The Radical Revolution

* The radical actors

- The Paris Mob

-> working class and poor Parisians and city dwellers

-> hated the king, nationalistic against enemies, wanted social justice

- The Jacobin Clubs

-> a cross between Elks Club and a political party

-> organized group of educated men with similar ideals

-> lawyers, bourgeoisie, tradesmen

* The pressures towards radicalization

- war, fear of led French to come together and fear internal enemies

-> king and nobles the obvious targets

-> the new CITIZEN ARMY acted as a school

=> showed people they could work together

=> taught equality

=> similar mechanism to the Greek phalanx

-> allowed the emergency dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety

=> these men were radical and willing to use power for more than just defense of

country

=> Robespierre, Marat, and Danton key early leaders

- poverty

-> economic dislocation caused by bad harvests and revolution had hammered standards of living

-> anyone with money or goods to confiscate becomes a target

=> the nobility and the Church

* Radical Projects

- social violence

-> Marat’s newspaper calling out mob violence

=> naming “traitors,” hoarders, and “enemies of the people”

=> mob responds by attacking targets in the streets and sacking their homes

=> being Marat’s enemy can end you swinging by the neck from a lamp-post

-> mob violence also occurring unbidden

=> walking the street in rich clothes dangerous

=> sporadic food riots

-> Sept.4/5, 1793, “Terror is the order of the day”

=> enemies of the Revolution will be sought and

guillotined

=> Danton coins the phrase

=> Escalating ‘trials’ where individuals receive sketchy rapid justice

+> C. of Pub. Safety justifies lack of due process as a necessary condition in the

dangerous time of Revolution

=> first targets are nobility, then quickly becomes anyone who disturbs the

Committee of Public Safety

=> executions do push the Revolution forward to equalization

-> the guillotine as the great social equalizer, the national razor

=> enemies of the Revolution cut off

=> all die in the same democratic way, king to beggars

- The Republic of Virtue

-> changing the social climate

=> the royalty taken off the face cards to show republican virtue

=> the calendar reorganized to end affiliation with Church and Roman emperors

and to show rationalism

=> Marie Antoinette executed for being a noble

=> slavery outlawed as immoral

+> Haitian blacks in the Convention as reps

=> universal suffrage, all men vote

=> women NOT given the right to vote

+> FRATERNAL virtue, brotherhood

-> Dechristianization movement

=> France now to worship republican virtue

+> the cult of the Supreme Being

=> result of radicals’ frustration with a Church that they saw as elitist and anti-

revolution

=> the Comm. of Pub. Safety leaders are not Christians, and they attempt to drag

France to a new ‘secular humanism’

+> significant popular support in urban France

+> rural France (peasants) increasingly alienated from the Revolution

-> economic changes

=> expropriations from executed enemies brings cash

=> price controls set on bread and staples to help poor

* The Terror

- assassination of Marat

-> destroying people’s lives from his bath tub

-> Chalotte Corday, a supporter of another Revolutionary faction stabs him to death

in his bath tub

=> look at the picture on p.583

- the violence of the C. of P. S.’s “Terror is the Order of the Day” spins out of control

-> 3,000 people dead in Paris, 40,000 altogether

-> peasant uprisings against the Revolution put down heavily

=> the countryside has left the Revolution

-> a cycle of paranoia develops

=> like under Caligula

=> inform on them before they inform on you

=> violence creates conspiracy, which calls violence

-> Danton and friends are executed when they attempt to reign in the Revolution

=> Robespierre claims that the Terror is an end in itself

+> purification through surgical violence

- Terror self-destructs

-> eventually, Robespierre seen as dangerous even by his friends

=> on July 27, he is denounced in Natonal Convention

=> beheaded the next day