Jacobin - The Terror

The Terror

After the fall of the monarchy Robespierre became a central figure in the Jacobin Club, and his faction in the National Convention, assembled in the fall of 1792, became known as Jacobins. They were at first a minority group, also called "The Mountain" (French: La Montagne), and its members Montagnards, because they sat together in the higher seats in the Convention's hall; they were dubious about the war with Austria which had begun that spring, but supported more revolutionary measures at home.

The Jacobins assumed more and more power during the spring of 1793, with the support of the Parisian mob, which overawed the Convention, culminating in a coup at the end of May. They were to hold power until the summer of 1794, and they repeatedly purged the Convention of those they held disloyal to the Republic, ending with a widespread program of execution, the Reign of Terror in their last months. Robespierre, generally the spokesman for the successful faction, had great esteem for his reputation as "the sea-green incorruptible", and set up the slogan of the Republic of Virtue, until the Jacobins' last purge, 9 Thermidor, 27 July 1794. Although some eye-witnesses said Robespierre was shot by a soldier, some historians state he attempted suicide; in any event, his lower jaw was shattered. He was executed the next day on Thermidor 10, 28 July 1794.

The Jacobin club, its leadership having been decimated with Robespierre's execution, was disbanded 12 November 1794. The Jacobins' overwhelming power rested on a very slender material basis. Some compared the club's autocracy to that of the Inquisition, with its system of espionage and denunciations which no one was too illustrious or too humble to escape. The power of the Jacobins was frequently felt through their influence with the Parisian underclass—the sans-culottes – who the Jacobins could reliably count on to support them, and to mass ominously in the streets and at the National Convention when a display of force was considered desirable. Yet it was reckoned by competent observers that, at the height of the Terror, the Jacobins themselves could not command a force of more than 3000 men in Paris. A primary reason for their influence, or strength, was that, in the midst of the general disorganization in revolutionary Paris and in the provinces, they alone were organised. The police agent Dutard, in a report to the minister Garat (30 April 1793), describing an episode in the Palais Egalité (Royal), adds: "Why did a dozen Jacobins strike terror into two or three hundred aristocrats? It is that the former have a rallying-point and that the latter have none".

The reason for the actions of the Jacobins proffered by republican writers of later times and some modern scholars is quite different: that is that France was menaced by civil war within and by a coalition of hostile powers without, requiring the discipline of the Terror to mold France into a united Republic capable of resisting this double peril.