National Convention

• 1. Introduction

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  The National Convention sat for the first time on the 20th of September 1792, and on that single day it held the fate of a king, a revolution, and a republic in its hands. Within twenty-four hours it had abolished the French monarchy entirely. Before it dissolved three years later, it had put a king on trial, executed him, unleashed a period of mass killing, abolished slavery across the French empire, and built the foundations of a modern welfare state. The questions that run through this documentary are not simply about what the Convention did, but how an elected assembly came to sanction terror in the name of the people it represented, and what, if anything, survived that contradiction.

• 2. A New Kind of Assembly

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  On the 26th of August 1792, primary assemblies across France elected the colleges that would then choose deputies to the new Convention. The election ran from the 2nd to the 10th of September. Despite expanding the vote to all French men aged twenty-one or older who had lived in one place for a year and lived by their labor, barely anyone showed up. Only 11.9 percent of an enlarged electorate cast a vote, a modest rise from the 10.2 percent who had voted in 1791, but still a striking abstention given the magnitude of the moment. In Paris, Maximilien Robespierre presided over the process personally, working with the radical press to shut out any candidate with royalist leanings. Across the whole of France, only eleven primary assemblies expressed any desire to keep the monarchy. The full Convention numbered 749 deputies, not counting another 33 from the French colonies, only some of whom reached Paris in time to participate. Among the more unusual members were Thomas Paine and Anacharsis Cloots, both appointed by the Girondins. The body met first in the Salle des Cent-Suisses, moved the next day to the Salle du Manège with its poor acoustics and cramped public space, and from the 10th of May 1793 settled in the immense Salle des Machines, where crowds in the public galleries shouted and applauded to steer the debates.

• 3. Three Factions, One Chamber

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  Lawyers made up the single largest professional group inside the Convention. The political landscape, however, was divided into three named factions that did not map neatly onto occupation or origin. The Montagnards, or the Mountain, took their name from the high bleachers where they sat; they numbered somewhere between 302 and 309 deputies and were the most disciplined bloc, with over 94 percent voting in alignment on core questions. The Girondins, also called Brissotins after their most prominent speaker Jacques Pierre Brissot, numbered between 178 and 227 deputies; they drew their name from the Gironde region, though many were Parisian in origin, and they split on key votes, with only about 70 percent voting together on the same issues. The Plain, or Marais, sat on the floor between the other two factions and ranged from 153 to 250 deputies, the least cohesive of the three, with barely 58 percent voting in common on core issues. During the early months the Plain sided with the Girondins, but as the Montagnards pressed for the execution of Louis XVI, the Plain shifted. The discovery on the 20th of November of a hidden cache of 726 personal documents signed by Louis pushed opinion sharply against him. At his trial he denied recognizing papers that bore his own signature.

• 4. The Fall of the Girondins

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  Military reverses from the First Coalition, the defection of general Charles François Dumouriez to the enemy, and the uprising in the Vendée that began in March 1793 gave the Montagnards powerful ammunition. They painted the Girondins as soft on enemies of the Republic. The Girondins resisted but ultimately accepted the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal and a new Committee of Public Safety. The crisis broke into the open with the insurrection of the 31st of May through the 2nd of June 1793, triggered in part by Jean-Paul Marat's trial and the arrest of radical sectional activists. On the 25th of May the Paris Commune marched on the Convention demanding the release of those activists. The Montagnard seizure of the Convention from the Girondins effectively handed power to a smaller body that would grow more lethal as the year wore on.

• 5. The Committee and the Terror

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  On the 5th of September 1793, armed Parisian sections surrounded the Convention again, demanding an internal revolutionary army, the arrest of suspects, and purges of the committees. The Convention yielded but kept formal control. Over the following weeks it moved at extraordinary speed: on the 6th it added Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varenne to the Committee of Public Safety; on the 9th it created the revolutionary army; on the 11th it decreed the Maximum for grain and fodder, setting price controls; on the 17th it passed the law on suspects; and on the 20th it tasked local revolutionary committees with drawing up lists of those suspects. The eight months from the autumn of 1793 to the spring of 1794, when Robespierre and his allies dominated the Committee of Public Safety, produced the period known as the Reign of Terror. The Terror was directed at alleged enemies of the Revolution across all classes and in the provinces as well as Paris. Marxian historian Albert Mathiez wrote that the severity of repressive measures in the provinces was in direct proportion to the danger of revolt. Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton, two of the more prominent men, were themselves executed on charges that their words threatened the Revolution. The Committee then eliminated the Hébertists, who had backed it, and the Dantonists, led by Danton, Delacroix, and Desmoulins, who had formed in reaction to the growing centralization of power. Having destroyed its own supporters, the Committee found that many Convention members who had voted with it through mid-1794 were no longer willing to do so.

• 6. Slavery and Saint Domingue

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  In 1792 the National Convention agreed to send three commissaries to Saint Domingue. Two of them, Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel, moved first to grant free men of color rights equal to those of white colonists. On the 5th of May 1793, Sonthonax and Polverel attacked the plantation system directly, forcing owners to improve conditions for enslaved people. Sonthonax then freed enslaved people who had been armed by their masters, reasoning they could not return to plantation life. On the 21st of June 1793 Polverel issued a proclamation in Cap Français freeing all slaves who agreed to fight for the French Republic against both internal and external threats. When the Society of the Friends of the Blacks pressed the National Convention to end the slave trade in the colonies, the Convention refused, with the Committee arguing that six million French people relied on the colonies to survive. On the 4th of February 1794, after hearing speeches from three deputies who had traveled from Saint Domingue, the Convention abolished slavery across the French colonial empire. The Committee of Public Safety, however, delayed sending the proclamation to the colonies for two months, apparently because of Robespierre's opposition. The Committee eventually circumvented him and dispatched the decree. Napoleon's attempt to restore slavery in 1801 undid this achievement, and the loss that followed cost France its most prosperous colony.

• 7. Welfare, Education, and Legacy

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  A law introduced on the 30th of May 1793 set a minimum salary of 1,500 livres for teachers and required that every town with a population of between 400 and 1,500 have at least one primary school. Under a public assistance law of the 19th of March 1793, state aid was to be distributed according to population in each department, work provided to the able-bodied, and home relief given wherever possible to other varieties of the needy. A later law of the 28th of June 1793 extended state aid through district agencies to the aged, to children, and, for the first time in the history of France, to unmarried mothers. Abandoned children were to be received in hospitals until they turned twelve, when they would be apprenticed. A law of the 9th of February 1794 established pensions for soldiers' dependents; a law of the 4th of June 1794 created pensions for war widows; and a law of the 11th of May 1794 established the Grand Livre de Bienfaisance Nationale, a register of state pensions for the rural poor. One study concluded, however, that decree after decree proclaimed the end of deprivation and that ever-larger appropriations were earmarked for poor relief, all to no lasting effect. In education, the Convention founded the École Polytechnique, the École Normale Supérieure, the École des langues orientales, the Conservatoire, and the Museum, along with the Grand Livre de la Dette publique. Its decree of the 4th of February 1794 ratifying the abolition of slavery was the first of its kind in any colonial empire, even if the law of the 20th of May 1802 later reversed it.