Jacobin Club

The Jacobin Club, the most famous of the political clubs of the French Revolution, had its origin in the Club Breton, which formed at Versailles shortly after the opening of the Estates General in 1789.

Rise to power

After the fall of the monarchy Robespierre was in effect the Jacobin Club, and it was by his standard all others were judged. With his fall the Jacobins would come to an end.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Not the least singular thing about the Jacobins is the very slender material basis on which their overwhelming power rested. Some groaned under their autocracy, which they compared to that of the Inquisition, with its system of espionage and denunciations which no one was too illustrious or too humble to escape. Yet it was reckoned by competent observers that, at the height of the Terror, the Jacobins could not command a force of more than 3000 men in Paris. But the secret of their strength was that, in the midst of the general disorganisation, they alone were organised. The police agent Dutard, in a report to the minister Garat (30 April 1793), describing an episode in the Palais Egalité (Royal), adds: "Why did a dozen Jacobins strike terror into two or three hundred aristocrats? It is that the former have a rallying-point and that the latter have none". When the jeunesse dorée did at last organise themselves, they had little difficulty in flogging the Jacobins out of the cafés into comparative silence.

Related Topics:
Inquisition - Espionage - Denunciation - 30 April - 1793 - Aristocrat

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Long before this the Girondin government had been urged to meet organisation by organisation, force by force; and it is clear from the daily reports of the police agents that even a moderate display of energy would have saved the National Convention from the humiliation of being dominated by a club, and the French Revolution from the Terror. But though the Girondins were fully conscious of this, they were too timid, or too convinced of the ultimate triumph of their own persuasive eloquence, to act. In the session of April 30, 1793 a proposal was made to move the Convention to Versailles out of reach of the Jacobins, and Buzot declared that it was "impossible to remain in Paris" so long as "this abominable haunt" should exist; but the motion was not carried, and the Girondins remained to become the victims of the Jacobins.

Related Topics:
Girondin - Terror - April 30 - 1793

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Meanwhile other political clubs could only survive so long as they were content to be the shadows of the powerful organisation of the Rue St Honoré. The Feuillants had been suppressed on August 18, 1792. The turn of the Cordeliers came so soon as its leaders showed signs of revolting against Jacobin supremacy, and no more startling proof of this ascendancy could be found than the ease with which Hébert and his fellows were condemned and the readiness with which the Cordeliers, after a feeble attempt at protest, acquiesced in the verdict.

Related Topics:
August 18 - 1792 - Cordeliers

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

France was menaced by civil war within, and by a coalition of hostile powers without. The discipline of the Terror was perhaps necessary if it was to be welded into a united force capable of resisting this double peril. The revolutionary leaders saw in the Jacobin organization the instrument by which this discipline could be made effective. This is the apology usually put forward for the Jacobins by republican writers of later times; they were, it is said (and of some of them it is certainly true), no mere doctrinaires and visionary sectaries, but practical and far-seeing politicians, who realized that desperate ills need desperate remedies, and, by having the courage of their convictions, saved the gains of the Revolution for France.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~