The Past and Present Society

Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4Author(s): A. SoboulSource: Past & Present, No. 5 (May, 1954), pp. 54-70Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649823 .Accessed: 07/03/2011 09:47

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PAST AND PRESENT

Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4

I DO NOT PROPOSE TO OUTLINE ROBESPIERRE'S BIOGRAPHY, FOR IN ALL essentials his life and the history of the French Revolution are one. My purpose is rather to sketch his relations with the popular move- ment of the year II (I793-4) and thus to indicate both the elements of his greatness and the limits of his political and social activity which led to his downfall, and made him a victim of the same contradictions which weighed upon the popular movement of his day.

* * *

If we are to discover what made Robespierre into the most famous of the early leaders of French democracy, we must consider not only the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but also his own origins and character.1 He was not himself a man of the common people. Born in I758 at Arras, he came from those circles of lower middle class attorneys which were to supply so many revolutionaries, especially of the I793-4 vintage; a social stratum naturally hostile to the feudal nobility, but almost equally opposed to the upper bourgeoisie* which stood so much higher in the social hierarchy. His father had been an impecunious lawyer, he was soon orphaned, but a scholarship from his local bishop enabled him to make a brilliant career at the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Robespierre belonged to the generation educated by the Oratorians, after the expulsion of the Jesuits in I762, and nurtured equally on the Classics and on the philosophy of Enlightenment. With them both he and Saint-Just acquired that Roman phraseology which so frequently camouflages the thought of their own century. There he also came under the powerful influence of Rousseau, which colours his political and social ideals, his sensibility, and lends severity to some of his tones of expression.

In I78I, at the age of 23, Robespierre returned to Arras to earn an honorable living as a lawyer, moving in the good society of the middle bourgeoisie but remaining poor. The word " poor " occurs frequently

* TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Since the words bourgeois and bourgeoisie have both a precise meaning for French historians, and a connotation somewhat different from the English words middle class, they have been retained throughout this article.

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in Robespierre's speeches. If we are to clarify his social ideas, we must define what it meant to him. For Robespierre the " poor man" was the man content to supply his needs by personal work, who neither disdained comfort nor pursued luxury and idleness. Thus Robespierre found himself naturally in agreement not only withl Rousseau's doctrine, but also with the way of life and the tastes of the lower and middle bourgeoisie, which recognized in him its own fundamental honesty, the dignity of its morals, its concern for decent appearances, its suspicion of excessive wealth, as well as its anxiety to keep the labouring masses at a distance. We need not insist on Robespierre's own fondness for respectable appearances. He never adopted the republican, or more precisely, the Sansculotte fashion, but always remained faithful to the dress of the old regime. Let us merely quote the wife of Lebas, member of the Convention, a daughter of the cabinet-maker Duplay with whom Robespierre lodged in the Rue Saint-Honor6. Her father, she said, had been too proud of his middle class respectability ever to admit to his table any of his servants, i.e. of his workers. In these words the gap between Jacobins and Sansculottes, between the popular classes in the strict sense of of the word and the middle bourgeoisie, lies revealed. Let us also recall that the good Jacobin Duplay, though immersed in the world of labour as a master-cabinet-maker, nevertheless drew ten or twelve thousand livres of income from the houses he owned. Clearly Robespierre's social ideas were to be entangled in many contradictions.

Social origins, education, temperament and the logic of events all explain why Robespierre from the start of the Revolution held firmly to the principle that birth and money should not measure the citizen's talent, his dignity, or his rights. From 1789, therefore, Robespierre was a defender of democracy. He was not simply content to defend the Revolution against the privileged classes and to demand the liberation of all the oppressed - actors, Jews, negro slaves in the colonies.2 In an assembly composed essentially of comfortable and wealthy bourgeois who were almost as suspicious of the popular classes as of the aristocrats, and made the right to vote conditional upon the payment of taxes, he never wavered in his opposition to the property-franchise.3 His voice was raised against all measures which might oppress the people, for instance martial law, and against unnecessary harshness in the suppression of the riots which broke out in the provinces. Thus he asked indulgence for the Swiss of Chateauvieux who revolted in I790.4 This determination to be on the side of the people explains all Robespierre's political attitudes from the beginning of the Revolution until the Terror. It made him into

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an enemy of the monarchy and of all modifications of the principle of equality in the Constitution of I79I. It made him oppose the Girondins from the beginning of I792. It led him to the Republic, and in I793 and the Year II it led him beyond it.

Circumstances and preconceived ideas thus made Robespierre into a champion of social democracy in I793-4. In the spring of I793 the Revolution was in profound crisis. The feudal nobility intensified its assault on the Republic at home and from abroad, and an important part of the bourgeoisie deserted it. It seemed clearer than ever that victory was impossible without the people. On 2nd June, I793, in the midst of the insurrection which was to bring about the expulsion of the Girondins from the Convention, Robespierre wrote: " The domestic danger comes from the bourgeois; to defeat the bourgeois we must rally the people."5 Since the country inevitably faced a combination of foreign and civil war the best chance of victory lay in making the Sansculottes feel that the battle was their own. This was the view taken by the section of the bourgeoisie which was determined to fight on, and hence Robespierre was called into the Committee of Public Safety on 27th July, I793.

The date marks the beginning of a new policy of national and revolutionary defence, which rested on the suport of strata of the middle bourgeoisie and the popular classes, the Jacobins and the Sansculottes. For more than one reason Robespierre has come to be regarded as the symbol of this policy. One section of the bourgeoisie accepted that appeal to the people which the Girondins, for reasons of class egoism, had refused to make. Under Robespierre's leadership it now set out to create a framework for popular enthusiasm and to discipline it by organising revolutionary government and Jacobin dictatorship.

The revolutionary government (in which Robespierre's influence was decisive) faced two sets of problems in its relations with the popular movement. It faced the problem of reconciling the characteristic political activities of the Sansculottes with the needs of the Jacobin dictatorship and of national defence, and that of reconcil- ing their social aspirations and demands with those of the bourgeoisie which, after all, retained control of affairs. In other words, it faced the problem of the relation between popular and property- owning classes.

* * *

We must therefore ask: what were the social positions of Jacobins and Sansculottes, that is to say of Robespierre and the popular movement ?

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Jacobins and Sansculottes had forced the policy of national and revolutionary defence upon the Convention, from outside, in the spring of I793. The leadership of this coalition, upon which the revolutionary government was to rest, lay unquestionably in the hands of the Jacobin middle bourgeoisie which Robespierre represented. They were the necessary link between the living force of the Sansculotte people and that section of the bourgeoisie which was determined to push the Revolution to its conclusion. The social situation of this Jacobin middle bourgeoisie, which determined its political stand, is clear, though we are still in need of many more detailed studies on the subject. As we have already seen, we may regard the master cabinet-maker Duplay with his ten or twelve thousand livres of unearned income as typical of it.

If the ambiguities in the Jacobins' position go far to explain the difficulties of the revolutionary government and the ultimate fall of Robespierre, the contradictions in that of the Sansculottes go even further. It is evident that the Sansculottes fought above and before all against the feudal aristocracy; as witness the taking of the Bastille and the enthusiasm of the volunteers. The sansculottes supplied the bourgeoisie with the revolutionary mass without which the old society could not have been overthrown. But when we have granted this, we must also admit that the very position of the Sansculottes in feudal society made them into a social force that was in many respects opposed to the bourgeoisie owning commercial capital.

Within the French Revolution there existed a popular movement, a specifically Sansculotte current of policy. Its origins may be sought in the deterioration of the conditions of life for small shopkeepers, artisans and labourers well before I789.6 It is significant that food crises brought the Sansculottes into action just as vigorously as the aristocratic conspiracy. The Sansculottes had their own forms of political activity and organization: " societes populaires " and " societes fraternelles" and the general assemblies of the Parisian sections which they dominated completely in I793-4.7 Thus there was a significant difference between any societe populaire and the Jacobin Club, which the Sansculottes attended seldom, if at all. This popular movement passed through its independent crises - for instance, that of early September I793 which Mathiez described as an " Hebertist upsurge," but which was really a " Sansculotte upsurge,"' followed rather than directed by Chaumette, Hebert and the Paris Municipal Council. Such insuriections had no close or exact relation with the general rhythm of the bourgeois revolution: the Sansculottes demanded the taxation of foodstuffs and the regulation of trade in

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them, which the Jacobin bourgeoisie only conceded to them under duress, on 29th September, I793.

All this throws light on the fundamental opposition, political and social, between the Sansculottes and the middle class.

The Sansculottes were direct producers. Peasants or artisans, they had to be free of seignorial control before they could dispose freely of their person. Hence their fundamental hostility to the feudal aristocracy; without them there could have been no bourgeois revolution. If artisans were to become free producers, who sold their goods where they found a market for them, they had to escape from the rule of the gilds with their masters, wardens and apprentice- ship regulations. Being direct producers, the Sansculottes regarded personal labour as the foundation of property. This conception of the worker holding private property rights over the means of his livelihood reflects the small-scale production of the craftsman and peasant; a mode of production which can only gain ground where the worker is a free property-owner - the peasant of the soil he cultivates, the artisan of his workshop and tools. Thus the Sansculottes became the driving-force of the bourgeois Revolution; for industrial capitalism also required the destruction of all the obstacles which seignorial power and the gild system placed in the way of the free development of production.

However, a society of independent petty producers working on their own account presupposes the break-up of the land and the scatter- ing of the other means of production; it cannot allow them to be concentrated. Thus the Sansculottes were profoundly hostile to the capital of large traders, monopolists and profiteers. Their ideal was a narrowly circumscribed state of society and production. As against the total freedom for production and trade they demanded taxation and control, with the object of preventing the concentration of property and of the means of production. In the year II the Parisian sections constantly protested against the concentration of war-production9: a specific issue which illuminates the opposition between popular movement and revolutionary government. The Sansculottes found it impossible to realize that, once a certain point of development is attained, the system of petty production to which they clung, itself produced the agents of its destruction; the scattered and individual means of production would then necessarily be transformed into socially concentrated means of production, the small property of a mass of independent direct producers would be supplanted by the large property of a capitalist minority.10 The Sansculottes' great love was for private property founded on

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personal labour, for the independence of shop, workshop and peasant holding; their great fear was to be thrown into the ranks of the propertyless. They did not forsee that capitalist private property founded upon wage-labour would necessarily supplant private property founded upon personal labour. They believed that the legal limitation of the size of personal fortunes and of the right of inheritance would be sufficient to maintain private property within the narrow limits of a system of independent petty production.

Thus on 2nd September, 1793, at the peak of the mass movement which forced the Convention into retreat, the Sansculottes of the Jardin des Plantes Section (later: Section of the Sansculottes), wrote as follows to the members of the Convention:

" Delegates of the people . . . you must speedily fix firm prices for essential foodstuffs, and firm levels for wages, and for the profits of industry and trade; you have the right and the powers to do so ... The aristocrats, the royalists, the moderates, the intriguers will say: ' You are interfering with property, which should be sacred and inviolable . . .' No doubt; but do these criminals ignore that the only foundation of property lies in the extent of physical needs ? . . . The Republic must guarantee to everyone ... the means of obtaining essential foodstuffs . . ." And the Sansculottes went on to demand not only the taxation of foodstuffs and wages, but also a strict limitation of property rights:

"Let the maximum of wealth be fixed; Let no individual possess more than this maximum; Let nobody rent more land than can be tilled with a specific number of ploughs; Let no citizen own more than one workshop or more than one shop.""x

I do not wish to insist on the contradictions inherent in such views, nor on the nature of the attempt to maintain private property in the means of production and exchange by fixing limits for it. Let us merely note the incompatibility of such a conception with the bourgeois conception of property as a " natural and imprescriptible right " according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of I789.

In political matters we note the same opposition between the bourgeois conceptions of democracy and the Sansculotte aspirations. The Sansculottes favoured a political system of direct democracy. The main features of this system were, first, the denial of political rights to citizens suspect of hostility to the Revolution and their exclusion from the general assemblies of the Sections, if need be by violence; Second, by the right to control representatives and to

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revoke their mandate, if they lost the confidence of their electors. The system had its significant political procedure. Thus voting was open, election by acclamation; to vote by secret ballot was, for the Sansculottes, a sign of bad civic behaviour and of aristocracy. They proposed to apply this system not only at the municipal, but also at the national level: on certain occasions the Sections declared that they would only accept decisions of the Convention if ratified by them- selves. The Sansculotte political ideal was thus a sort of direct democracy, wholly different from the liberal democracy which was in the minds of the bourgeoisie; and, incidentally, difficult to apply in the crisis through which the Republic was passing. Hence Robespierre and the Jacobins opposed it.

Such were the political and social positions of the popular move- ment. What were Robespierre's ? The logic of events made him a defender of social as well as of political democracy. He held that inequality of wealth could reduce political rights to a vain shadow. With Rousseau he believed that not only Nature, but also private property lay at the roots of inequality. Property was therefore an evil, though a necessary one. Though it had not to be suppressed, it must be controlled. On this point the continuity of Robespierre's social thought was extremely clear.

Thus on 5th April, I79I, in the discussion on the Law on the equality of inheritance, Robespierre had stated:

" Too great an inequality of wealth is the cause of political inequality, and of the destruction of freedom. It follows from this principle that the laws must always tend to diminish such inequality, which a certain number of men turn into an instrument of their pride, their passions and frequently of their crimes . . . Therefore, if all your laws, all your institutions do not tend to destroy this excessive inequality of wealth, you have done nothing for the public welfare."12

Two years later, on 24th April, I793, in his speech on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he repeated his views:

" Certainly no revolution was needed to teach the world that the extreme disproportion between fortunes is the source of many an evil and many a crime; nevertheless, our conviction that the equality of wealth is a chimera, has not weakened." Robespierre consequently proposed a declaration to the effect that property was not a natural and imprescriptible right but a social institution guaranteed by the law.'3

We note the same tendency of thought and the same views in Robespierre's statements on another important question, that of the

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ROBESPIERRE AND THE POPULAR MOVEMENT OF I793-4 6I

cost of living. He shares the bourgeoisie's fondness for free trade; but also the Sansculottes' desire to limit that freedom. On 2nd December, I792, when food riots had broken out in the Department of Eure-et-Loir, Robespierre made an important speech on the question of the food-supply (subsistances). "Freedom of commerce is necessary" he argued " but only up to the point where murderous greed begins to abuse it." He then propounded the familiar Sansculotte ideas, notably the view that the people's right to food must override the right of property. " No man " he said " has the right to pile up bushels of corn by the side of his fellow-man dying of starvation. The right to live is the first of all rights . . . It is no longer true to say that property can ever be in conflict with men's maintenance, which is as sacred as life itself. Whatever is necessary to preserve that, is the common property of all society." And he concluded: " I do not deprive the rich of any honest profit or legitimate property; I only deprive them of the right to attack that of others. I do not destroy commerce, but the banditry of monopolists."14

Holding these principles, Robespierre believed in a social ideal of a society of small independent producers, each owning a field, shop or workshop, large enough to maintain his family. This expressed his moral feeling. These were the " poor," who lived by their labour and owed nothing to any man; who gained and maintained the small property that safeguarded their independence by means of those qualities of wrork, thrift and frugality which Robespierre rated so highly. Thus his social ideal came close to the aspirations of the small peasants, the agricultural day-labourers, the journeymen, the artisans, the small shopkeepers of the later eighteenth century - in a word, of the Sansculottes. It was indeed made to the measure of the economic conditions under which the majority of independent producers lived at this time. Robespierre was as great an enemy of commercial and monopolist capital as of feudal aristocracy.

* * *

The policy of Robespierre and the revolutionary government of the year II may be summed up as a constant effort to overcome this contradiction, to reconcile the opposed interests of the property- owning bourgeoisie and the popular classes, of Jacobins and Sansculottes. While the aristocratic danger was imminent and popular support necessary, the alliance between these divergent social groups stood. When victory was in sight, in the spring of the

PAST AND PRESENT

year II (I794) the dangers of the Sansculotte alliance became apparent. Robespierre had too profound an understanding of politics to under- estimate the balance of social forces, or to overlook the fact that the bourgeoisie played the main part in the direction of the Revolution. He cared too much about the interests of the bourgeoisie to attach himself irrevocably to the Sansculottes;. but he also cared too much about the needs of the Sansculottes to find grace in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. In this connexion it is significant that Robespierre, who had clearly defined his social views in December, I792, and April, I793, ceased to express them once he became a member of the Committee of Public Safety; it is remarkable that he refrained from speaking in the debates which preceded the voting of general price control (the Law of the General Maximum) on 29th September, I793. He was no demagogue. He realised that he could not yield to the popular movement without destroying the social equilibrium upon which the action of the government rested.

For a year, from July I793, to Thermidor, year II, Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety attempted, in politics, to discipline the popular movement and to enclose it in the framework of the Jacobin dictatorship and the revolutionary government; in social affairs, to make just enough concessions to the Sansculottes to attach them to the new regime without terriying the possessing classes.

During the summer of 1793, at the peak of the Revolution's crises, when it seemed to be clear that the Convention could not achieve victory without the people, the popular movement gained momentum and imnosed a series of revolutionary measures on the Convention and on the Committee of Public Safety, which had not yet established itself firmly. On 27th July, 1793, the day of Robespierre's entry into the Committee of Public Safety, the Convention passed the law which made death the penalty for profiteering. On 23rd August the Convention - against its inclinations and the opposition of the Committee of Public Safety - decreed general conscription (levee en masse), which had been the essential plank of the Sansculottes' programme of national defence. On 5th September, a popular insurrection forced it to set up the Revolutionary Army. On I7th September, it adopted the Law of Suspects. Finally, on the 29th, it resigned itself to voting the law of general price-control, which taxed all foodstuffs and other essential goods and controlled trade in them. The popular surge of September I793 thus produced the Terror, the organisation of surveillance and repression by the Law of Suspects, the voting of taxes demanded by the Sansculottes, the organisation of a Revolutionary Army to requisition food from the

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peasants; but it also gave a powerful impetus to the formation of revolutionary government. The Committee of Public Safety saw its powers strengthened. On I3th September it was granted the right to present to the Convention the list of members for the Committee of General Security and of all the other committees. This measure was decisive, for it gave the Committee of Public Safety pre-eminence and the reality of power.

From then on the revolutionary government took shape with increasing rapidity. The Committee of Public Safety supervised the general co-ordination of emergency powers and established control over the popular organizations. The essential problem of the autumn of I793 was to apply universal national service efficiently by getting the local authorities into action and breaking down the last resistance to it: national defence was patently the supreme task, and revolutionary defence was closely linked with it. On loth October, 1793, St. Just secured a decree to the effect that the govern- ment would remain revolutionary while the war lasted. This meant that the Constitution passed in June 1793, was to be definitely put on the shelf, the elective principle to be subordinate to the author- itarian. The decree setting up the Revolutionary Government of the I4th Frimaire, year II (4th December, 1793) went beyond this. Such elected local authorities as still survived were to be under the supervision in each region of a national agent, a striking anticipation of the Napoleonic prefect. Elections were abolished; a decree of 5 Brumaire (26th October) had already suspended municipal ones. The Representatives on Mission from the Convention and the National Agents were merely to " consult " the " societes populaires." Thus the sovereignty of the people and the electoral power were concentrated, not - as Mathiez stated - in the Clubs, but in the hands of the apparatus of government.15

The consequences of all this for Sansculotte democracy were serious. The Sansculottes clung above all to their electoral power, which symbolised the sovereignty of the people. This they now lost. Thus in Paris, the Revolutionary Committees of the Sections had at first been elected by the general assemblies. In the autumn they came under the censorship of the General Council of the municipality; in the winter, under the control of the Committee of General Security. By the spring of the year II their members were purely and simply nominees of the Committee of Public Safety. The General Council of the Paris municipality went the same way. After Germinal, year II and the execution of Hebert and Chaumette, the Committee of Public Safety deposed a good many of its members

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and nominated replacements without consulting the Sections.16 The new Robespierrist municipality, under Payan, exercised strict control over the general assemblies and forbade voting by acclamation or simply by open ballot: thus all the characteristic features of Sansculotte democracy were proscribed. The authorities went further. In Floreal and Prairial, under pressure from the govern- ment and the Jacobin Club, the " societes sectionnaires " which were the basic units of the popular movement, were dissolved; the reason most generally given was, that the Jacobins must be the sole centre of public opinion.17 In fact, the popular organisations and Sansculotte deiimocracy appeared to be incompatible with the revolutionary government and Jacobin dictatorship. Caring above all for central- isation, the revolutionary government obviously gained in efficiency by such measures. However, in striving to squeeze the popular movement into the Jacobin framework, it lost that confident Sansculotte support which had brought it to power in the preceding summer. Thus the spring of the year II saw in political matters the irrevocable divorce between the popular movement and the revolutionary government.

What was even more serious, the incompatibility between Sansculotte social aspirations and the purposes of bourgeois revolution emerged at the same moment. From September 1793 onwards, the Committee of Public Safety had held the popular social agitations in check as well as it could.18 When at the end of winter, food-shortage made itself felt again, the agitation revived. It was supported and given resonance by a group of men, not so much a party as a group with common ambitions, if only those of achieving power: men like Vincent, secretary-general of the War Ministry, Ronsin, general of the Revolutionary Army, Momoro, administrator of the Department of Paris. This group is commonly known as the Hebertists, because Hebert acted as their spokesman in his journal Le Pere Duchesne. Utilising the popular demands for its political ambitions, the group demanded the confiscation of the property of suspects for the benefit of Sansculottes, the strict application of general price-control, a new law against profiteers. While they stood for this programme, the Hebertist group could count on popular sympathy, and thus threaten the Committee of Public Safety with another insurrection.

The Committee multiplied concessions to avoid such a conflict. The general Maximum, in preparation since Brumaire, was published on 6 Ventose (24th February, 1794), and a new law against profiteers was announced. Above all, on 8 Ventose (26th February) Saint-Just,

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in a famous report, proposed decrees to settle the fate of suspects and their property. On the same day the Convention decided the confiscation of such property; on the I3th (3rd March, I794) it called upon the Committee of Public Safety to draw up a survey of of " indigent " patriots and to propose " the means of indemnifying the unfortunate with the property of the enemies of the Revolution."'9 Albert Mathiez has hailed these Ventose Decrees as " the programme of a new revolution." Their purpose, it is argued, was " to raise to social life . . . the class of the eternal disinherited."20 In fact- and without throwing any doubt on the sincerity of Robespierre and Saint-Just here2l -these decrees bear the mark of the indecision which underlay the social ideas behind them, and of the contradictions in the political position which gave them birth. The Ventose Decrees are a political step in the continuous struggle against aristocracy, rather than a new social movement. Their purpose was not so much to raise the Sansculottes to propertied status as to destroy the society of the Old Regime root and branch. " The Republic " declared Saint-Just " is constituted by the destruction of what is opposed to it." Saint-Just did not attack property as such; that of patriots was to remain sacred and inviolable. The fortunes of the new regime's enemies were to be confiscated, and used to indemnify its supporters, the indigent patriots. The aim of the measure was thus essentially political. The government wished to gain the support of the Sansculottes in order to achieve victory at home as well as on the frontiers. What better means of securing it than by raising them to the dignity of property-owners on the ruins of aristocracy ? The Ventose Decrees thus belong with such measures as the confiscation of property for rebellion or treason. Seen in this light, they cease to have exceptional character. Throughout the year II there is ample documentary evidence, from bourgeois Jacobin as well as from Sansculotte sources, of this determination to destroy aristocracy and to distribute its remains to the victors.22 The Ventose Decrees moreover made little impression on the Sans- culottes. The social agitation persisted and encouraged the Hebertists in their attempt to organise a new popular insurrection. On the eve of the campaigning season, the government could not run this risk. The Hebertists were arrested on 24 Vent6se, year II (I4th March, 1794) tried and executed on 4 Germinal (24th March).

The Ventose crisis is really the crucial point in the relations between revolutionary government and Sansculottes, Robespierrists and popular movement. The tragedy which ended in Thermidor began in Vent6se. Until then the Committee of Public Safety and

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Robespierre had somehow managed to maintain the balance between the dissimilar social elements on which the revolutionary govern- ment rested, middle bourgeoisie and popular classes, Jacobins and Sansculottes. In Ventose they had to make their choice: they could not but choose the class for which they stood, and which, moreover, played a decisive part in the Revolution.

Thenceforth the crisis rapidly became more acute. The popular movement drew steadily further away from the revolutionary govern- ment, while the Robespierrists attempted to maintain the necessary alliance.

The Hebertist trial did not touch the Sansculottes directly, and the subsequent repression was, all things considered, moderate. However, the trial disconcerted the Sansculottes, and demoralised them in proportion as Hebert the journalist had succeeded in giving clear formulations of their own confused aspirations. Government measures against the sectional organisations in the spring of the year II finally turned the Sansculottes away from political activity. The general assemblies ceased to take an interest in general politics and confined themselves to voting conformist motions. " The Revolution is frozen " Saint-Just was soon to say. This profound disaffection of the popular movement from the revolutionary govern- ment is the essential explanation of the 9th Thermidor and of Robespierre's fall.

* * *

Let us, at the end of this rapid analysis, sum up the achievements and weaknesses both of the popular movement and of Robespierre. Once again we shall need to insist on the contradictions in which both were entangled.

The popular movement made possible the establishment of the revolutionary government; hence it made possible the defeat of internal and external counter-revolution, the triumph of the bourgeois revolution. However, it was unable to achieve its own objects, its ultimate failure being due to an internal contradiction. Politically, the Sansculottes represented the advanced party of the Revolution. Economically, they remained attached to petty independent production, to the world of the handicraftsman and small shopkeeper. They were doomed to decline with this system of production, as and when property based on the personal labour of its owner disintegrated, and the direct producers were expropriated for the benefit of capitalist private property, founded on other

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people's work - on wage-labour. This contradiction doomed all the Sansculotte efforts in the year II to found that egalitarian republic which would have been their salvation. Failure to realise this has led Daniel Guerin into a serious error of historical perspective, for he wrongly considers the Sansculotte movement as an advance guard, and the attempts of the year II as the embryo of proletarian revolution. " In 1793 " he writes " bourgeois revolution and the embryo of proletarian revolution overlap."23 That is to mistake the Sansculottes for proletarians instead of the petty independent producers they were. No doubt it would be wrong to describe them as reactionaries in economic and social matters. So long as they fought against feudal aristocracy, they marched in the direction of history; if, under the Revolution, they were the enemies of commercial capitalism, they were not hostile to industrial capitalism.24 However, once the feudal relations of production had been completely destroyed and the triumph of industrial capitalism had been assured, the descendants of the Sansculottes, craftsmen, small shopkeepers, small peasants, would take their stand against it, would occupy economically retrograde positions and would attempt to turn back the wheel of history.25

Robespierre was beset by a similar contradication. Fundamentally a disciple of Rousseau, he was far from having absorbed the thought of the materialist philosophers of the 18th century. Though-as befitted a follower of the author of the Social Contract - he favoured political and social democracy, it must be admitted that he had no strong consciousness of the economic problems of his age. In pursuing his ideal of an egalitarian republic of petty independent producers he too became the defender of an obsolete economic system, which stood in the way of an economic evolution that led to the triumph of capitalist concentration. We observe here how profound an antagonism may exist between the aspirations of a social group or an individual and the objective state of the historic necessities. Neither Robespierre nor Saint-Just had the least suspicion that their action might depend on something other than their will and energy. They had faith in the beneficent influence of laws and institutions; but the most rigorous laws are incapable of turning aside the course of history. Robespierre's case measures the inability of a man, however great, to pass beyond the frontiers of his epoch.

Nevertheless, however great Robespierre's ultimate failure, he remains in more than one sense the incarnation of the popular Revolution. The middle class has been well aware of this. It has

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concentrated its hatred against him, turned him into the scapegoat of the Revolution, and piled up round his figure those errors and prejudices which the historian must destroy if he is to restore the real picture of Robespierre. He will forever remain " the Incorruptible." He made a great mark on history. His mere name can still make men devote themselves unswervingly, to the point of supreme sacrifice, to serving the ideal of fraternal equality which for him was the essence of the Republic of the Year II. Michelet was often unjust to Robespierre, but he was not mistaken in concluding his History of the French Revolution with the follow- ing passage:

" A few days after Thermidor, a man who is still alive and was then ten years old, was taken by his parents to the theatre. After the performance he admired the long file of brilliant carriages, which he observed for the first time. Men in livery, hat in hand, addressed the spectators as they left: " Do you need a carriage, master ?" The child did not understand these new words too clearly. He asked for an explanation, and was told merely that there had been a great change since the death of Robespierre."

Paris A. Soboul.

NOTES 1 This is no place for a bibliography on Robespierre. We may however

recall that Ernest Hamel's Histoire de Robespierre 3 vols. (Paris i865, i866, I867) remains the fundamental work on the subject.

Robespierre's works are still in process of publication by the Societe des Etudes robespierristes. The following have so far been published:

i. Robespierre a Arras: Les oeuvres litteraires en prose et en vers, recueillies et publiees par Eugene Desprez et Emile Lesueur; one vol. (Paris, 1912).

2. Robespierre a Arras: Les oeuvres judiciaires, recueillies et publiees par Emile Lesueur; one vol. (Paris, 1914).

3. Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre, recueillie et pubiiee par Georges Michon; 2 vols. (Paris, 1926, 1941).

4. Discours, recueillis et publies sous la direction de Marc Bouloiseau, Georges Lefebvre et Albert Soboul; 2 volumes have appeared (I789 - sept-

embre 1791), (Paris, 1950, 1952). 2 Sur le droit de vote des comediens et des Juifs, 23 decembre 1789. Sur le droit de citoyennete des Juifs portugais, espagnols et avignonnais, 28 janvier I790 (Discours, I, I67 et 213).

3 Sur le droit de vote, 22 octobre I789. Sur les conditions d'eligibilite, 29 octobre 1789, Sur les conditions de cens exigees des citoyens actifs, 25 janvier I790, Sur la necessite de revoquer les decrets qui attachent 1'exercice des droits du citoyen a la contribution du marc d'argent ou d'un nombre determine de journees d'ouvrier, avril I79I, Sur le marc d'argent, 28 mai I791, Sur le marc d'argent et le cens electoral, II et I2 aofit I79I (Discours, I, I30, 133, 200, II, I58, 427, 6I7 et 63I).

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4 Sur i'affaire de Nancy, 3I aofit et 3 septembre 1790 (Discours, 1, 527, 529 et 535). 5 Albert Mathiez, La Revolution francaise, III, 4.

6 See C. E. Labrousse: La crise de l'economie franfaise a la fin de l'Ancien Regime et au debut de la Revolution, one vol. (Paris 1944). This volume is devoted to the crisis in the wine-grov;ing industry. However, the author poses the general problem: " A Revolution of poverty or one of prosperity ?"

7 See Ernest Mellie, Les sections de Paris pendant la Revolution fran;aise (2I mai I790- I9 vendemiaire an IV), Organisation, Fonctionnement. One vol. (Paris I898). See also Albert Soboui, Les papiers des sections de Paris (I790- an IV), Repertoire sommaire. One vol. (Paris I950).

8 Albert Mathiez, La Rgvolutionfranfaise, iII, 41. P&titions de la section des Tuileries, 4 fevrier I793 (B.N., ms, F. fr., Nouv.

acq., 2647, f.7), de la societe des Hommes libres de la section du Pont-Neuf, Ier mois an II (Ibid., 2713, f.46), de la societe populaire et de 1'assembile generale de la section de 1'Unit&, 4 pluviose an II (A.N., D III 255, d.2), de la section du Bonnet-Rouge (Ibid., 253", d.I). 10 See K. Marx, Capital, Bk. I, sect. VIII: Primitive Accumulation.

11 " Section des Sansculottes. Addresse a la Convention Nationale, 2 septembre I793." Printed. 6 p in-8°, Bibliotheque Nationale Lb'40 2140; quoted in George Lefebvre, Questions agraires a:z remps de ia Terreur (Strasbourg I932) 78. In order to arrive at a precise definition of the social status of the sans-culottes it would be necessary to undertake a series of exact social analyses. As an example of research undertaken in this direction, the works of George Rude and Richard Cobb should be mentioned. The former discusses the social composition of the popular riots in Paris from I789 to I793, the latter the political and social composition of the Paris Revolutionary Army, see George Rude: La composition sociale des insurrections parisiennes de I789 a I791 (Annales historiques de la Revolution Frangaise, 1952, p. 256) and Les e9neutes du 25, 26 Fevrier I793 a Paris (Ibid., I953, p. 33). Richard Cobb, L'Armee revolutionnaire parisienne (Composition sociale et politique) (Bulletin de la Societe d' Historie moderne, Juin-Juillet, 1952, p. 4) and L'Armee revolutionnaire parisienne a Lyon et dans la Region Lyonnaise. (Lyon I952). 12 Discours, 1I, 8 r.

13 Moniteur, reimpression, XVI, 213. 14 ibid. XIV, 636. 15 ibid. XVIII, 618; Albert Mathiez, La Revolution franfaise, III, 77. 16 See Michel Eude, Etudes sur la Commune robespierriste. one vol. (Paris I937). 17 From the end of Germinal to the beginning of Prairial, year II, 39 popular

societies were dissolved. For their addresses at this time, see Serie C. of the Archives nationales.

18 We may here recall the movement of dechristianisation of Brumaire, year II. Though the Sansculottes took part in it immediately and spread its effects widely, nevertheless I do not think that this was a specifically Sansculotte movement. Among its originators may be found such shady figures as Proli, Pereira, Desfieux, " les agents de l'etranger." In his speech of 27 Brumaire, year II, Robespierre clearly hinted that those who were destroying altars might well be counter-revolutionaries disguised as demagogues. (Moniteur, reimpression, XVIII, 459). 19 Moniteur, reimpression, XIX, 565 and 61.

20 Albert Mathiez, La Revolution fran;azse, III, I47 and I49. 21 See Georges Lefebvre, Questions agraires au temps de la Terreur. The

author has no doubt that there was political trickery; but if the majority of the Convention and of the Committee of Public Safety was disingenuous, the Robespierrists were not. (p. 5).

22 See the texts cited in Albert Soboul, A propos d'un article sur la Revolution francaise (Annales, 1952, no. 4, 5I7). For instance, Hanriot, commander of

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the Paris National Guard told the Jacobins on Brumaire 7, year II: " What the aristocrats lose must be given to the patriots; houses, land - all must be divided among those who conquer the criminals" (Journal de la Montagne, 9 brumaire, an II).

23 Daniel Guerin, La Lutte de classes sous la premiere Republique. Bourgeois et Bras-nus (I793-1797). 2 vols. (Paris I946) I, 5, 37.

24 It is significant that in his draft Declation of rights Momoro guarantees the inviolability only of industrial property (article XXVII); " what are falsely called territorial properties " are to be inviolable only " until the moment when the Nation will have established laws on this matter " (Bibl. Nat. Lb4l 2978).

25 See K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist party, I. Bourgeois and Proletarians.