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19, 584-593
In Paris, the local government was controlled by the Commune, which
drew a number of its leaders from the city’s artisans and shopkeepers.
• Favored radical change and put constant pressure on the
National Convention, pushing it to ever more radical positions.
• Organized a demonstration, invaded the National Convention
and forced the arrest of, and execution of the leading
Girondins, thereby leaving the Mountain in control of the
Convention.
The National Convention itself still did not rule all of France.
• The authority of the convention was repudiated in western
France by peasants who revolted against the new military draft.
o The Vendean rebellion soon escalated into a full-blown
counterrevolutionary appeal.
o Foreign Crisis
Early 1793: much of Europe – an informal coalition of Austria,
Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Britain, and the Dutch Republic – was pitted
against France.
Carried away by initial success the French welcomed the struggle.
• Grossly overextended, the French armies began to experience
reverses, and by late spring some members of the anti-French
coalition were poised for an invasion of France.
o If they succeeded, both the Revolution and the
revolutionaries would be destroyed and the old regime
reestablished.
The National Convention became one of curbing anarchy and
counterrevolution at home while attempting to win the war by a
vigorous mobilization of the people.
• To administer the government, the convention gave broad
powers to an executive committee known as the Committee of
Public Safety, which was dominated by the Danton.
o For the next twelve months, virtually the same 12
members were reelected and gave the country the
leadership it needed to weather the domestic and
foreign crises of 1793.
o One of the most important members was Maximilien
Robespierre.
A small town lawyer who had moved to Paris as
a member of the Estates-General.
He was dedicated to using power to benefit the
people, whom he loved in the abstract though
not on a one-to-one basis.
o A Nation in Arms
To meet the foreign crisis and save the Republic from its foreign
enemies, the Committee of Public Safety decreed a universal
mobilization of the nation on August 23, 1793.
12/1-2 Radical Revolution to Napoleon Ch. 19, 584-593
•
In less than a year the French revolutionary government had
raised an army, the republic’s army called “a nation in arms,”
was the largest seen in European history.
o It pushed the allies back across the Rhine and even
conquered the Austrian Netherlands.
o Creation of modern nationalism.
By May 1795, the anti-French coalition of 1793 was breaking up.
o The Committee of Public Safety and the Reign of Terror
To meet the domestic crisis, the National Convention and the
Committee of Public Safety established the “Reign of Terror.”
• Revolutionary courts were organized to protect the Republic
from its internal enemies.
• Victims of the Terror ranged from royalists to former
revolutionary Girondins and were people who had opposed the
radical activities of the sans-culottes.
• In the course of nine months, 16,000 were officially killed
under the blade of t he guillotine, but the true number of the
Terror’s victims was probably closer to 50,000.
o The bulk of the executions took place in the Vendee
and in cities such as Lyons and Marseilles, places that
had been in open rebellion against the authority of the
National Convention.
• Military force in the form of revolutionary armies was used to
bring recalcitrant cities and districts back under the control of
the National Convention.
o Marseilles fell to a revolutionary army in August.
o Starving, Lyons surrendered early in October after two
months of bombardment and resistance.
o In Vendee, the revolutionary armies were also brutal in
defeating the rebel armies. “No quarter to be given.”
o Most notorious act of violence was in Nantes, where the
victims were executed by sinking them in barges in the
Loire River.
• The terror demonstrated no class prejudice.
o To the Committee of Public Safety, this bloodletting
was only a temporary expedient.
Once the war and domestic emergency were
over, “the republic of virtue” would ensue, and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the
Citizen would be fully established.
• The French government during the Terror was lead by a group
of 12 men who ordered the execution of people as national
enemies.
o Used Rousseau to justify.
o The “Republic of Virtue”
12/1-2 Radical Revolution to Napoleon Ch. 19, 584-593