names to dates to sequences of events, as well as omitting important details of the revolutions at the grassroots level. Not even contemporary eyewitnesses and participants agreed on all the basic facts: Lamartine’s and Blanc’s histories of the February 1848 Revolution, for example, diverged even on simple details regarding major events. These discrepancies, which recurred again and again, obliged me to consult many memoirs, contemporary documents, and other histories before I felt I could make reasonable judgments and present a responsible picture of these nineteenth-century insurrections. Under such circumstances, errors are difficult to avoid, and I can only hope that any that may persist in the pages that follow are minimal and inconsequential.

I owe my greatest debt in writing volume 2 of The Third Revolution, once again, to my companion and colleague, Janet Biehl, who helped immensely with the research and edited the manuscript with great astuteness, care, and dedication. Her enormous support and assistance were indispensable in the preparation of this book.

Several staff members of the Bailey-Howe Library at the University of Vermont in Burlington were also very helpful. Not only did Dean Leary and June Trayah go out of their way to make available books from the library’s excellent collection, but Craig Chalone and Rebecca Gould actually brought some of them to my home after their working hours in the dead of a Vermont winter. Being seriously disabled, I could not pick them up myself. Ferd G. Hill of the Fletcher Free Library did me a similar kindness and managed to acquire several indispensable but difficult-to-find books through the interlibrary loan system for me. To all of these kind Vermonters, I owe my warmest gratitude. Finally, I wish to express my immense debt to Jane Greenwood, my editor at Cassell, for her generous support for the book, and for making it possible for me to go to a third volume. I also remember with fondness my former editor, Steve Cook, for his interest in and encouragement of the entire project.

Murray Bookchin Burlington, Vermont May 18, 1997