Jacobins

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jacobins began not as architects of terror but as a small group of deputies from Brittany who gathered quietly during the Estates General of 1789 at the Palace of Versailles. Within a few years, that modest caucus would become the most influential political club in French history, a nationwide movement with membership estimated at half a million or more, and a network of at least 7,000 chapters spread across the country. At the peak of their power, well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for what the government called political crimes. How did a club that began by debating constitutional questions turn into the engine of the Reign of Terror? And how did the word Jacobin outlast the revolution itself, traveling across borders and centuries to describe something far broader than the men who first answered to the name?

• 2. From Brittany to Paris

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  The Club Breton, as it was first called, started with a narrow membership: deputies from Brittany attending the Estates General. Figures such as Maximilien Robespierre, representing Artois, and the powerful comte de Mirabeau joined early, alongside Abbé Sieyès, Antoine Barnave, and Jérôme Pétion, among others. Meetings in those first months were held in secret, and few records survive of what was said or where the group gathered.

  After the March on Versailles in October 1789, the club shifted its base. It was re-founded in November 1789 as the Société de la Révolution, partly inspired by a letter from the Revolution Society of London congratulating France on regaining liberty. To house its growing membership, the group rented the refectory of a Dominican monastery on the Rue Saint-Honoré. Those Dominicans had long been nicknamed Jacobins by Parisians, because their first house in Paris stood on the Rue Saint-Jacques. The nickname attached itself to the club's members almost immediately.

  On the 8th of February 1790, the society adopted a formal constitution, its rules drawn up by Barnave and issued under the signature of the duc d'Aiguillon as president. The club's stated purposes were to discuss questions before the National Assembly in advance, to strengthen the constitution, and to correspond with similar societies forming throughout France. Any member who acted against the constitution or the rights of man was subject to expulsion. Within months, the English writer Arthur Young had joined on the 18th of January 1790, one of the first foreigners to enter through the club's newly open doors.

• 3. A Nation of Chapters

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  By the 10th of August 1790, one hundred and fifty-two affiliated clubs were already in correspondence with Paris. Counter-revolutionary activity in the spring of 1791 drove more citizens toward the clubs. By the close of that year, the network extended across all of France. At its height, at least 7,000 chapters operated across the country, bound by a centralized correspondence that the Paris club coordinated.

  The Paris club itself was a place of social contradictions. Membership required a subscription high enough to exclude working men, confining the rolls largely to well-off professionals and bourgeoisie. Robespierre was a lawyer; the brewer Santerre was a typical wealthy member. Aristocrats like the duc d'Aiguillon, the prince de Broglie, and the vicomte de Noailles also counted themselves members. Yet the club also contained figures like Michel Gérard, a peasant proprietor from Tuel-en-Montgermont in Brittany, whose plain speech was admired as popular wisdom and whose rough clothing became a fashion model for Jacobin style.

  Women were not admitted as members, though they were permitted to follow discussions from the balconies. The club claimed to speak for the people while drawing nearly all its active membership from those who already held property and standing. This gap between rhetoric and composition would shadow the Jacobins throughout their years of greatest power, and their opponents never stopped pointing to it.

• 4. The Girondin Split

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  Late in 1791, a faction of Jacobins in the Legislative Assembly began pressing for war against Prussia and Austria. Brissot led the call, supported by Pierre Vergniaud, Fauchet, Maximin Isnard, and Jean-Marie Roland. Robespierre, also a member of the Jacobin Club, took the opposing side and argued fiercely against war, though he did so from the club's floor rather than in the Assembly, where he held no seat. He referred to the pro-war group dismissively as the faction from the Gironde, a label that stuck even though not all of them came from that department.

  In March 1792, Girondin pressure forced the Feuillant ministers from office. The Assembly declared war the following April. From that moment, the internal fault line in the Jacobin Club widened into a permanent divide between the group around Robespierre, later called the Mountain, and the Girondins. Neither faction ever held official status or formal membership lists; historians estimate the Girondins in the National Convention at around 150 deputies and the Mountain at around 120, with the remaining roughly 480 of 750 deputies forming the Plain.

  Outside Paris the Girondins were stronger, but inside Paris the Mountain commanded the crowds. The public galleries of the convention cheered loudly for Montagnard speakers and jeered the Girondins. By late 1792, the Girondins had stopped visiting the Jacobin Club altogether. Robespierre, with his 25-year-old protégé Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, had become the dominant voice there, and the split was effectively complete.

• 5. Purge and Terror

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  On the 2nd of June 1793, around 80,000 armed soldiers surrounded the Tuileries Palace, where the National Convention sat. In a chaotic session that day, the Convention expelled 22 leading Girondins, including Lanjuinais, Isnard, and Fauchet. Several of those expelled, among them Brissot, Pétion, Jean-Marie Roland, and Buzot, fled Paris to organize revolts in more than 60 of France's 83 departments against the Montagnard-dominated government.

  Robespierre, who earned the nickname l'Incorruptible for his refusal to bend his principles, entered the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793. By then, Danton, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot d'Herbois, and Billaud-Varenne were also in or entering the Committee, turning it into an instrument of the Mountain. In October 1793-21 former Girondin deputies were sentenced to death. The following spring brought internal purges: Hébert and followers were executed in March 1794, and Danton with 13 associates followed in April. In both cases, Robespierre had insinuated in the Convention that those men were "internal enemies" promoting tyranny.

  The government's province-wide campaign against what it labeled counter-revolution, conspiracy, and enemies of freedom resulted in 17,000 death sentences between September 1793 and July 1794. Robespierre declared the first maxim of his policy to be "lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror." On his speech of the 2nd of December 1792 he had articulated the underlying principle: "What is the first goal of society? To maintain the imprescribable rights of man. What is the first of these rights? The right to exist."

• 6. Fall and Closure

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  In late June 1794, three colleagues on the Committee of Public Safety turned on Robespierre. Billaud-Varenne, Collot d'Herbois, and Carnot called him a dictator. On 10 Thermidor, Year II, which fell on the 28th of July 1794, troops were sent to arrest leading Montagnards at the Hôtel de Ville and at the Jacobin Club itself, where members had been gathering every Saturday evening. Robespierre and 21 associates, including Saint-Just and Couthon, were sentenced to death by the National Convention and guillotined.

  What followed was the Thermidorian Reaction. Anti-Jacobin pamphlets appeared. Organized gangs called the jeunesse dorée, or Muscadins, attacked Jacobin members and assailed the club's hall in Paris. On 21 Brumaire, the Convention refused to order protection of the club. The Committee of General Security shut the meeting hall that night; it was padlocked at four in the morning. The following day, 22 Brumaire, which was the 12th of November 1794, the National Convention passed a decree permanently closing the Jacobin Club by a nearly unanimous vote and without debate. Within a year, 93 percent of the affiliated clubs across the country were also shuttered.

  Membership in the Paris club had already fallen to 600 by the time the doors closed, partly because of the financial disarray in the society and partly because of the club's continued association with atrocities in Nantes involving Jean-Baptiste Carrier. An attempt at revival came in July 1799 with the Réunion d'amis de l'égalité et de la liberté, headquartered in the Salle du Manège at the Tuileries, drawing roughly 250 members of the legislature including many former Jacobins. It published a newspaper, the Journal des Libres, and proclaimed the apotheosis of Robespierre and Babeuf. It lasted barely a month before being suppressed. Its members, finding themselves without options, gave their support to Napoleon Bonaparte.

• 7. Legacy and the Word Itself

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  After the revolution, the word Jacobin took on a life independent of the club and its members. Conservative writers across Europe used it as a pejorative for any politics deemed dangerously progressive. Anglophone progressives used it differently, as a pejorative for violent revolutionary excess, reserving the positive features of the revolution for the Girondins. In Britain the word carried a faint additional resonance from Jacobitism, the earlier monarchist movement tied to the deposed King James II of England, though the two had no actual connection.

  The Jacobins provided a political foundation that later movements drew on selectively. Anarchists borrowed the emphasis on mass movements, direct democracy, and left-wing populism. The Paris Commune was seen as the Jacobins' revolutionary successor. Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party, the Faisceau, claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the Jacobin movement. The Revolutions of 1848 across Europe drew on currents that the Jacobins had helped set in motion. Before the Russian Revolution, however, the word itself had already slipped into obsolescence, overtaken by terms like Marxism, anarchism, socialism, and communism.

  In modern France, Jacobin has shed its terror associations for the most part. It describes a position favoring equal formal rights, centralization of the state, and moderate authoritarianism. It is used as a self-identification by those who support a state education system that promotes civic values. The Jacobins also completed the abolition of feudalism in France, a process formally decided on the 4th of August 1789 but stalled by compensation requirements; in power, the Jacobins removed those requirements entirely. On that count at least, the Jacobin club's influence on French republican government, its secularism and its sense of nationhood, outlasted everything else the revolution produced.