By August 1793, 60 departments, or three-quarters of the total, were declared to be in a state of rebellion. The Mediterranean port of Toulon, occupied by the British fleet, defected to the British. 253), which unleashed enthusiastic support from the forces of popular radicalism in Paris and elsewhere – notably the sans-culottes – and provoked armed resistance from the forces of counter-revolution in the Vendee and around Bordeaux, Lyons and Marseilles. It was in effect a ‘declaration of total war’ (Blanning, 2000, p. So began the decree on the Levée en masse issued by the Convention in August 1793, a compulsory call-up of 750,000 men (all single men aged 18–25) and the harnessing of all human and material resources. Extract from the 3rd letter of Maximilien Robespierre to his constituents’ (trans. It stamps a great character on the National Convention and renders it worthy of the confidence of the French …In vain did an audacious faction and some insidious orators exhaust all the resources of calumny, charlatanism and chicane the courage of the republicans triumphed: the majority of the Convention remained unshakeable in its principles, and the genius of intrigue yielded to the genius of Liberty and the ascendancy of virtue. This great act of justice appalled the aristocracy, destroyed the superstition of royalty, and created the republic. The tyrant fell beneath the sword of the laws. on the place de la Revolution formerly called place Louis XV. 4 Figure 4 shows, beneath the severed head of Louis XVI, the words from the Marseillaise: ‘Let impure blood water our furrows.’ The caption reads: ‘Monday 21 January 1793 at 10.15 a.m. In Danton's words, ‘France threw down its gauntlet to Europe, and that gauntlet was the head of a king’ (quoted in Doyle, 1989, p. Again, the Revolution made a violent break with the French past and in doing so issued a defiant challenge to the rest of Europe. Marie-Antoinette, long defamed as ‘the Austrian bitch’ on suspicion of scheming for Austria's interests, was guillotined in October. He was guillotined in what became the place de la Revolution (formerly place Louis XV, now place de la Concorde). Addressed by his surname (‘citizen Capet’) just like any other citizen, he was, by a narrow majority vote, sentenced to death. In January 1793 Louis XVI was tried by the Convention for so-called crimes against the nation. In practice, only one-tenth of the electorate – the sans-culottes – ventured to vote. Theoretically, the legislature was now – for the first time in modern history – elected by universal male suffrage. (The term was taken from the Constitutional Convention which drew up the US Constitution in 1787.) The significance of this appeared two days later, when the Convention duly decreed the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of the French Republic with a new constitution. On 20 September 1792, under pressure from Robespierre and the Jacobins, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by a National Convention. ‘The French Revolution, anti-noble almost from the start, had also turned anti-clerical, anti-monarchical and (with the September massacres) terroristic’ (Doyle, 1999, p. Le Père DuchesneĮgged on the perpetrators, while the minister of justice, Georges Danton (1759–94), did nothing. In the ‘September massacre’, some 1,400 priests and suspected counter-revolutionaries were dragged from prison by rampaging sans-culottes, and together with common criminals and prostitutes were wantonly butchered. With a declaration by the Assembly in July 1792 of la patrie en danger (the fatherland in danger), Prussian troops on French soil in August, and the fall of the border fortress of Verdun in September, there was mass panic in Paris, with accusations of treachery against the king and queen, Lafayette (who fled abroad), ‘aristocrats’ and priests. 4.3 Birth of the republic: war, civil war and terrorĪfter the church and monarchy, ‘war was the third great polarizing issue of the Revolution’ (Doyle, 2001, p.
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