Parties of the French

Revolution

Notes by Faisal Sayyar

Political clubs were a new form of political activity in response
to the new freedom of public expression. They started in
France in 1789. Clubs as such were not new. The latter half of
the eighteenth century had seen the spread of a wide range of
informal groups in a movement of what historians call
‘Enlightenment Sociability’. They included salons or private
discussion groups, more formal intellectual associations,
masonic lodges, all devoted to socializing and talking and
reading about the latest ideas. But mostly they avoided politics
as a forbidden topic. When the old political authorities
disappeared with the Revolution, however, the club model was
adopted as an obvious and familiar way of discussing issues of
the day and mobilizing opinion behind the new order of things.
Clubs’ Emergence
France before 1789 was an absolute monarchy with few and limited representative
institutions, where nobody had the right to resist the authority of the king. Politics
was seen as the private business of the monarch, and all publications were subject
to government censorship. But military overstretch over the century led by the
1780s to a financial crisis which the king felt unable to resolve without consulting
representatives of the taxpayers. They resisted his plans, driving the monarchy into
bankruptcy in the summer of 1788. Royal authority collapsed as Louis XVI gave in
to demands for the election of the Estates-General, a national representative body
which had not met since 1614. In June 1789 the Estates transformed themselves
into the National Assembly and declared that the Nation, not the king, was now the
sovereign authority in France. The storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July
prevented the king from crushing this defiance, and the National Assembly began
the massive work of reforming French institutions and society from top to bottom
and giving the country a written constitution. No longer subject to censorship,
political clubs began to form all over the country to support this work of reform.
The Storming of the Bastille by Jean-Pierre Houël
Clubs’ Emergence

Mostly they followed the lead of a group of members of the Assembly who in
the autumn began to discuss their political plans in a club called the Society of
the Friends of the Constitution. They met in a former convent of Dominican
friars called the Jacobins. The idea of a political club originated with deputies
from Brittany who had begun to meet informally to concert action earlier in the
summer in the so-called ‘Breton Club’. Soon non-deputies were applying to join
the society, and provincial counterparts were being established in major cities to
discuss current affairs, read the newspapers, correspond with each other, and
petition the authorities. They applied to the ‘mother society’ for affiliation, and
by the middle of 1790, there was a Jacobin club network of well over a hundred
affiliated clubs. By July 1791 the number was approaching a thousand. They
saw their role as mobilizing public support for the reforms of the Revolution.
Jacobins

Admission to Jacobin Clubs was originally confined to ‘active’ citizens, defined as

electors paying a minimum level of direct taxes. This ensured that only men of
comfortable means enjoying political rights could get in. But as the Revolution
became more radical in the course of 1791-2, most Jacobin Clubs opened their doors
to all male citizens, although members still had to be proposed and elected. At the
same time, clubs began to exclude or expel people with questionable political views
or records. They also began to rename themselves Societies of the Friends of Liberty
and Equality rather than Friends of the Constitution. Always bastions of current
political orthodoxy, they became more extreme and radical along with the governing
assemblies. By 1793 they were playing a leading role in revolutionary government
and were an important instrument of the Terror. Their members were forever
associated with Terror after it ended in 1794, and the clubs were closed down.
 Jacobins

Jacobin’s Seal
Feuillants

After Louis XVI tried to flee Paris in June 1791 there was a surge of
republicanism. The Paris Jacobins lent their support to a petition to dethrone
the king, but most of the club’s members disapproved and seceded to form a
monarchical club meeting at another former convent, that of the Cistercian
Feuillants. They tried to capture the Jacobins’ network of provincial affiliates,
but most refused to join them. Meanwhile, the rump of the Jacobins was kept
alive, though for the moment renouncing republicanism, by the efforts of
Robespierre.
The Feuillants were committed to making the constitution work and
supporting the king, but their moderation and exclusivism kept them far less
popular than the reviving Jacobins, membership rapidly declined, and with the
fall of the monarchy in August 1792 they disappeared.
Ideology and views

The Feuillant party was formed to protect a conception of power. Its goals were to
neutralize royalists by gaining the support of the moderate right, to isolate the
democrats from the majority of patriotic deputies, to withstand Jacobin influences and
to terminate societies that threatened the nation's independence of the National
Assembly.  As a result, the Feuillants were attacked from both the left and the right.
The Feuillant group was against passive citizens being enlisted in the National Guard.
They believed the only way to have a strong army was for it to be structured. "By
favoring elimination of “passive citizens" from the National Guard (27 April 1791),
remaining silent during the debate on the right to petition and post bills, opposing the
political emancipation of the blacks (11–15 May 1791), the triumvirs exhausted their
popularity within the space of a few months". The group asserted that if the political
emancipation of blacks passed, the main source of France's income would be lost. The
sugar fields in Saint-Domingue could be taken over and land might also be lost.
Active and Passive Citizens
• Active citizens are citizens who are literate and have knowledge about
the law. They have a continuous income and consist of the right to
vote. To become an active citizen one must be above 25 years of age
and had to pay taxes equal to at least 3 days of a laborer's wages.
• Passive citizens are citizens who are illiterate and have no knowledge
about law and government. They don't have jobs but they are under the
protection of government. They don't have the right to vote. The
women, men below 25 years of age, children and men above 25 years
of age who didn't have enough to pay the taxes were listed under
passive citizens.
Cordeliers

The Cordeliers (named after yet another former convent where they met on the left
bank of the Seine) were founded in the spring of 1790 as the Society of the Friends
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. From the start they were always more radical
than the Jacobins, being open to all comers, including women, and pressing for a
more democratic franchise. It was here that Danton first made his name. The
Cordeliers were responsible for the republican petition which split the Jacobins in
June 1791, and many of their members were casualties when the National Guard
fired on the petitioners in the July ‘Massacre of the Champ de Mars’. After a period
of persecution after that, the Club revived as a center of democratic radicalism and
support in 1793-4 for the Terror, but suffered when in the spring of 1794 its leaders
were arrested and executed for criticizing the rule of the Convention. After the Terror
ended the club suffered the same, ultimately terminal, persecution as the Jacobins.
Last meeting of the club of the Cordeliers
 Girondins

The Girondins were not a club at all. They were a group of vocal
deputies in the Legislative Assembly and then the Convention who were
named after spokesmen who represented the Gironde department,
though most did not come from there. All were members of the Jacobin
Club until they began to be expelled in the autumn of 1792. They did
not form any sort of rival club, nor were they a political party, but they
were bound together by hostility to the power of Paris over the national
Convention. Eventually, the radicals of the capital successfully called
for the expulsion of 29 deputies identified as Girondins in June 1793. In
response several provincial centers exploded into the so-called
‘Federalist Revolt’, but this only sealed the fate of the expelled deputies,
who went to the guillotine in October 1793, protesting their continued
commitment to the libertarian ideals of the Revolution. Their memory
was only slowly rehabilitated after the end of the Terror.
The Girondins in the La Force Prison after their arrest. Woodcut from 1845.

A Guillotine
Enragé
Enragé, (French: “Madman”) any of a group of extreme revolutionaries in France in 1793, led by a former priest, Jacques
Roux, and Varlet, a postal official, who advocated social and economic measures in favor of the lower classes.
The Enragés (French for "enraged ones") were a small number of firebrands known for defending the lower class and
expressing the demands of the radical sans-culottes during the French Revolution. They played an active role in the 31 May 31
– 2 June 1793 Paris uprisings that forced the expulsion of the Girondins from the National Convention, allowing
the Montagnards to assume full control.  The Enragés became associated with this term for their angry rhetoric appealing to the
National Convention to take more measures that would benefit the poor. Jacques Roux, Jean-François Varlet, Jean Théophile
Victor Leclerc and Claire Lacombe, the primary leaders of the Enragés, were strident critics of the National Convention for
failing to carry out the promises of the French Revolution. The Enragés were not a unified party, rather the individual
figureheads that comprised the group identified as the Enragés worked for their own objectives and evidence of cooperation is
inconclusive. As individual political personalities, the Enragés were cynical to the point of anarchism, suspicious of most
political organizations and individuals and they resisted ties to others.  The leaders did not see themselves as part of a shared
movement and Roux even called for Varlet's arrest. The notion of the Enragés as a cohesive group was perpetuated by
the Jacobins as they lumped their critics Leclerc and Roux into one group.
Demands:
In 1793, Jacques Roux delivered a speech at the National Convention known as the Manifesto of the Enragés that represents
the essential demands of the group. He asserted that freedom and equality were thus far "vain phantoms" because the rich
had profited from the French Revolution at the expense of the poor. To remedy this, he proposed measures for price controls,
arguing: "Those goods necessary to all should be delivered at a price accessible to all". He also called for strict punishments
against actors engaged in speculation and monopoly. He demanded the National Convention take severe action to
repress counterrevolutionary activity, promising to "show them [enemies] those immortal pikes that overthrew the Bastille".
Lastly, he accused the National Convention of ruining the finances of the state and encouraged the exclusive use of
the assignats to stabilize finances.
The Revolution
The Enragés formed in response to the Jacobin's reluctance to restrain the capitalist bourgeois. Many
Parisians feared that the National Convention protected merchants and shopkeepers at the expense of
the sans-culottes. The Enragés, though not a cohesive body, offered the working poor a platform to
express their dissent. Their dissent was often conveyed through riots, public demonstrations and
passionate oratory.
Jacques Roux and Jean-Francois Varlet emboldened the Parisian working poor to approach the Jacobin
Club on 22 February 1793 and persuade them to place price controls on necessary goods. The Enragés
appointed two females to represent the movement and their agenda to the National Convention.
However, the National Convention refused to grant them an audience. This provoked outrage and
criticism throughout Paris and some went as far as to accuse the National Convention of protecting the
merchant elite's interests at the expense of the sans-culottes. Further attempts for the Enragés to
communicate their position were denied by the National Convention. Determined to be heard, they
responded with revolt. They plundered the homes and businesses of the merchant elite, employing
direct action to meet their needs. The Enragés were noted for using legal and extra legal means to
achieve their ends.
The Enragés were composed of members within the National Convention and the sans-culottes. They
illuminated the internal and external war waged by the sans-culottes. They complained that the
National Convention ordered men to fight on the battlefield without providing for the widows and
orphans remaining in France. They emphasized the unavailability of basic necessities, particularly
bread. In his Manifesto of the Enragés, Jacques Roux colorfully expressed this sentiment to the
National Convention, stating: "Is it necessary that the widows of those who died for the cause of
freedom pay, at the price of gold, for the cotton they need to wipe away their tears, for the milk and the
honey that serves for their children?".
They accused the merchant aristocracy of withholding access to goods and supplies to
intentionally drive up prices. Roux demanded that the National Convention impose capital
punishment upon unethical merchants who used speculation, monopolies and hoarding to
increase their personal profits at the expense of the poor. The Enragés labeled price
gouging as counter-revolutionary and treason. This sentiment extended to those who
sympathized with the recently executed King Louis XVI. They felt that those who
sympathized with the monarchy would also sympathize with those who hoarded goods. It is
not surprising that many within the Enragés actively worked against the Girondins faction and
indeed they contributed to the demise of the moderate Girondins, who had fought to spare the
king. Those who adhered to the ideologies presented in the Manifesto of the Enragés wished
to emphasize to the National Convention that tyranny was not just the product of monarchy
and that injustice and oppression did not end with the execution of the king. In their view,
oppression existed whenever one stratum of society sought to monopolize the majority
of resources while simultaneous preventing others from gaining access to those same
resources. In their view, the pursuit of resources was acceptable, but the act of limiting access
to resources was punishable by death.
The Enragés called on the National Convention to restrict commerce that it might not "consist
of ruining, rendering hopeless, or starving citizens". While the Enragés occasionally worked
within political structures, their primary objective was achieving social and economic reform.
They were a direct action group, attempting to meet the immediate needs of the working poor.
The Breton Club

The French Revolution’s first significant political club was the Breton Club. It began as an informal
gathering of 44 Third Estate deputies at a Versailles café, before and after sessions of the Estates-
General. At first, most of these deputies were from Brittany, hence the name of the club; their
meetings discussed provincial issues as well as the proceedings at the Estates-General.
By early June, the Bretons had opened their meetings to deputies from other regions, as well as
a few liberal aristocrats. Breton Club meetings were attended by influential figures like Honore
Mirabeau, Emmanuel Sieyès, Isaac Le Chapelier, Antoine Barnave and Maximilien Robespierre.
Members of the Breton Club supported liberal political reforms including voting by head, the
adoption of a constitution and the formation of a national assembly. During the events of June
1789, the Breton Club gathered before each session of the Estates-General in order to discuss
strategy.
Numbers at the Breton Club dwindled in July, following the formation of the National Assembly.
Those members not from Brittany soon drifted away from the club, their mission
apparently accomplished.
The Executions
Key Points
• 1. Political clubs were groups of like-minded people who met socially, outside the
legislatures and formal political bodies, to discuss and debate political issues and events.
• 2. These clubs began informally as social gatherings, however, they evolved over time, to the
point where they functioned as de facto political parties, setting agendas and shaping
decisions in the legislature.
• 3. The first of these groups was the Breton Club, which met at Versailles during the Estates-
General. After moving to Paris in late 1789 this group evolved into the Jacobin Club.
• 4. Other clubs active during the first years of the revolution included the Society of 1789
(aristocratic and wealthy constitutional monarchists) and the Cordeliers (a populist and
democratic group based in working-class Paris).
• 5. The Jacobin Club remained moderate and supportive of a constitutional monarchy until
the club split in July 1791. Its constitutional monarchists left to form the Feuillants, while
those who remained fell under the influence of republicans like Brissot and Robespierre.
Aftermath of the Revolution

Strictly speaking, there were no political parties as we understand them in revolutionary France.
Contemporaries did not distinguish parties from selfish factions, more interested in private agendas rather than
the public good. But the Jacobin network of clubs always strove to propagate something like a party line, and
by the time of the Convention in 1793-4 they took their lead from the deputies of Paris and their allies who
were known, from where they sat on the high seats of the assembly, as the Montagnards or Mountain Men.
They included Robespierre, Marat, and Danton. They stood for republicanism and egalitarianism, an economy
controlled in popular interests, a centralised power structure, and hostility to established religion. They
specialised in democratic style and rhetoric, although while they were in power they ruled through Terror. This
bequeathed a problem to subsequent French history and its interpretation: could you have a democratic republic
without Terror? Not until the Third Republic was established, and survived, after 1870, was it clear that you
could. But when that republic stabilised it adopted many of the slogans and causes first espoused by the
Jacobins in 1793-4. Thus, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as the national motto, free state education and a measure
of social welfare, and laîcité – a state without religious affiliations. These are part of France’s ideology today,
with all its fateful consequences for relations with Islam.
The Revolution also created powerful enemies. Counter-revolutionaries outraged by its attacks on church and
king constituted a sort of party. Much of the nineteenth-century French politics was a conflict between
republicans and conservatives who wanted to ditch revolutionary legacies and bring back monarchy
underpinned by religion – and in fact, the country was a monarchy of one sort or another for most of the time
from 1804 down to 1870. Only defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of that year, and the refusal of monarchists to
accept revolutionary legacies like the tricolour flag, opened the way for secularising republicanism to triumph.
The battle of Bastille
The Modern View

For much of the twentieth century the history of the Revolution was dominated
by left wingers inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917. They were broadly
sympathetic to the radical Jacobinism of 1793-4, even if ambivalent about the
Terror. But when Marxism and the Soviet Union collapsed historians turned
back to deploring the Terror and arguing that it was inevitable. Only in the last
few years have some non-Marxists begun to look on Jacobinism with more
sympathy and to highlight its concern for democracy, equality, and social
welfare. One or two are now even prepared to risk defending the necessity of
Terror. The enigmatic figure of Robespierre continues to attract fresh and often
quite sympathetic biographers. Others, however, still deplore the brutality and
arbitrariness of the Terror, impugn the sincerity of Jacobin rule, and emphasize
the idealism of the Girondins as the true custodians of the values of 1789.
Napoleon Bona Part Maximilien Robespierre
Controversial Questions

Because there were no parties as we know them, there were simply shades of opinion
about where the Revolution was going and where it should stop. Three great issues
polarized participants in the French Revolution and tore it apart: religion, monarchy,
and war. In religion the question for revolutionaries was should there be a state church,
or no church? For counter-revolutionaries the only acceptable solution was the
restoration of the church as it had been before 1789. As regards monarchy, once again
counter-revolutionaries favored a return to the absolute authority of pre-revolutionary
times. And if they were not outright republicans, revolutionaries had to decide why a
constitutional king was necessary, and if he was, how much power he should have. As
to war, it was launched in 1792 as much for domestic as international reasons. The
ostensible aim was to destroy counter-revolution. But should it be a limited war, or an
open-ended conflict with the whole European old regime? And should it be a war of
liberation, or of conquest?
There are no great unsearched issues in all this, but aspects of the perennial questions
are being looked into all the time from new angles. We shall never be able to say that
we need no more knowledge in order to understand such a complex topic.
The Leaders of French Revolution