Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory

471 Pages·1970·9.392 MB·English

by  Isser Woloch

JACOBIN LEGACY

JACOBIN LEGACY
The Democratic Movement Under
the Directory
By hser Woloch
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Princeton University Press 1970
Copyright © 1970 by Princeton University Press
All Rights Reserved
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This book has been composed in Linotype Granjon
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For T{ancy and D avid

PREFACE
Slowly but relentlessly Jacobinism was suppressed following
Robespierre’s fall. In November 1794, four months after Thermidor,
the National Convention ordered the Paris Jacobin Club closed,
while representatives were sent on missions to purge and subdue the
provincial clubs or popular societies. In retreat and disarray, those
that survived quietly complied with a decree of August 1795 that
dissolved all clubs provisionally. A few weeks later, Thermidor was
consummated when the Directory regime took its place under
the Constitution of the Year III. Faithful to the libertarian spirit of
1789, however, the new charter offered a vague guarantee for free­
dom of association. Under this ostensible protection, and the general
amnesty that inaugurated the transition, Jacobins began tentatively
to regroup. Though their new clubs were dispersed by the Direc­
tory several times, it was not until Bonaparte swept away all the
scruples of liberal constitutionalism that political clubs were defin­
itively banned and Jacobinism interred. The August 1795 decree
did not prove decisive.
Historiographically, however, it has been. The literature on the
original clubs of 1789-95 is enormous, comprising over two hun­
dred local studies and several works of synthesis. As against this im­
pressive corpus, the only work on the later clubs is Aulard’s vintage
essay on the Paris Club of 1799, and studies of the Sarthe and
Toulouse by M. Reinhard and J. Beyssi. As Professor Godechot has
observed in his standard survey of revolutionary institutions, the
clubs of the Directory years have hardly been studied at all. This
striking disproportion may be explained with some justification by
the state of the sources. When the government ordered the popular
societies closed in 1795, it stipulated that their papers be seques­
tered and stored by the local authorities. Many of these records
(minute books, correspondence, membership lists) therefore sur­
vive in communal archives and have since been edited or used as the
basis for local case studies. During the Directory, by contrast, the
sequestration of whatever papers the clubs may have kept was
rarely ordered. Hence no ready-made body of detailed sources
awaits the historian seeking material on the later clubs. Their his­
tory must instead be written from relatively fragmentary sources
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scattered among the voluminous political and administrative records
of the Directory era.
The resulting imbalance of scholarship has been detrimental in
two ways. In the first place it limits our perception of the phenom­
enon of Jacobinism itself since it serves to cut off its history arbi­
trarily. Secondly, it encourages our habitual underestimation of the
Directory period’s significance. Admittedly, the Directory years are
overshadowed by two commanding peaks of French history. After
the epoch-making days of revolutionary government and popular
revolution they indeed loom as a depressing aftermath of social
malaise, second-class leadership, and incipient militarism. Viewed
from the other end, they must likewise appear as a prolonged prel­
ude to the Napoleonic experience. But this does not mean that the
conflicts and issues raised by the democratic revolution of the Year
II were definitively settled or irrelevant to the Directory. On the con­
trary, to trace these out is to contribute part of the answer to how
and why the French Revolution issued in dictatorship.
Recently some beginnings have been made towards rediscovering
the history of those years. In the classic French genre of local his­
tory, two exhaustive studies have appeared after an hiatus of thirty
years since Marcel Reinhard’s pioneering book on the Sarthe de­
partment: P. Clemendot’s volume on the Meurthe, and J. Surat-
teau’s study of Mont-Terrible. Work on international movements of
revolutionary expansion and counterrevolution by J. Godechot and
R. R. Palmer has produced a substantial réévaluation of the Direc­
tory’s importance in the history of Western Europe. Meanwhile,
the origins of revolutionary socialism have been placed under the
microscope by a veritable renaissance in the historiography of Babeuf,
Buonarroti, and the Conspiracy of Equals.
Counterrevolution and Babeuvism have the virtue of being pal­
pable and even dramatic; this book will focus on the more mun­
dane position of the democrats or Neo-Jacobins. Its dual objective
is to provide a fresh perspective on the history of Jacobinism, and
on the fate of the Directorial republic. The principal advantage to
the overview attempted here is that it relates a number of themes
even if no single theme is examined exhaustively. To have limited
the study to the clubs in one department, or to the democratic press,
or to career line analysis of selected groups (to name some of the
possible alternatives) would have been to rule out a perception of
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their interconnections. Obviously, too, there was an enormous range
of local diversity in France, both circumstantial and fundamental,
and it must not be assumed that this study is a blithe attempt to
ignore or minimize this. Yet the existence of local diversity did not
prevent a sense of common purpose from developing among the
Neo-Jacobins, nor did it preclude certain similarities in their activi­
ties, which gravitated around newspapers and clubs. In short, one
is confronted here with a classic forest-trees problem, and the ap­
proach offered here is one opting for a view of the forest. The focus
of this study therefore fits its subject’s special characteristics. Its
equilibrium lies between local and national settings, between expres­
sions of consciousness and modes of behavior, between the forms
of political life and the social realities that they so imperfecdy en­
compassed. If this must be reduced to a single concern, it is an at­
tempt to rediscover a political culture in several of its dimensions.
Two threads of continuity in the history of Jacobinism are the role
of political clubs, and the constellation of attitudes which I have
labeled “the democratic persuasion.” This said, it is apparent that
as Jacobinism evolved after the Year II it suffered several vicissi­
tudes. Immediately after the Directory was launched, Babeufs pro­
gram of insurrection and communism challenged, disoriented, and
ultimately compromised Jacobins or, as they now appeared, tradi­
tional democrats. To put it another way, the difficulties of reorien­
tation to the Directory regime were complicated by Babeufs
meteoric rise. After the suppression of the Babeuvists, an upsurge
of royalist reaction threatened to overwhelm the Jacobins along with
the republic itself. The pains of reorientation were followed by the
trauma of another struggle for bare survival. Only after these
obstacles were negotiated did an eventual Jacobin resurgence occur.
The Year VI (1797*98) was the year of Neo-Jacobinism. As the
republic entered an unprecedented period of peace and normalcy
(following the Directory’s famous anti-royalist coup d’etat of 18
fructidor, and the treaty of Campoformio) the Jacobins regained a
significant measure of initiative. Their legacy was now embodied by
several hundred clubs, or Constitutional Circles as they were called,
on which this study will focus. It was an elusive movement (fore­
shadowing the non-communist Left of modern times), but it yields
to analysis. What was the social role of these clubs? What were the
patterns of political and civic activism that they practiced? What
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attitudes did they represent and what concrete issues did they raise?
Did the endless struggles over patronage take place within a larger
context of ideological conflict? And finally, did Neo-Jacobinism
produce any resonance among the cadres of Parisian sansculottes?
By concentrating on these questions, Part II attempts to explain
how the Jacobin legacy was translated into a movement that kept
alive the Revolution’s democratic promise under the Directory,
The extent of the Jacobin resurgence became visible in the Year
VI elections and produced an important consequence. Part III sug­
gests how conservative republicans (Directorials) and democratic
republicans (Neo-Jacobins) confronted each other in what almost
amounted to party rivalry. When the Directory’s repressive action
ultimately aborted this process, the effect was to deny legitimacy to
the Jacobin opposition, and thereby weaken the republic enor­
mously. A dramatic but short-lived revival of Jacobinism during the
war crisis of 1799 (treated in Part IV) opened the question again,
and the answer this time was final.
Los Angeles
January 1969
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