- the Convention retained sovereign power in the formal sense that it elected all members of the three committees each month, and the committees were ultimatley responsible to it
- committee of public safety and General Security were given enormous discretionary powers, and by the end of 1793 had become virtually autonomous
- eventually, during the first half of 1794, the Committee of Public Safety came to monopolise all the powers of govt., a situation in which quite literally 12 ruled France
The Levee en masse and the creation of Armees Revolutionnaires
- rev. govt. helped enormously in its work of national defence by the levee en masse of 23 August, 1793
- and the creation of civic militia -
- the levee en masse was both an act of military conscription and a call for a national, patriotic risingto extirpate the enemies of the Republic
- response in Paris electric, but in provinces the peasnty had to be bludgeoned into the army and terrorised into co-operation with civil authority
- to make dangerous generalisation – e/where throughout France townsmen responded magnificiently to this call for a national rising, while in rural communities it was received with apathy and fatalistic passivity
- the armees revolutionaries recruited in Paris and the larger towns, staffed by sans-culottes elected by the rank and file, para-military, ultra-revolutionary, and dangerously autonomous, went out into the countryside in the autumn and winter of 1793-4 to promote recruitment, to requistion grain,
ECONOMIC POLICIES AND CONTROL
- the principal economic policies of the Convention b/w June and December 1793 were introduced in response to sans-culotte pressure
- most important economic decree abolished all remaining feudal rights without indemnification
- declared monopoly of capital crime, stabilised the assignats, established, established a compulsory loan
- *** Of these decrees the LAW OF MAXIMUM – 29 SEPTEMBER 1793 – was the most important
- it empowered the state to regulate the supply and prices of essential commodities (food stuffs, fuels, industrial raw materials.
Representatives on Mission and the Agents Nationaux
- C.P.S. slowly centralised its power over the provinces during the autumn and winter of 1793-4 with the aid of ad hoc and permanent officials
- Reps on mission (at one time up to 100 members of the Convention) carried the power of the state personally into the more troubled regions of France and made lightning chekcs on the armies of the frontiers
- The power of the reps on mission symbolised for frenchmen in the Provinces waas both august and terrible
GREAT TERROR
- the govt wanted to be in complete control over repression, so in May 1794, it abolished all the provincial Revolutionary Tribunals
- all enemies of the Republic had now to be brought to Paris, to be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal
- did not mean Terror less sever
- Law of Prairial, passed 10 June 1794 ‘Enemies of the people; were defined as those ‘who have sought to mislead opinion..to dprave customs and to corrupt the public conscience.’
- Terms so vague almost anyone could be included
- No winesses were to be called and judgement wa to be decided by the ‘conscience of the jurors’ rather then by any evidnce produced
- Defendants were not allowed defence council and the only possible verdicts were death or aquittal
- this law removed any semblance of a fair trial and was designed to speed up those process of revolutionary justice
- MORE PEOPLE WERE SENTENCED TO DEATH BY THE REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL IN THE NINE WEEKS AFTER 10 JUNE THAN IN THE PREVIOUS MONTHS OF ITS EXISTENCE
9 THERMIDOR – FALL OF ROBESPIERRE
-throughout July, moves were being made within the Committees and the Convention to organise a coup against the Robespierris
- the conspiracy was very difficult to organise, since it encompassed moderates and extremists whose dislike for eatch other was only subordinate to their greater hatred and fear of Robespierre
- in the end it was Robespierre’s final speech to the Convention on the 8 Thermidor that finally cemented an alliance of the Thermidorians
- the speech took several hours to deliver
- as it progressed became increasingly hysterical, irrational, and paranoid
- near the end Robespierre made wild allegations of reason and corruption within the Committees of Fincance, General Security, and Public Safety, but when challenged to name the traitors he refused
- when the Convention reassembled the next day (9 Thermidor, 27 July) a motion to impeach and outlaw the Robespierrists was moved and carried
- Robespierre arrested and executed
- Thus began the Thermidorian reaction
- Within a month of the whole machinery of the governemtn of the Terror would be dismantlye
NAPOLEON
The effective ruler of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, 30 year old general, first consul between 1796-1799. After years of turmoil, or rebellion, revolution and counter-revolution, people yearned for a stability and security. In 1802 another plebiscite approved Napoleon’s appointment of consul for life, in 1804 he assumed the title of emperor. At the crowning ceromony 2 December 1804 Napoleon took the crown from the hands of the pope and placed it on his own head as a symbolic enthronement of a ’self-made’ emperor
The bank of France established to stabilise the currency. New codes of civil law, pean and commercial were formulated into the Code Napoleon, ensureing equality before the law and bestowing a sense of permanence on the gains of the Rev..
OUTCOME AND INFLUENCE OF THE REVOLUTION
- rev many diff. Things to many diff people
- its effects varied from city to country side, from northern France to the south
- evaluation of the significance of the revolution brought about during the rev. involves an identification of the aims of the revolutionaries, and judgement of the extent they were attained
- both ‘democratic’ and ‘liberal’ aspirations became influential forces in European society as a result of the Rev. period
- in the early stages of the rev. the liberals and democrats were united in theier efforts to achieve an alteration of the old order
THE REVOLUTION AS AN ASSERTION OF REPUBLICANISM
- the establishment of a repubic had not been one of the primary aims of the revolutionaries
- a form of constitutional monarchy was widely preferred opinion in the early years
- after the republican administrations had failed to achieve stability and order, the French people returned to the monarchical form of govt.
DESTRUCTION OF PRIVLEGE
- through the momentous 1789 declarations abolishing feudalism and proclaiming the rights of the citizen, together with that abolishing the monarchy (1792)
- french revolutionaries destroyed the power and prestige of both previously privleged aristocracy and the monarchy
- people could no longer be ‘born to rule’ and the principle of divine right did not return
THE REDUCTION IN AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH
-through the revolutionary proclamations of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the confiscation and sale of Church lands, the Roman Catholic Chruch lost its dominant position in French society
in effect society was largely de-Christianised and secularies
IMPORTANCE OF REV. HISTORIANS VIEWS
Since the revn most historians have argued that for better or worse, the revn profoundly altered most aspects of life in France. Since mid 1950s, when Alfred Cobban atacked ‘the myth of the french revolution’ revisionist historians have increasingly questioned the long accepted certainties of the origins and outcomes of the rev.
British historian Roger Price
‘In political and ideological terms the revolution was no doubt crucial importance, but humanity was not transformed, thereby at the end of all the political upheavels fo the revolution and Empire little had changed in the daily life of most frenchment.’
Soboul: ‘A classic bourgeois revn, its uncompromising aboliton of the feudal system and the seigneurial regime made it the starting point for a capitalist society and the liberal representative socialist revn.’
Nobles – greatest loses in the revn
- lost their feudal dues
- *Nobles who stayed in France and were not prosecuted during the Terror reatined their lands and never lost their position of economic dominance