Girondins

8 Key excerpts on "Girondins"

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  Encyclopedia of Political Theory

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The Jacobins acted as a debating club and political pressure group rather than as a formal political party. The French revolutionaries were opposed to the idea of political parties, thinking that parties would be used to promote particular interests rather than the good of all. In the early years of the revolution, the Jacobin club was dominated by relative moderates such as Antoine Barnave, Adrien Duport, and Alexandre Lameth who were committed to a constitutional monarchy and a limited franchise. Following the attempted flight of Louis XVI in June 1791 and the gradual unraveling of the constitutional monarchy that followed, the moderates left the club. In late 1791, the club came under the domination of Jacques Pierre Brissot and the group later known as the Girondins, a group that spearheaded the drive to war over Robespierre’s objections.

  In the summer of 1792, when the monarchy was overthrown and the first French republic founded, the Jacobins moved decisively to the left. The Girondins abandoned the club in the autumn of 1792. It was now under the domination of radical revolutionaries, prominent among them Robespierre, Georges Danton, Louis de Saint-Just, Jean-Paul Marat, and other members of the “mountain” (Jacobin deputies in the National Convention). In September 1792, the Jacobins changed their name to the Society of Jacobins, Friends of Liberty and Equality. In June 1793, the sans-culottes (the poorer working-class members, so named because they wore full-length trousers instead of the more fashionable knee-length culottes) ousted the discredited Girondins from the convention, and the Jacobins came into government.

  The Jacobins were hard-liners, prepared to enforce the aims of the revolutionary government and make a concerted effort to gain victory both in the war with foreign powers and with the many counterrevolutionaries within France. To do this, these hitherto idealistic and humanitarian men adopted the tactics of terror. They formed the first government to enlist terror in the cause of a political ideal. The terms terrorist and terrorism were invented retrospectively in late 1794 to describe the Jacobins and their methods. The Jacobins proved to be cautious about implementing the economic measures desired by the sans-culottes and were made uneasy by the violence of the sans-culottes, even though the threat of that violence had been enlisted to put the Jacobins into power. The Jacobins curbed the political autonomy of the sans-culotte movement, and the sans-culottes

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  Themes in Modern European History 1780-1830

  • Pamela Pilbeam, Pamela Pilbeam(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The election of the Convention marked another step to the revolutionary left, and the formerly radical Girondins found themselves transformed into conservatives in the sense of wishing to uphold a constitutional republican government. To their left within the Convention were the Montagnards or Mountain, so called because they occupied the highest benches within the chamber, including Robespierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Marat and even Louis XVI’s treacherous cousin, Philippe Égalité, the former due d’Orléans. The Montagnards dominated the Parisian Jacobins and possessed the confidence of the sans-culottes. Yet even their position was capable of being redefined and they were under increasing competition for the affections of the sansculottes from the extreme left in the form of the enragés led by Jacques Roux, or the followers of René Hébert, the journalist responsible for the infamous Père Duchesne. Although distinct both the enragés and the Hébertistes advocated radical social and economic policies and the latter were to the fore in the dechristianization campaign. It is clearly very difficult to do justice to the shifting sands of revolutionary politics, but it is important to remember that issues such as the fate of the king, or popular insurrection in Paris, were constantly redefining the contours of the political map. If anything the overthrow of the monarchy heightened the tension in Paris. The fall of the key fortress of Verdun on 1 September reinforced the impression that the advance of the enemy was unstoppable. As Paris mobilized its men for the front, demagogues such as Marat played upon popular fears of a counterrevolutionary insurrection from amongst the many prisoners crammed into the city’s jails. Public authority was divided between the revolutionary city government in Paris known as the Commune, the Legislative Assembly and a ministry composed largely of Girondins, but dominated by Danton

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  The Giant of the French Revolution

  Danton, A Life

  • David Lawday(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Grove Press

    (Publisher)

  Exit Moderates

  It amazed Danton that the Girondin leadership – men (and, of course, a woman) of high ideas – could be so obtuse. There were not two but three wars he had to fight: after the monarchs of Europe and counter-revolution at home, he had a war on his hands against avowed republicans whose philosophy he fundamentally shared. He was with them on property, on education, on religion, on all manner of items that were going into the republic’s slow-born constitution. How hard he had tried to bring them round. Perhaps Madame Roland, her husband and her adoring Buzot were beyond reach, but surely other leading Girondins could be made to see that their refusal to lock arms with fellow patriots in this perilous hour spelled doom for the new France they had created – and that their own doom would in all likelihood precede it.

  Danton had done his damnedest to work for a truce. On the eve of his final trip to Belgium in early March 1793, heartbroken by Gabrielle’s death not a month before, he and Camille had set up a secret meeting with the Girondins away from the angry ballyhoo of the Riding School. It took place a few miles outside the city walls at Sceaux, in a village house owned by Lucile’s mother, Madame Duplessis. The Girondins who came were the movement’s more approachable leaders, men whom Danton had dealt with, befriended even, before relations soured. Brissot and Vergniaud were there, and so was the courtly constitutionalist Condorcet, and Pétion, the Mayor of Paris. These were men of the progressive bourgeoisie with a dash of nobility in their ranks who did not necessarily share the Roland couple’s snobbish abhorrence for Danton and the radical Jacobins. Still, the attempt at reconciliation failed. Danton was saddened: there was common ground, to be sure, but his adversaries refused to bury the hatchet with the Mountain, insisting that a truce would amount to giving immunity to the ‘savages’ who abetted the prison massacres, which they would not permit.

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  Lectures on the French Revolution

  • Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron, Reginald Vere Laurence, John Neville Figgis, (Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  During the agony of his party, Condorcet found shelter in a lodging-house at Paris. There, under the Reign of Terror, he wrote the little book on Human Progress, which contains his legacy to mankind. He derived the leading idea from his friend Turgot, and transmitted it to Comte. There may be, perhaps, a score or two dozen decisive and characteristic views that govern the world, and that every man should master in order to understand his age, and this is one of them. When the book was finished, the author's part was played, and he had nothing more to live for. As his retreat was known to one, at least, of the Montagnards, he feared to compromise those who had taken him in at the risk of their life. Condorcet assumed a disguise, and crept out of the house with a Horace in one pocket and a dose of poison in the other. When it was dark, he came to a friend's door in the country. What passed there has never been known, but the fugitive philosopher did not remain. A few miles outside Paris he was arrested on suspicion and lodged in the gaol. In the morning they found him lying dead. Cabanis, who afterwards supplied Napoleon in like manner, had given him the means of escape.

  This was the miserable end of the Girondin party. They were easily beaten and mercilessly destroyed, and no man stirred to save them. At their fall liberty perished; but it had become a feeble remnant in their hands, and a spark almost extinguished. Although they were not only weak but bad, no nation ever suffered a greater misfortune than that which befell France in their defeat and destruction. They had been the last obstacle to the Reign of Terror, and to the despotism which then by successive steps centred in Robespierre.

  XVIII

  THE REIGN OF TERROR

  The liberal and constitutional wave with which the Revolution began ended with the Girondins; and the cause of freedom against authority, of right against force was lost. At the moment of their fall, Europe was in arms against France by land and sea; the royalists were victorious in the west; the insurrection of the south was spreading, and Précy held Lyons with 40,000 men. The majority, who were masters in the Convention, had before them the one main purpose of increasing and concentrating power, that the country might be saved from dangers which, during those months of summer, threatened to destroy it. That one supreme and urgent purpose governed resolutions and inspired measures for the rest of the year, and resulted in the method of government which we call the Reign of Terror. The first act of the triumphant Mountain was to make a Constitution. They had criticized and opposed the Girondin draft, in April and May, and only the new declaration of the Rights of Man had been allowed to pass. All this was now re-opened. The Committee of Public Safety, strengthened by the accession of five Jacobins, undertook to prepare a scheme adapted to the present conditions, and embodying the principles which had prevailed. Taking Condorcet's project as their basis, and modifying it in the direction which the Jacobin orators had pointed to in debate, they achieved their task in a few days, and they laid their proposals before the Convention on June 10. The reporter was Hérault de Séchelles; but the most constant speaker in the ensuing debate was Robespierre. After a rapid discussion, but with some serious amendments, the Republican Constitution of 1793 was adopted, on June 24. Of all the fruits of the Revolution this is the most characteristic, and it is superior to its reputation.

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  Robespierre

  A Study

  • Hilaire Belloc(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Patavium Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VII — THE FALL OF THE GIRONDE

  THE Girondins were struck and were falling. They never had been France, but only a superb opposition, opposing tyranny from the vague sky of the ideal. On the death of the King, who had stood for the positive tradition of the nation, they came to a last rally; with the spring season they fell. Their fall and their sacrifice are the other names for the establishment and growth of the Terror. France reseized herself with violence: out of her instinct for united government and for a head at Paris came the despotism of Paris over the departments, of the brain over the body.

  I have insisted at such length in my last chapter upon the sharp five months of the struggle that lay between the imprisonment and the execution of the King, because that space had transformed Robespierre. He had entered it the idol rather than the chief of a political minority; he had been the cantator of the sacred texts, preaching, thinking himself a man oppressed by the regular forces of government and battering from below, in a hopeless opposition, what were then the sure foundations of the Gironde. The war, which he detested, had come. The palace which was the common enemy he saw half-allied with the drawing-room of Roland, with what he thought to be nothing but an intriguing clique;—Dumouriez and Brissot were in his eyes the leaders of this shameful cabal. He was perhaps the first at the Jacobins, but the club was still a battlefield. He had feared the 20th of June. In August he had shut himself in at home, disappointed and disdainful on the eve of the assault on the Palace.{110}

  In a day and a night, not by his work—by work done in spite of him—his whole position had changed. He was permitted to pass from opposition to action: the price to be paid for mingling with the Commune, and for accepting Paris and violence was his old consistency; he paid it. He consented to become in part the mouthpiece of that violence, in part only did he remain the professor and logician of the strict revolutionary theory. This compromise made him, long before January, the chief target of the moderates: of the pure visionaries, the great souls that surrounded Vergniaud. Having been singled out for their principal attack, he could not fail to reap the fruits of any victory against them. When months later the Gironde disappeared, as it was fated to disappear, it was to the profit especially of Robespierre who had not grasped the nature of its peril, who had attacked it only in debate.

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  Crowd psychology. Philosophical and Literary Works. Illustrated Edition

  The Social Contract, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Charles Mackay, Wilfred Trotter, Everett Dean Martin, G. D. H. Cole, James Strachey(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Intimately persuaded that such a proclamation would transform the civilised world, it instituted a new era and a new calendar. The year I. of this era marked the dawn of a world in which reason alone was to reign. It was inaugurated by the trial of Louis XVI., a measure which was ordered by the Commune, but which the majority of the Convention did not desire.

  At its outset, in fact, the Convention was governed by its relatively moderate elements, the Girondists. The president and the secretaries had been chosen among the best known of this party. Robespierre, who was later to become the absolute master of the Convention, possessed so little influence at this time that he obtained only six votes for the presidency, while Petion received two hundred and thirty-five.

  The Montagnards had at first only a very slight influence. Their power was of later growth. When they were in power there was no longer room in the Convention for moderate members.

  Despite their minority the Montagnards found a way to force the Assembly to bring Louis to trial. This was at once a victory over the Girondists, the condemnation of all kings, and a final divorce between the old order and the new.

  To bring about the trial they manoeuvred very skilfully, bombarding the Convention with petitions from the provinces, and sending a deputation from the insurrectional Commune of Paris, which demanded a trial.

  According to a characteristic common to the Assemblies of the Revolution, that of yielding to threats and always doing the contrary of what they wished, the men of the Convention dared not resist. The trial was decided upon.

  The Girondists, who individually would not have wished for the death of the king, voted for it out of fear once they were assembled. Hoping to save his own head, the Duc d'Orleans, Louis' cousin, voted with them. If, on mounting the scaffold on January 21, 1793, Louis had had that vision of the future which we attribute to the gods, he would have seen following him, one by one, the greater number of the Girondists whose weakness had been unable to defend him.

  Regarded only from the purely utilitarian point of view, the execution of the king was one of the mistakes of the Revolution. It engendered civil war and armed Europe against France. In the Convention itself his death gave rise to intestine struggles, which finally led to the triumph of the Montagnards and the expulsion of the Girondists.

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  The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution

  • Timothy Tackett(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Maximilien Robespierre, leader of the Montagnard faction of the Jacobins. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  Jacques-Pierre Brissot, leader of the “Brissotins” or Girondin faction. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  It is not impossible, of course, that political posturing and demagoguery played a role in the accusations between factions. Yet if we can believe the observations of Dumont, by March of 1792 the Girondins were totally swept up in the culture of suspicion. When the Genevan pastor met with the group that spring, “they talked only of the conspiracies of the emigrants and the ‘Austrian committee,’ and of the treachery of the court.”67 The terrible factionalism reminded Dominique Garat of the stories he knew so well in his studies of ancient history: “Parties that hoped to destroy one another, accused each other of trying to destroy the state.” “In the beginning such allegations were perhaps only suspicions born of hatred or harsh insults arising from all-consuming anger; but in the end they became a profound conviction.” The deputies’ personal correspondence conveys the intensity of the fears of treachery and conspiracy, conspiracy both external and internal to France, and inside the Assembly itself.68 Their vision of events was rapidly penetrated by the same Manichaean imaginary touching so much of French society, in which factional rivals were not simply misguided or dull minded, but treacherous and morally tainted.

  Whatever the origins of factionalism in the Revolutionary assemblies, once deputies came emotionally to identify with a given “party,” their allegiance rapidly crystallized and took on a life of its own. Factional confrontations assumed the character of a struggle for power and for survival. For Cambon, writing in October 1791, the principal objective of both the Feuillant and the Jacobin clubs was to destroy their opponent. Each side seemed to define itself as much by what it opposed in the factional “other” as by what it actually supported.69 Elements of both revenge and fear of revenge came into play. The anger and hatred long focused on aristocrats and the refractory clergy were now directed at the opposing faction, as competing groups came to vilify and demonize their antagonists.70 Representatives on the left used emotionally charged epithets from the first National Assembly, stigmatizing their Feuillant rivals as “blacks” or “ministerials.” The Jacobins Malassis and Cavellier would complain of “our Maury’s, our Cazalès’, our Malouet’s”—referring to three of the most eloquent defenders of the Right in the previous Assembly. “For,” they added, “we too have such men.”71

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  Republicanism

  An Introduction

  • Rachel Hammersley(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  24 Most Girondins favoured an appeal to the people on the king’s fate, but they were defeated on 15 January 1793, and the following day a majority voted in favour of immediate execution. An attempt at a reprieve also failed.

  After the regicide, several Brissotins took up official positions or influenced the government in more informal ways. Jean-Marie Roland (1734–93) was minister of the interior, Clavière, who had already been finance minister under the monarchy, continued in that role, and Condorcet was responsible for drawing up the ‘Girondin constitution’ that was debated in the Convention in the spring of 1793. Their influence was short-lived, however, since they soon came into conflict with Robespierre and his associates. Girondin deputies were arrested on 31 May 1793 and subsequently expelled from the Convention. Many, including Brissot and Clavière, did not survive the year.

  Building on years of thought and practical experience, the Brissotins offered a sophisticated definition of republican government. In his newspaper Le Patriote Français Brissot declared: ‘I understand, by republic, a government in which all the powers are, 1. Delegated or represented; 2. Elective among and by the people, or its representatives; 3. Temporary or removable’.25 Brissot used this definition to deny the relevance of ancient republican models to late eighteenth-century France, pointing out that none of the ancient republics had managed to combine these three requirements within a single system. Rome had had an hereditary senate, Sparta hereditary kings, and Athens had been a pure democracy with no representation. A successful modern republic, the Brissotins observed, needed to address issues that simply had not been relevant to the ancients. Both the area and the population of modern states were much larger than their ancient counterparts. This was an advantage, since the eighteenth century, and especially Geneva’s recent experience, had revealed the vulnerability of small republics, which had to rely on larger neighbours for protection. A large republic would be better able to maintain itself.26 It did, however, mean that some form of representation was essential. It was also crucial that modern republicanism be compatible with commercial society. Drawing on ideas and practices from the new United States of America as well as from Geneva, the Brissotins advocated a representative government, designed to obviate the problem of the size of the French state; the reinforcement of republican manners among the population, for example through education; and an emphasis on Montesquieu’s commerce d’économie.27

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