User:Mangiamelek

french revolution While Britain's colonies were working toward becoming the United States of America, France was suffering from economic crisis and on its way to its own revolution -- a revolution that would use some of the same language used by British liberals and the American revolutionists.

Between 1715 and 1771, French commerce had increased almost eight-fold. France was second only to Great Britain in trade. It was exporting sugar, coffee and indigo that had been developed in its Caribbean colonies. Transportation was improving. In the 1780s, for example, the 600 miles between Paris and Toulouse was only an eight-day journey, rather than the fifteen days it had taken in the 1760s. But the advance in commerce did not produce well-being for the common people. The population of France had grown to between 24 and 26 million - up from 19 million in 1700, without a concomitant growth in food production. Farmers around Paris consumed over 80 percent of what they grew, so if a harvest fell by around 10 percent, which was common, people went hungry. There was insufficient government planning and storage of grain for emergency shortages. Agriculture was three-quarters of the economy but it was backward compared to the agricultures of Britain and the United Netherlands, and it was still burdened by feudalistic arrangements. People suffered too with a decline in the 1780s in France's textile industry. The importation of British textiles, cheaper and of better quality than French textiles, created unemployment among France's spinners and weavers.

The city of Paris had a population of roughly 650,000, many of them getting by without regular jobs. Alongside the unemployed textile workers were people who sold second-hand goods or worked at odd jobs such as carrying water. They too were hurt by the rise of hard times. Paris had many who stayed alive by petty thievery or prostitution -- sometimes both. People were being buried everyday without ceremony in pauper's graves. And many of the living were hungry, in Paris and in other French cities.

France's government was in financial crisis. For years, royal ministers believed that more revenues were needed if France were to maintain its position in international affairs and take care of domestic affairs. Originally the kings of France paid the costs of rule from wealth produced on their own domains -- helped in emergencies from an assembly of people who granted the royal treasury tax revenues. But emergencies were now perpetual. During the Seven Years' War and during France's help for the American Revolution, the monarchy had fallen deeper in debt. The government was taxing common people regularly and paying half of its revenues to cover debts owed to aristocrats and other lenders. Louis XVI considered extending taxation to France's two privileged orders: the nobility and the Catholic Church. With this in mind, and for other reforms (such as the elimination of internal tariff barriers) the king's government, in February 1787, convened a consultative body of nobles and clergy called the Assembly of Notables. The nobles and clergy remained opposed to paying taxes, and, in May, the Assembly of Notables was dismissed. Plans were then laid to convene a larger consultative body, the Estates General, consisting of members of the Church (the First Estate), the nobility (the Second Estate) and all others (the Third Estate). Plans for the first meeting of the Estates General since 1614 were made for early 1789.

In July, 1788, a hailstorm destroyed crops. France had its worst harvest in forty years, and the winter of 1788-89 was severe. Getting no relief from their hunger, people rioted. The economy declined further. In Paris, construction workers were joining the ranks of the unemployed. People were being evicted from their rented homes. With bread more scarce, its price rose. People had been in the habit of eating mainly bread, and it now took most of the wages of those still working to obtain it. The Church was handing out bread and milk, and the king's economic minister, Jacques Necker, was doing what he could. He forbade the export of grain and launched a program to import food. This was with little success. Food was in short supply in Europe in general and frozen rivers and canals were hampering transport.

Political Reform The Estates General convened as scheduled, in May, 1789, at Versailles (pronounced ver-sEYE, as in the word eye), where the king and his court were established - twelve miles from Paris. Representing the Catholic Church were many ordinary parish priests. The nobles selected their representatives, many of them the kind of impoverished hereditary nobles not usually seen at court -- men who enjoyed wearing their elaborate garb while marching at the head of the procession in the opening ceremony. Half of the 1,200 delegates were mostly lawyers, representing their fellow commoners – the Third Estate. Each delegate had one vote. Traditionally the Church and nobles voted together, two votes against one vote for the Third Estate. The Church and nobles were united by family ties, prosperous nobles sending their sons into the upper echelons of the Church and into the military as commissioned officers.

In the meeting of the Estates General, delegates of the Third Estate complained that they represented 97 percent of the nation's population and should have more influence. They rebelled, breaking away and creating their own convention, which they called the "National Assembly." It was a challenge to the other two orders and to the authority of the king. The National Assembly was presuming to speak for the nation as a whole.

At work was the liberalism that had grown with the Enlightenment, a liberalism reinvigorated in prestige by the American Revolution. From the Estates General, liberal-minded clergy and nobility joined the National Assembly. Amid cheering at the National Assembly, nobles announced their willingness to give up their feudal rights. Prosperous and educated commoners with liberal ideas were also represented in the National Assembly -- a class that had risen with the rise of commerce. Members of the National Assembly wanted the creation of a parliamentary system similar to what the British had, and they swore not to disperse until a constitution had been written and ratified (a swearing to be known as the Tennis Court Oath).

Louis XVI was gentle by nature, but he mobilized his troops against the National Assembly and its supporters, ordering his army to surround Versailles and Paris. Then he vacillated, letting the first act of the revolution stand. Louis XVI was surrendering some of the power that for two hundred years had been thought of as absolute.

Fall of the Bastille In Paris, people had been blaming the old order, hoarders and greedy merchants or the rich in general for their troubles. The people of Paris welcomed news of the National Assembly's creation, and they hoped that it would end their hardship and hunger. On July 12, people in Paris saw evil at work in the dismissal of the king's finance minister, Jacques Necker. The king had accepted the advice of advisors and had replaced Necker with a baron named Breteuil. In response, people in Paris marched in the streets. Cavalry tried to disperse the demonstrators. Demonstrators threw stones and debris at the cavalry, and rumors spread that more troops were about to attack the city. Barricades were erected in the streets with the call for people to arm themselves. Crowds emptied gunshops. Soldiers joined the crowds and joined in the looting.

On July 14, to obtain gunpowder and more guns, a crowd of around 80,000 stormed an old fort in the city, the Bastille, and demanded surrender of the fortress. Those storming the Bastille killed a few of the 30 or so garrison soldiers defending it, and the attackers suffered 98 killed and 78 wounded. The crowd released the seven who had been prisoners in the Bastille. With a pocketknife, someone cut off the head of the leader of the garrison, and the head was paraded around on the end of a stick.

The Bastille had been a symbol of authority, and people in Paris saw themselves as having taken control of the city. The municipal authorities that King Louis had appointed were replaced by sympathizers. And the king's troops were replaced by a militia of armed people called the National Guard. The king, eager to maintain what he thought was his good standing with his subjects, gave in and endorsed the new order in Paris.

People were also rebelling outside of Paris. Most of France was rural: 80 percent of the population living in villages or hamlets of less than 2,000 people. Those who tilled the soil had not been suffering as much from hunger as people in the cities, but peasants had been unhappy with taxes, dues payments and other obligations to nobles, such as labor drafts to work on roads. Peasants were unhappy about the rise in rents in recent years (a rise due in part to an increase in population). In the countryside were also those too poor for tenant farming. There were people who had been surviving by home industry or labor at harvest time, people who had been living off public and private charity, stealing bread or pennies from charity boxes, and many of them were ready for revolution.

With rebellion in the countryside, peasants with property to protect were afraid of roving bands of vagrants. Rumors spread that the nobility was paying brigands to march against them. The rumored armies never materialized, but where life was hardest the peasants attacked more sucessful peasants, and they attacked the grand manor houses and castles of nobles, burned title deeds and searched for hoarded grain. Peasants believed that the days of paying taxes to nobles were over, and some tried to retrieve taxes they had recently paid in the form of grain. Nobles who resisted were sometimes killed. If the peasants could not find title deeds, they sometimes burned down the noble's home.

In towns, tax offices were attacked. Soldiers threw down their weapons, and about half of the municipalities experiencing risings came under new leadership that associated itself with the authority of the people's National Assembly, while wielding what power and influence they could. In other municipalities, revolutionary committees shared power with the town councils. And in some places, townsmen were appalled by attacks on nobles, and they did what they could to maintain order, including hanging those they considered brigands.

Delegates to the National Assembly were alarmed by the spreading violence. They responded with speeches about lifting the yoke that for centuries had weighed upon the peasants. On August 4, the National Assembly made the abolition of feudal privileges official. Nobles were prohibited from charging dues, from making people work on roads or from holding exclusive hunting rights. The National Assembly removed nobles as makers of law in what had been their areas of rule. Their courts were abolished. They were no longer exempt from paying taxes. And the National Assembly ended obligations to pay tithes to the Church.

On August 27, the National Assembly issued its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen -- the draft of which had been discussed with Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France. Rather than law, this was a statement of principles, the purpose of which was to educate and enhance love of liberty. The declaration spoke of man's natural right to liberty and right to resist oppression. It spoke of a right to property. Virtue and talent, it stated, should be the only requirements for public office. It claimed that all "men" should be equal before the law, that arbitrary arrests should be illegal, that people should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a court of law, and that there should be freedom of opinion concerning religion.

In 1780 Louis XVI had abolished torture as a means of getting people to confess to crimes. Discussion in the National Assembly moved from general principles to the details of a new constitution. The main issue was how powers would be divided between the king and elected representatives of the people -- including the question of the king having veto powers over legislation. Louis XVI was seen as an enlightened monarch. [note] The National Assembly had declared itself sovereign but was seeking the king's cooperation. Louis announced that he agreed with the "spirit" of the constitution, but, when he expressed his own ideas about specific points, newspapers in Paris supporting revolution saw the king's opinions as opposition. These newspapers spread animosity against the king. Deputies to the National Convention and the many who supported the revolution looked upon Louis with greater suspicion. The French Revolution was beginning to suffer from exaggeration, fear and an inability to work around disagreements.

Constitutional Monarchy Some royalty and nobles were fleeing to Austria, Russia or Britain. These were people who had bought lace, dresses and other goods, and, with orders down, unemployment began to rise among the women who made these goods. International trade was down. The harvests had failed for the second year in a row. Economic hardship and hunger remained for common people in France. Protestations had not increased the supply of bread. The Church was no longer giving food to the hungry. A rumor was being passed around that aristocrats were conspiring to prolong the hunger in order to bring the common people to their knees and block reforms.

At the royal palace in early October a banquet was held which turned into a demonstration of loyalty to the crown. The Queen, Marie-Antoinette, and her four-year-old son were toasted. After she left, someone, perhaps a little drunk, may have shouted "Down with the Assembly!" In Paris the following day, revolutionist newspapers described the banquet as an orgy that included insults to the revolution. Already annoyed by hunger and deprivation, people in Paris lost their temper. Another mob formed, 7000 strong, mostly women, armed with sticks, scythes and pikes. The mob marched the twelve miles to Versailles and they invaded the National Assembly, believing they could cajole the assembly into making bread available. They invaded the apartments of royalty, overwhelming and killing bodyguards. They shouted that they were going to cut off the queen's head and fry her liver. Marie-Antoinette fled through a secret passageway, and the mob cut her bed to ribbons. They hated the queen, seeing her as a wicked, defiant woman. They despised her because she was Austrian (a country that had been hostile to France). They believed the rumors that had been spread in the equivalent of today's supermarket tabloids, which accused her of homosexuality (considered a German vice) and of heterosexual affairs and orgies. [Eat cake, etc.]

The following day the mob took the king and queen and the National Assembly (defended by accompanying troops) back with them to Paris. The National Assembly was from then forward to hold its meetings in Paris, and the king and queen, their children and a few servants, were to live in the royal family's old Paris palace, at Tuileries, less splendid than the palace at Versailles and more exposed to the public.

The majority of delegates to the National Assembly felt themselves above and at odds with the Paris mobs. They outlawed, on pain of death, any "unofficial demonstrations." And people in Paris continued to suspect that deputies to the National Assembly were indifferent to their plight and as thinking of themselves as better than they.

The Constitution In Paris, the National Assembly continued to struggle to create a constitution, and it tried to create economic relief. In November it nationalized Church lands (ten percent of the land in France), claiming that it was retrieving land that belonged to the nation which the Church had been holding in trust. And in April, 1790, the National Assembly issued paper money, the assignat, backed by the value of these lands.

On July 14, people from across France gathered in Paris to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Ceremonies and declarations of loyalty to the revolution and to national solidarity took place. And nature was accommodating them. Better weather in 1790 made better harvests, bringing some relief, with many believing that God was siding with the revolution.

The National Assembly abolished tariff barriers within France -- which had been the moneymaking device of local nobility. And on March 2, 1791, the National Assembly abolished trade guilds and corporations, believing they were vestiges of a society based on privilege. This included employers' associations, and laborers now felt free to press for higher wages. On June 14, the National Assembly intervened and prohibited all organizations of workers and collective worker actions. They forbade local authorities to accept representations from any worker group or to offer employment to a member of any such group.

The National Assembly, meanwhile, was moving to put all religion under its authority. Deputies to the National Assembly were mostly Christians. They saw the message of Jesus supporting liberty, tolerance and against despotism. In their opinion the revolution they were making conformed to Christian principles. They believed, as had Voltaire, that the masses needed religion, that religion was a civilizing force and that the Gospels had a moral and humanistic value. They believed there was no conflict between reason and religion, that both were directed toward human welfare and happiness. They also favored putting organized religion under the control of the revolution. They wanted a church for the nation that was less opulent than the Catholic Church. They wanted the government to oversee the elections of pastors and bishops, and they wanted clergymen to swear loyalty to this plan. About half of the clergy refused. In places across the country, violence broke out between supporters of the revolution and defenders of the Church. In March, 1791, Pope Pius VI damned the attempt to apply state authority over the Church. Louis XVI was a devout Catholic, and he was troubled by it all. More suspicion was heaped upon him by the public, and he was accused of sheltering priests who had refused to take the oath of loyalty to the state. In April, Louis wanted to perform his annual Easter devotion at Saint-Cloud, ten miles west of Paris, but a mob surrounded his carriage and prevented his departure. In June, 1791, he wrote a note denouncing the revolution and fled with his family, disguised as servants. He was caught about 20 kilometers from the border of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and returned to Tuileries. The king was now more obviously a prisoner, and the National Assembly suspended his official powers.

In July, the National Assembly split over whether the king should be absolved for his attempt to flee. The following day, a Parisian mob, wanting to save France from a traitor-king, rioted. The National Guard, led by Lafayette (of American Revolution fame), dispersed the demonstration by firing into it, striking about sixty of the demonstrators, and this convinced people in Paris that deputies to the National Assembly despised ordinary people.

However much deputies to the National Assembly were displeased by Louis XVI, they wanted a constitutional monarchy. They remained afraid of the masses, believing that extending the revolution would lead to complete democracy and demands for the redistribution of property and sharing of property. In August the deputies altered a number of clauses in the constitution, adding protections for property owners.

The constitution was completed on September 3 and sent to the king for acceptance. The constitution confirmed the existence of an hereditary monarchy with limited veto powers:the king could temporarily stall legislation with his veto, but he could not veto any legislation permanently. The king was to have no control over the army, no authority over local governments, and he could send no representatives to serve in parliament. There was to be a single legislative house -- rather than two houses as in the United States. All judges were to be elected, and voting was to be by all who paid taxes equivalent to three days wages or more. The constitution repeated some of what was said in the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens: all men were said to be born with equal rights, and everyone was said to be free to speak, write or print his opinions provided he did not abuse this privilege. And the amount of taxes that a person paid was to be based on the amount of wealth he possessed.

The king gave his acceptance on September 13. Amid widespread rejoicing, the revolution appeared complete. Public opinion was largely on the revolution's side, but aggravations had been created by government trying to exercise authority over religion. And soon the revolution would damage itself by overreaction.

Republic, War and Terror In accordance with the constitution, the National Assembly disbanded itself. Power passed to a newly elected Legislative Assembly (parliament), 745 deputies strong -- mostly youthful lawyers of moderate wealth. Amnesty was offered those who had fled the revolution, and, on October 15, King Louis asked émigrés to return to help make the constitution work. Improved relations followed between the Louis XVI and the public. But it did not last long.

Few émigrés returned. Instead, they continued expressing their hostility toward the revolution. The Legislative Assembly debated and then voted in favor of declaring that all émigrés were plotting against the revolution. An ultimatum was sent to Austria, demanding the expulsion of those Frenchmen hostile to the revolution, and the Legislative Assembly declared that those who did not return by January 1, 1792, would be considered guilty of a capital crime. Accommodating public opinion and the Legislative Assembly, the king came to parliament in December and announced an ultimatum to the elector of Trier (in the German Rhineland), a demand that the elector put an end to hostile émigré activity in his realm. And the delegates gave King Louis long applause.

Some deputies were optimistic about sending troops into neighboring countries, believing that people there would be eager for liberation in the form of French-style political and social changes. With support of local peoples, they believed, defeat of old-world monarchs by French soldiers would be easy. Adding to the support for war were military men, including Lafayette, who thought that war would reinvigorate the army. The leading spokesman for those in the Convention favoring war, Jacques Brissot, had his mind not on fraternity but on weeding out terrorists. Brissot was a passionate speaker who represented the educated middleclass and the interests of the provinces over Paris. He had been impressed by the American Revolution. He was absolutist in his approach to loyalty to the French Revolution. The war, he believed, would help expose traitors.

The brother of Marie-Antoinette, Leopold II of Austria (who was also the Holy Roman Emperor) had hoped to avoid war with France, but he had also stated his readiness to defend Louis XVI and was now ready to defend Trier. France could easily have avoided war with Leopold, but on April 20, 1792, France declared war and launched an offensive into the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium).

The French offensive fell apart when it met its first resistance, and patriotic enthusiasm for the offensive turned into a search for scapegoats. More intense now was the belief that France and the revolution had to be defended and enemies of the revolution defeated. It was goodbye to the kind of reconciliation that was being applied in the United States regarding former loyalists. France's Legislative Assembly rapidly passed laws to combat treason. All foreigners were to be under surveillance. Priests who had not taken an oath to the state were suspected of disloyalty and to be deported, and on May 29, the king's special bodyguard was disbanded and replaced by National Guardsmen thought to be loyal to the revolution.

In a letter to Lafayette, dated June 16, Thomas Jefferson spoke of his support for France and its "exterminating the monster aristocracy," prefacing this with "May heaven favor your cause."

Amid the patriotic fervor, volunteers were joining the military, and from the provinces they passed through Paris, fraternizing with the revolutionary Parisians and singing patriotic songs, including the Marseillaise -- later to be the revolution's anthem.

Believing that King Louis was insufficiently loyal to the revolution, on June 20 a mob invaded his palace, threatened and humiliated him but left him physically unharmed. Then in July the commander of the Prussian-Austrian army, the Duke of Brunswick, threatened violent punishment if the Parisians were disobedient toward Louis. This support for the king from abroad offended the Legislative Assembly, and some of them called for the king's removal. A mob of several thousand Parisians sacked the king's palace and killed a few of the king's Swiss guards. Louis escaped, but the Legislative Assembly gave in to the passions of the Parisians, voted for the removal of all the king's powers and declared him a prisoner. France was to be a republic. Newspaper support for the monarchy was prohibited. And it was decided that the constitution of 1789 had to be replaced by a constitution for a republic.

European monarchies withdrew their ambassadors from Paris, while the administration of George Washington also considered withdrawing. Washington's friend, Lafayette, who had been the commander of the National Guard in Paris, was hostile to development of the new radicalism in Paris, and the Legislative Assembly passed a decree of impeachment against him. Lafayette -- an American as well as French citizen - fled northward, hoping to reach the United States by way of the United Netherlands, but he was captured by Germans hostile to the French and put in an Austrian prison.

Responding to passions for action against treason, in August the Legislative Assembly set up a Revolutionary Tribunal. Legal guarantees in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were superseded by what was considered emergency measures. There was to be no appeal of sentences handed down by the tribunal - sentences that were frequently death by a new mechanical device called the guillotine.

Military Victories and the Beheading of Louis XVI Prussia had joined the war against France in May, and, on August 23, 1792, the Prussians captured Longwy, just inside France and south of the Austrian Netherlands border. On September 2 the Prussians captured Verdun, 50 kilometers to the southwest. Rumors spread that nobles and priests were plotting with the invaders. Parisians went on a five-day rampage, to monasteries and from prison to prison, killing political prisoners, priests and nobles, as they went. And the dead were counted at around 1,500.

The Legislative Assembly had been the creation of the constitution of 1789, and, with the constitution and its monarchism now dead, the Legislative Assembly voted itself out of existence, and elections were held for a new governing body: the National Convention. Only 7.5 percent of the electorate voted.

Deputies of the National Convention debated issues concerning a new constitution and pursued the nation's war effort. A great number of volunteers were mobilized, and, on September 20, France's regular army artillerists won one of the great battles of the decade by blowing to bits an advancing Prussian and Austrian force, 50 kilometers west of Verdun, at Valmy. The following day, a happy National Convention declared France to be a republic.

Following their defeat at Valmy, the invaders withdrew from France. In late September, the French advanced in the southwest, occupying the coastal town of Nice (pronounced neece) -- a town that had been under Sardinian rule. The French pursued the Austrians into the Netherlands, and on November 6 a force of 45,000 French defeated an army of 13,000 Austrians near Jemappes, 50 kilometers southwest of Brussels. Then on November 14 the French overran Brussels. By now the French had annexed the Kingdom of Savoy, whose king had been hostile to the revolution. (The year before, France had annexed Avignon.) And on December 2 the French captured the German city of Frankfurt.

These victories calmed France, but on December 11 the trial of Louis XVI began. Some in the National Convention joined with the Parisians in their belief that the death of the king would advance the revolution. Louis XVI, once known to his people as Louis the Beneficent was now called Louis the Last. Tom Paine, respected in France for his role in the American Revolution, was back in France and had been chosen to be a member of the National Convention, and he voted against execution, seeing no point in it and favoring exile for the king to the United States. On January 20, 1793, the National Convention voted 380 to 310 in favor of execution, and the following day, in public in downtown Paris, Louis climbed the wooden stairs to the guillotine, and with calm and dignity he submitted to his execution.

France against the Rest of Europe Much of Europe outside France was revulsed by the execution of Louis XVI. Britain joined Holland, Spain, Russia, Sardinia, Naples, Portugal, Prussia and Austria in an alliance against France, with small Germans states eager to give soldiers, for a price, to the British. France's National Convention declared war on Great Britain and Holland. There were food shortages again, and food riots. French money, the assignat, plunged in value and prices skyrocketed.

To meet the challenge from abroad, the National Convention, on February 24, 1793, decreed military conscription, which was met with hostility in places outside Paris. On March 1, the Austrians began an offensive in the Netherlands (Belgium), throwing back the French. In the United States, Thomas Jefferson threw his support to France, Alexander Hamilton gave his support to England, and President George Washington chose neutrality -- the proclamation of neutrality to be issued on March 4. Among peasants in western France, around the area called Vendee, an anti-draft rebellion arose and grew in intensity, and the new rebels proclaimed a war to restore the monarchy and the Church.

In Paris the desire to strike at the revolution's enemies intensified. Among deputies the renewed reverses brought fear of more massacres like those of the previous year. Taking the side of moderation were the followers of Brissot (also called the Girondin). They accused the more radical deputies (called Montagnards) of having encouraged the earlier prison massacres. Divisions within the Conventions were widening, with Parisians most hostile toward the Girondin.

The general who had led the victories against the Austrians and Prussians, the year before, General Dumouriez, had been in sympathy with the moderates in Paris. He disliked the more radical deputies and wanted to re-establish the constitution of 1791. He failed in his attempt to enlist his forces to march on Paris. On April 5, under threat from the convention, he fled to the Austrians. The day after his defection the National Convention created the Committee of Public Safety, a body of twelve, with emergency, or dictatorial, powers. Having been associated with Dumouriez, the Girondists came under greater suspicion. The Girondists accused their more radical colleagues of joining with the people of Paris to purge the Convention.

Parisian activists believed that the Convention had to be cleansed of moderates. Moderation was seen as counter-revolutionary and traitorous. Suspicion was a patriotic duty, and anger was a virtue. The "people" of Paris stormed the convention. Deputies sided with the mob, some perhaps from fear. The National Convention voted in favor of expelling 31 moderates, who were charged with treason and arrested. This shifted the National Convention further to the Left. Outside Paris, various governments withdrew recognition from the purged Convention. On June 10, 1793, the National Convention passed a law that deprived the accused of counsel and the calling of witnesses. And, to make prosecution easier, juries were allowed to convict on the basis of rumor.

On June 24 the National Convention approved its new republican constitution. The new constitution proclaimed the people's right to employment and to an education. It created universal manhood suffrage, and it declared the right to insurrection against a government that was violating the "rights of the people." A nation referendum on the new constitution was to be held on August 4.

There was to be no such national referendum. Elsewhere in France, moderates had turned against Paris and were demanding decentralized government. By July only the area around Paris was firmly under the control of the National Convention. From Lyon (France's second largest city) and from Marseille came accusations that the National Convention had become puppets of the Paris mob. Some had spoken of raising an army to march on Paris, but this was not to happen, as various localities remained weakened by a lack of unity.

On July 13, an admirer of the bourgeois (middleclass) revolutionaries (the moderate Girondists), Charlotte Corday, assassinated one of the more prominent of the radical revolutionaries, Jean Paul Marat, a man who believed in the redistribution of wealth, a dictatorship representing the poor, and was a passionate supporter of terror. Charlotte Corday believed that in killing Marat she was saving the revolution. Instead, it intensified the passions and fears of the more radical members of the National Convention (the Montagnards), now less inclined to compromise.

In August, the Committee of Public Safety was pursuing its aim of eliminating all counterrevolutionary elements within France, raising new armies, and making sure that food was supplied to the armies and cities. The economy was put on wartime controls. Wages were regulated. Hoarding was now a capital offense. Price controls were created that left retailers little or no profit. Some would soon stop ordering more goods, putting themselves and wholesalers out of business. Ration cards were distributed to assure that limited supplies, including bread, were shared fairly. White bread and pastries were outlawed in favor of making more of the nutritious brown bread. An illegal (black) market developed in the sale of wood, meat, eggs, butter and vegetables. In market places, women who complained of prices that were higher than the law were cowed by market women who showered insults and vulgarities upon them. All horses and public buildings were drafted into the war effort. Workshops were compelled to make arms and munitions and told when their orders were to be completed. All unmarried men capable of bearing arms were subject to the draft.

On August 27, citizens of Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast, expressed their hostility to the central government by giving control of their harbor, arsenal and French ships to a Spanish and British military force. Paris sent troops to Toulon in early September and retook the city. Mobilization was paying off for Paris, and French ground forces forced the British to withdraw from Dunkirk.

These successes were followed on September 5 by an armed mob surrounding the National Convention and demanding more arrests. The deputies accommodated them, announcing that terror was "the order of the day." The deputies created a new force: six thousand men, 1,200 artillery pieces and guillotines-on-wheels, which went into the countryside in search of hoarders, spies and counter-revolutionary priests.

On October 3, seventy-three deputies of the National Convention were considered not revolutionary enough. They had not voted against the expulsion of the 31 moderates earlier in the year and were accused of conspiring against the French people. One of them, Thomas Paine, was spared because he was not French. Paine was imprisoned. The search for traitors found some others in Paris, and persons were arrested for violating price controls. People were tried in batches and sent to the guillotine the same day. On October 16, Marie-Antoinette, who had been languishing in prison and charged with treason, was guillotined. From October through December, 177 persons were executed in Paris.

The Terror Peaks By the end of the year the revolts outside Paris were largely crushed, with a lot of bloodshed. In the city of Lyon, 1,800 were sentenced to death. In Marseille and Bordeaux, hundreds were executed. The revolutionaries imprisoned thousands, and many of the imprisoned were to die between the first of the year and early 1795.

France's army was winning victories again outside France, their large numbers enhancing their morale. France's generals were using mass attacks at bayonet point to overwhelm their enemy. Conscription was changing warfare. The French had the first citizen's army in 2000 years, and a massive army of conscripts was beginning to show its superiority over smaller professional armies. By the spring of 1794 the French were victorious on all fronts.

In Paris the terror continued. Differences of opinion existed also among the radicals of the National Convention. One of the prominent members of the National Convention, and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, was the thirty-six year-old Maximilien de Robespierre, a former lawyer active in the revolution since having been chosen as a delegate for the Third Estate back in early 1789. Robespierre had urged the emancipation of Jews and slaves and the abolition of the death penalty, and in late 1791 and early 1792 he had been opposed to France going to war. He had distrusted the wisdom of the Parisian mobs and had often sided with moderation, but when the mob had begun exercising more power over government he had swung to their side, deciding that they represented the real engine of revolution.

Robespierre was devoted to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like Rousseau, he believed in a personal god, in divine providence and the immortality of the soul, and, like Rousseau, he saw morality and virtue as rising from the faith and hope of religious people. Robespierre described the revolution as grounded in virtue. He found fault with those in the convention associated with Jacques René Hébert. He identified them as atheists and anti-Christians. Robespierre saw anyone who did not believe in a Supreme Being as subversive, and he saw atheism as corrosive, morally offensive and a useless provocation against the sensibilities of common people. Hébert led a faction in the Convention that rivaled Robespierre's identification with the will of the Paris mob. Robespierre joined others on the Committee of Public Safety in judging the Hébertists as anarchists guilty of conspiracy and of collusion with foreign powers, and on March 24, Hébert and nineteen of his colleagues were guillotined.

Robespierre than came into conflict with another prominent deputy, Georges Jacques Danton. Initially Danton supported executing suspected enemies of the revolution, but in 1793 he had not wanted a repeat of the massacres of 1792, and he was having second thoughts about continuing the war. His fellow deputies spoke of his opposition to the terror as encouraging those opposed to the revolution. Danton was an outstanding orator, and he still had a following among some of the deputies. The Committee of Public Safety feared that he might be able to rally the convention against their positions. Robespierre disliked Danton. Danton rejected his talk of virtue, and Robespierre asked how a man "with so little notion of morality ever became a champion of freedom." [note]

Voices of the Revolution, edited by Peter Vansittart, 1989, p.278. On March 29, Danton and a few of his allies were arrested. A phony trial was conducted, the judge himself fearing accusations against him by the Committee of Public Safety. Danton and his friends were accused of conspiring against the French people, of dealings with the Girondists, of attempting to restore the monarchy, embezzling state funds and other charges. They were guillotined on April 5.

Robespierre's idea of virtue was devotion to the revolution, exemplified by those volunteering to risk their lives by joining the military. He continued his celebration of the Supreme Being and acknowledgment of the immortality of the soul -- to the applause of the Convention. He was one of those who thought in absolutes and was soon to say that he recognized only two parties: "virtuous citizens and bad citizens." By his fellow deputies he was called the incorruptible because he was uninterested in money and could not be bought. Robespierre appeared to be giving his all to the welfare of the revolution, and whatever he did he justified in the name of serving France.

Robespierre was elected president of the National Convention, but by the other deputies he was not really popular or well liked. And, now that they had been killing each other, more were asking themselves about the need for limits - while Robespierre was apparently interested in demonstrating his certainty that the terror was still the right thing to do.

A law passed by the National Convention on June 10, 1794 gave Robespierre the power to indict anyone on the flimsiest of charges. No witnesses were to be allowed. Court proceedings were reduced to mere condemnations. Between June 12 and July 28, 1285 persons were guillotined in Paris -- the greatest period of work for the city's executioners.

In late July, Robespierre announced to the Convention that more cleansing was to come, without saying whom the targets were to be. He spoke of having "trembled" lest he be "soiled by the impure neighborhood of wicked men." The Convention held its applause. Delegates feared their own imperfections, or perceived imperfections, and that they might be targeted. The following day, when Robespierre rose to speak again to the deputies they howled him down. Robespierre responded with demands that he be allowed to speak. Instead, the deputies voted overwhelmingly that he and several of his supported be arrested. He was charged with crimes against the republic. Robespierre and his supporters escaped and tried to rally Parisians to their support. That night there were marches and counter marches. In an exchange of gunfire, Robespierre received a shot to his jaw, and his jaw was tied shut with a bandage made from a torn sheet. His speaking days were over. Those with guns who opposed Robespierre triumphed, and the following day, July 28, 1794, it was the turn of Robespierre and 21 of his associates to have their heads chopped off by the guillotine.

A New Mood and New Constitution Aside from the execution of Robespierre and his 21 associates, the revolution was worse off now than it had been before the attempt to nationalize religion, or before the decision to strike against counter-revolutionary émigrés and go to war, or before the execution of the king. None of these had brought any visible benefit to the revolution. By mid-1794 the revolution had more enemies than it had had at the end of the first year of the revolution, 1789. Many had died, and the war had further damaged the nation's economy. The winter of 1794-95 was harsh again. The economy remained depressed. Trade through such ports as Marseille and Bordeaux remained dramatically diminished.

Production methods in agriculture were still backward. Larger farms -- Britain's advantage in agriculture -- were not developing. The revolution left the peasants unencumbered by the complex rights to lands that had burdened them in former times, and the revolution had given landowners control over their village councils and control over agricultural policies, taking these away from feudal lords (seignoirs), but it would be many years before this would benefit agricultural development in France -- which would come with water control projects.

Following the execution of Robespierre, the surviving deputies of the National Convention felt obliged to dismantle the laws that had given free reign to the terror. And many of those who were still in prison as a result of these laws were released, including Thomas Paine in November, 1794. Those deputies surviving the terror wanted order and stability.

In December, the Convention repealed wage and price controls -- the policy that had been advocated by Parisian radicals. With the lifting of price controls the value of the country's paper money (the assignat) collapsed, producing skyrocketing prices for food. The River Seine froze, cutting Paris off from supplies of grain and fire wood. In March, 1795, the National Convention was still rationing bread, but supplies of grain were running out. Hunger produced more rioting in Paris. The rioting extended into May, when a mob invaded the National Convention again, demanding bread and killing one of the deputies, whose head was put on a pike. Some of the Leftist deputies went over to the side of the mob, but the Convention as a whole resisted and was rescued by the army. The turmoil in Paris lasted three days, ending with the arrest of thousands. Many of the activists had their weapons taken away, and around twenty leaders were executed. The six deputies who had sided with the demonstrators were tried and given a sentence of death, and four of them committed suicide.

The rebel movement in Paris felt defeated. Many believed the revolution a failure. Women in Paris began turning to their religious heritage. In the countryside, communities were searching for priests to perform mass. Among the poor, nostalgia was developing for the good old days when the king looked out for the basic needs of his subjects. Outside of Paris, people released from prison and those who had lost friends and family during the terror were demanding and initiating revenge against those who had terrorized them. Former terrorists were imprisoned, and a few were killed in what was called the White Terror, which had lasted through May and June of 1795.

A shortage of food existed also in the army, and the government was alarmed over a rebellion that occurred among French troops in the Austrian Netherlands. The National Convention lumped terror from the right with terror from the left and campaigned for unity and obedience to the Convention, and the National Convention managed to maintain the loyalty of the majority in the army.

Leaders of the rebellion that had been taking place in the Vendée since 1791 had contacted the British and French émigrés in Britain, and, on June 27, the British continued their war against the French by landing an army of 4,500 Frenchmen at Quiberon. By late July the invasion was defeated. A law required the execution of any émigré bearing arms, and 748 émigré officers were put to death. Rebellion in Brittany and the Vendée against the government continued into 1796 but would finally end in the summer of that year.

Meanwhile, in June, 1795, the ten-year-old son of Louis XVI had died while in prison. One of the brothers of Louis XVI, the Comte de Provence, in exile in Italy, proclaimed himself heir to the throne, with the title Louis XVIII.

A New Constitution People with substantial wealth were beginning to display their affluence again. People were addressing each other as "mister" (monsieur) again, rather than as "citizen." Deputies to the National Convention responded to what had been mob excesses by asserting that the most worthy people were those who owned property. The constitution that the deputies created was prefaced with a declaration of the rights and duties of man and citizen, but it excluded the masses from political power.

The new constitution supported property rights, but properties confiscated from the Church and from émigrés were not to be returned. The constitution called for a bicameral legislature -- as in England and the United States -- which was believed more stable than a one-house legislature. Executive power was placed in what was called the Directory, consisting of five persons elected by the legislators. A referendum was held to approve the new constitution. Electoral assemblies voted favorably.

The National Convention had a few weeks of power before the new constitution was to go into effect, and to protect themselves and republicanism they passed a law requiring that two-thirds of those elected to the new government had to be former members of their National Convention. Conservatives rebelled against this rule and tried to take over the government by force. General Napoleon Bonaparte was put in charge of crushing the uprising. He used his artillery against the rebels, and hundreds were killed.

On October 26, 1795, the National Convention dissolved itself and a new republican government took power. A new guard was organized in Paris, loyal to the government rather than thought of as a people's army. To signify the change in mood and the end of terror, the Place de La Revolution - where around 2800, including Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and Danton, had been guillotined -- was renamed, eventually to be called the Place de La Concorde. And Napoleon Bonaparte was named commander-in-chief of all armies within the boundaries of France.

General Napoleon Bonaparte The winter of 1795-96 was the worst of the winters since the beginning of the revolution.

The Directory supported one of the benefits of the revolution: an advance in science and education. The old academies that had been dominated by the aristocracy were being replaced by new institutions of research and learning. New medical schools were developing, and schools for teachers and engineers, with recruitment based on merit rather than class privilege. Paris was on its way toward becoming the world center in science and medicine well into the nineteenth century.

In 1796 the Directory crushed a new communist movement led by Gracchus Babeuf. In Paris, Babeuf had started a newspaper called The Tribune of the People and had quickly acquired a following. He claimed that equality among men would not be achieved until property was abolished, and he advocated agrarian communism. Rather than the kind of popular rising against the government that had failed in 1794, he had been looking forward to an armed coup by an elite few. Instead, in 1796, he was guillotined.

Financially, the government was still bankrupt. But economically the Directory was benefiting from the country's conquests abroad. The war had been going well for France. The Austrian Netherlands had been annexed. The French had conquered the United Netherlands. Prussia had signed a peace treaty with France in April, 1795 -- Prussia having turned its interest in the direction of Poland, hoping to limit Russian expansion there. And by now France had signed a peace treaty with Spain. In the spring of 1796, French armies were pushing through the Holy Roman Empire, and Napoleon Bonaparte was given command of an army directed against the Austrians and Piedmont. Napoleon was an exceptional commander. He knew how to rally his ragged and hungry troops, telling them he would lead them to the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces and opulent towns, he told them, would be at their disposal. There, he said, "you will find honor, riches and glory." The Austrian and Piedmont armies outnumbered Napoleon's army, 52,000 to 32,000, but the Austrian and Piedmont armies were scattered, divided in purpose and slow, while Napoleon's army was concentrated and following Napoleon's singular strategy. Napoleon, moreover, was a man unusual in capacity for details, and a man unafraid of danger. By using his army economically and concentrating his attacks at critical places and critical times, within fifteen days he won six victories, captured 55 artillery pieces, and conquered what he told his troops was "the richest parts of Piedmont." Napoleon chased the Austrians out of Milan and entered that city on May 15, 1796. By January 1797 he had won more great battles, the last one at Rivoli on January 14. Napoleon's victories cheered the French people, and his name was being spoken across Europe.

Large armies were living off of the lands they occupied and reducing unemployment at home. In February, 1797, the assignat was abandoned in favor of metallic currency, and the Directory had begun balancing its financial books by the taxes and other wealth it was taking from conquered territories, including taxes that Napoleon was levying in areas he had conquered.

Politically, however, the Directory ran into trouble. The first elections for seats in parliament, held in April, 1797, did not have the requirements involved in the selection of deputies in 1795. Conservatives hostile to the war and to the Directory won a substantial number of seats. During the months that followed, deputies to the new parliament argued whether it was best to continue with a republican constitution or to return to a constitutional monarchy. Two of the five members of the Directory sided with the conservatives. The three remaining members of the Directory engineered a coup to save the republic, but the Directory crippled its political legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had conquered Venice and had been expanding against the Austrians. The Austrians had sued for peace and, in October, 1797, Napoleon, acting on his own, had signed a treaty with them, giving Austria rule over Venice. The Venetian Republic was dead. Napoleon's troops pulled out of Venice in January, 1798, and behind them arrived Austrian troops.

Meanwhile, a French army had conquered Rome, and, in December, the French took the city of Naples, 180 kilometers to the south of Rome. The French were raiding churches and palaces in Italy, confiscating art treasures and sending them back to France, helping the Directory financially.

Napoleon's campaigning in northern Italy over, in May, 1798, he set sail from France for Egypt, with a plan to strike at Britain by cutting off its trade route to India. On the way, he conquered the island of Malta -- a hundred kilometers south of the heel of the Italian boot. On July 1 he arrived in Egypt to do battle against its Mameluk rulers, and on July 21 he defeated an army of some 40,000 at the Battle of the Pyramids. Then on August 1, a British naval force, led by Admiral Horatio Nelson, smashed the French navy at anchor at Abu Qir bay, near Alexandria, Egypt -- the French losing 6,200 men as casualties and prisoners. The British were jubilant and encouraged, and in the last half of 1798, Austria, Russia and Turkey, also encouraged by the British victory at Abu Qir, joined Britain in a new coalition against France.

Beginning in March, 1799, the allies began pushing the French out of Italy. Only Napoleon in Egypt was still winning battles. The south of France appeared vulnerable to invasion, and the government in Paris was in crisis. Its Executive Directory was under a prolonged and vociferous attack from its assembly deputies. There was not the balance of powers that existed in Britain and the United States, and the new constitution of 1795 had not been working. The Directory was ruling more-or-less dictatorially and still trying to hold on to power. Leftists in the Assembly were still much weaker than were centrists, but they were loud in blaming greed and corruption of members of the Directory for insufficient supplies reaching the military and for the military defeats. Military conscription was still creating opposition to the government. On August 15, British and Russian forces landed in the United Netherlands, and the Dutch fleet joined them against France.

In France, monarchists were rising in revolt in expectation of the arrival of the liberating armies fighting revolutionary France. In August, monarchists rose around Toulouse. Around Bordeaux, fighting created perhaps as many as 4,000 casualties. In mid-September, an estimated 3,000 monarchists ransacked the town of Le Mans, looking for arms and supplies. And a monarchist army briefly occupied the town of Nantes.

In October, Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and, without permission from the Directory, returned to France. His six-day journey across the country to Paris was filled with local officials greeting him with speeches and jubilant crowds of thousands flocking to get a glimpse of him. Napoleon was the country's only undefeated general. He was a hero who had helped straighten out matters in Paris in 1795 and in 1797, and there was hope that he would now put an end to the squabbling and crisis in Paris and soon enough to save the endangered nation.

In Paris, one member of the Directory, Emmanuel Sieyès, joined with others in a conspiracy with Napoleon. In 1789, Sieyès had written a pamphlet advocating rule by the entire people. Recently his motto had become "confidence from below, authority from above." In the guise of an emergency to save France from a leftist coup, the creation of a new constitution was announced. The Directory was replaced by a three-man provisional government, one of whom was Sieyès and another Napoleon, and a committee of 50 deputies was created to change the constitution. In December a plebiscite overwhelmingly approved the new constitution. The Roman Republic of ancient times had had two consuls to avoid any one man from having too much power. France was to have three consuls, but one of them was to be the First Consul -- Napoleon's new title. According to the constitution it was the First Consul's duty to appoint ministers, generals and civil servants. There was to be little in balance of powers after Napoleon took office, on December 25 -- while the war that France's revolutionaries had started in 1792 continued.