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EDICT OF TOLERATION. The Edict of Toleration (Edit de Tolérance), issued by Louis XVI in November 1787, took effect in January 1788. It granted civil rights to French Protestants (Calvinists, that is, since the very small number of French Lutherans were not included in this decree) for the first time since 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The Edict of Toleration did not explicitly grant Protestants political rights, which were recognized only after the call for elections to the Estates-General. In towns such as Nimes and Montauban, the substantial Protestant minority took a particularly active role in revolutionary politics in 1789 and 1790, leading to a counterrevolutionary Catholic backlash and violence in both instances. The extension of religious toleration to Protestants served as a precedent for the eventual extension of such rights to Jews by the Constituent Assembly.

EDUCATION. There was no comprehensive educational system in France on the eve of the Revolution. Nearly all education was conducted by religious orders in small, local schools. Boys and girls received primary education, but only boys continued on to secondary education, in an array of collèges across the country. Religious orders did reserve scholarship spaces for children of the poor in their schools, but by and large the children of the wealthy and the aristocratic elite fared better in their access to education, often through private tutors. There were more than 20 universities in France in 1789, the most important of them in Paris, but important faculties of law, medicine, theology, and the arts could be found in major provincial cities as well.

There was much debate about education during the Revolution, and many proposals, but relatively little successful reform, in part due to the political upheaval and the vicissitudes of war. In December 1789 the Constituent Assembly placed education under the responsibility of departmental administrations, and in practice many of the schools of the Old Regime continued to operate. By the law of 28 October 1790, educational institutions were exempt from sale as biens nationaux, but schoolteachers and university faculty were required to swear the civil oath of the clergy in 1791 and this produced serious divisions within the schools and the defection of many teachers. In September 1791 Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord delivered a report on behalf of the Education Committee calling for the complete reorganization of education, but these recommendations were never implemented.

A new Committee of Public Instruction convened under the Legislative Assembly, and in April 1792 Marie-Jean Condorcet delivered a report on behalf of that committee proposing a comprehensive proposal for national education, including the creation of lycées, but the declaration of war against Austria consigned that plan to the dustbin. In August 1792 all religious orders were disbanded, although individual clerics were allowed to continue to teach. The inability of local governments to collect new taxes, however, threw many schools into financial crisis.

The National Convention devoted more attention to education than the previous two assemblies. In March 1793 a new law permitted the sale of those biens nationaux owned by educational institutions that were not being used for education, the proceeds from which would be used to pay teachers. The law of 30 May 1793 mandated that all towns with a population between 400 and 1,500 should have at least one primary school, and established a minimum salary for teachers at 1,500 livres. The Constitution of 1793, though never implemented, declared education a civic right. In July 1793 Maximilien Robespierre introduced legislation modeled on the reforms first proposed by the martyred deputy, Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, calling for universal primary education for boys and girls that would stress practical and patriotic instruction. War and the Terror prevented the implementation of this legislation, and it was abandoned after 9 Thermidor.

The Thermidorians accomplished a great deal in the area of educational reform, reaffirming the principle of universal primary education, allowing the creation of both state and private schools, and adopting general curricula and course syllabi. A law adopted on 25 February 1795 provided a comprehensive plan for national schools, calling for the creation of écoles centrales in each department (restricted to boys only), establishing a curriculum, creating scholarships for the poor, and recommending fixed salaries for teachers. The Daunou Law, adopted in October 1795, revised that legislation and called for schools to be funded through the collection of fees, with separate schools to be created for girls. The Ecole Polytechnique was also created in 1795.

Under the Directory, efforts were made to improve financial support for education, but without notable success. Napoleon Bonaparte would dismantle much of the educational reform of the Revolution and lay the foundation for the modern French educational system.

EGYPTIAN CAMPAIGN. At the end of 1797, only Great Britain remained an active enemy of France. The First Coalition had crumbled in the face of Napoleon Bonaparte’s triumphant campaigns in Italy, and Napoleon received a hero’s welcome in Paris. The Directory considered a naval expedition against England, or Ireland, but ultimately decided against it. Egypt seemed an attractive alternative. A French presence in Egypt would serve to challenge British naval supremacy in the Mediterranean, and in the future could serve as a staging ground for a French expedition against India, where the French had been defeated by the British in the 1750s. Napoleon offered to lead the campaign, and on 19 May 1798 set sail from Toulon with a fleet of more than 400 ships (including 13 ships-of-the-line), some 35,000 troops, and a contingent of more than 150 scientists and other intellectuals.

Napoleon’s army easily defeated the Mameluke troops and occupied Cairo, but in August Admiral Horatio Nelson’s British fleet attacked the French fleet in Aboukir Bay and virtually destroyed it, leaving Napoleon’s forces stranded in Egypt. The French attack on Egypt brought Austria and Russia back into coalition with Great Britain, along with the Ottoman Empire, which claimed Egypt as a possession. In February 1799 Napoleon moved east into Syria with a force of some 10,000 men, where he easily defeated a Turkish army. Another Turkish force was engaged near Aboukir Bay in July 1799, and again the French army triumphed. Without naval support, however, Napoleon could accomplish no grand victory. On 23 August 1799 he turned over command of the army to General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, eluded the British naval blockade, and returned to France. Plague had already raced through the French ranks, and in June 1800 Kléber was assassinated. Not until the fall of 1801 were the remaining 19,000 troops evacuated to France.

The most enduring result of the Egyptian campaign derived from the scholarly part of the expedition. Several notable scientists accompanied Napoleon, including Gaspard Monge, the mathematician, and Claude Berthollet, a celebrated chemist. This was the first major contingent of Europeans to visit Egypt, and their task was both to spread the ideas of the Enlightenment and to study the remnants of ancient Egyptian civilization. Naturalists, geologists, archaeologists, and historians were among the scholars. They established the Institute of Cairo, discovered the Rosetta Stone (which eventually revealed the secret to Egyptian hieroglyphics), and surveyed the isthmus of Suez to explore the feasibility of a canal. Between 1809 and 1828, a 23-volume Description de l’Egypte would be published. This scholarly endeavor is credited with founding the field of Egyptology, but can also be seen as the first manifestation of modern orientalism, placing academic investigation in the service of colonialism.

ÉMIGRÉS. Over the course of the Revolutionary decade, roughly 150,000 émigrés left France, some voluntarily due to fear or as a protest of revolutionary reforms, others forced to flee due to political persecution. Approximately 25 percent of those emigrating were members of the clergy, 17 percent were members of the aristocracy, and the remaining 58 percent were drawn from the Third Estate. Emigrés left France in waves, generally prompted by political events. A first group of prominent aristocrats, including the Comte d’Artois (brother of Louis XVI), left immediately after the fall of the Bastille. More aristocrats fled due to the Great Fear, and another wave followed the October Days. Legislation against refractory priests brought a substantial number of émigrés among the clergy in 1792. The September Massacres late that year inspired another wave of emigration, as did the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793. The federalist revolt and its suppression further swelled the number of émigrés, and not surprisingly there was consistent emigration during the year of the Terror.

The émigrés sought many different destinations, and congregated in a number of different places. Several princes of the blood, including Artois and eventually the Comte de Provence, gathered in Coblenz, where a small émigré army eventually took shape. Turin was an early center of emigration and counterrevolutionary intrigue. Perhaps 25,000 émigrés fled to England, and a number made the Channel Islands their haven. Spain, Italy, and even Russia each received émigrés, as did the United States, where Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours and his family would make an important contribution.

Many of those who emigrated did so simply to seek refuge, while others were determined to combat the revolutionary tide from outside France. Particularly in the early years of the Revolution, émigré aristocrats played an active role in efforts to support Louis XVI and restore the absolute monarchy. The king was somewhat ambivalent about those efforts, mindful of aristocratic challenges to royal power throughout the last half of the 18th century. But his flight to Varennes was a failed effort to join émigré forces in Germany, and those forces supported the Austrian army when the two countries went to war in 1792. Emigré soldiers participated at the battle of Valmy, but the crushing defeat suffered there, followed by the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, dealt a crippling blow to émigré efforts to oppose the Revolution by military force. The disastrous expedition to Quiberon was the last serious effort in that regard, although émigré soldiers would continue to serve in the armies of Austria, Prussia, Great Britain, Russia, and Spain.

Revolutionary governments adopted shifting policies toward the émigrés. In December 1790 the Constituent Assembly decreed that any émigré holding an official post who failed to return within a month would lose his salary. In July 1791 those émigrés who failed to return were to be subject to a tripling of their taxes. But in September 1791, after Louis XVI had accepted the constitution, the Constituent Assembly repealed all anti-émigré legislation. In the face of continued émigré belligerence, however, the Legislative Assembly passed new legislation against those who had emigrated, calling in November 1791 for the death penalty against émigré conspirators and the sequestration of their property. All émigré land was ordered sequestered in February 1792, and was ordered sold as biens nationaux in July 1792. In August 1792 the families of émigrés were placed under surveillance and forbidden to hold public office, and in October all émigrés were banished from France in perpetuity, to be punished by death should they return. The Thermidorians would confirm and codify all previous legislation against émigrés. The early years of the Directory brought a relaxation in the enforcement of that legislation, and the return to France of some émigrés, but the Fructidor coup of 1797 harshened policy against émigrés once again. Only after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power were the majority of those who had fled France welcome to return, although many refused to do so until after the Restoration.

Three of the émigré princes would rule France between 1814 and 1848. Those aristocrats who had lost their titles were able to reclaim them. And while many émigrés lost land during the Revolution, some of it sold at auction, the wealthy aristocrats among them were generally able to reclaim their property. It was principally the small nobility and commoners among the émigrés who suffered permanent economic loss.

ENLIGHTENMENT. The Enlightenment was an 18th-century intellectual movement, dominated by French thinkers but not exclusively French, critical of Old Regime social and political institutions, but not overtly revolutionary in its calls for reform. Many of the ideas of the Enlightenment grew out of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, but the expansion of the French commercial economy and the accompanying growth of an urban population were also important as impetuses to the social criticism offered by Enlightenment thinkers and to the creation of an educated audience receptive to their ideas.

The term “enlightenment” derives from a French phrase, le siècle des lumières, or the century of lights. Some have called it the Age of Reason, although that label runs the risk of confusing this period, with its emphasis on inductive reasoning, with the deductive reasoning that characterized 17th-century rationalism, most succinctly expressed by the dictum of René Descartes, “I think therefore I am.” For Enlightenment thinkers, knowledge derived not from the human mind alone, but from experiment and observation. In the words of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment represented a “daring to know,” a willingness to question all conventional knowledge.

Central to Enlightenment thought was a belief in progress and a conviction that human reason was the key to achieving social, political, and economic progress. Enlightenment thinkers ventured boldly into all areas of human knowledge, as exemplified by the Encyclopédie, co-edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. This was a 28-volume project, published between 1751 and 1772, whose purpose was, as Diderot put it, “to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth, to present its general outlines and structure to the men with whom we live, and to transmit this to those who will come after us. . . .” The Encyclopédie included essays from more than 160 writers and represents the single most important publication of the French Enlightenment. Although most of the entries in the Encyclopédie were not political, the very premise of the project represented an implicit challenge to both church and crown, and after the initial volumes appeared its publication was banned in France.

Several of the major Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, had a substantial impact on the social and political ideas of the French revolutionaries. Baron Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois had a profound impact on both American and French political theorists. François-Marie Arouet, better known to us as Voltaire, ranged widely in his social criticism, but is most noted for his persistent and biting critique of religious intolerance generally, and more specifically the failings of the French Catholic Church. Most important of all was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755) and Du Contrat social (1762) had a profound influence on the political thinking of the revolutionaries. The widespread popularity of Rousseau’s novels, most notably Emile and Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, ensured that his political thought had a much broader currency than would have been the case were he simply a political theorist. It is difficult to exaggerate the influence of Rousseau’s writings on public opinion in France at the end of the Old Regime. During the Revolution, a bust of Rousseau could be found in virtually every Jacobin club meeting hall in France, and the remains of both Rousseau and Voltaire were interred in the Panthéon in festivals choreographed by Jacques-Louis David.

There has long been debate about whether or not the Enlightenment should be seen as a cause of the French Revolution. Alexis de Tocqueville attributed the inability of the revolutionaries to achieve a stable, constitutional regime to the impractical, abstract theorizing of the philosophes, who in his view were out of touch with the fabric of French society. But while the deputies of the various national assemblies during the Revolution were clearly influenced by the ideas of the philosophes, the majority of them were men who also had practical experience in the courts, in the royal bureaucracy, or in local government under the Old Regime. It should also be noted that virtually none of the Enlightenment thinkers advocated revolution, and very few, apart from Rousseau and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, considered participatory democracy to be a workable form of government.

Enlightenment ideas, then, established a context of intellectual ferment, of questioning, of faith in the ideal of progress and in human reason to achieve that progress that made the social and political upheaval of the Revolution possible. The salons, the freemason lodges, and the provincial academies that provided a milieu in which Enlightenment ideas could be discussed also served to create the social networks and institutions that would mobilize the populace after 1789. The honnête homme described by so many Enlightenment writers became the political activist of the 1790s, and as those activists sought to remake and regenerate French society they naturally turned to the works of the philosophes for guidance.

ENRAGÉS. The enragés, narrowly defined, were a group of militant activists in the sections of Paris in 1792–1793 who advocated direct democracy and progressive social and economic policies. The term “enragés,” as applied to that group, was coined by the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet. More broadly, the term was applied from 1789 onward in a pejorative sense to any group perceived as radical by opponents of the Revolution.

The enragés of 1792–1793 were an unorganized group, led by Jacques Roux, Jean Varlet, Jean-Théophile Leclerc, Claire Lacombe, and Pauline Léon. They enjoyed some support from the Cordeliers, but were not a dominant force in that club. Maximilien Robespierre denounced the enragés for their alleged complicity in the market riots of February 1793 in Paris, but several among them, most notably Varlet and Leclerc, played a prominent role in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, which led to the proscription of the Girondin deputies. The enragés were not satisfied by the policies pursued by the Montagnards in the weeks that followed, however, and on 25 June Jacques Roux delivered an incendiary speech before the National Convention, in which he called for additional purges and for aggressive measures to counter food shortages and rising prices. For this, Roux was denounced at the Jacobin club and expelled from the Cordeliers. The enragés continued to agitate through the summer, however, culminating in the protests of early September 1793, which led to the Law of Suspects and the broadening of the maximum to include staple goods beyond bread and grain.

At that point, though, the Jacobins moved to control the popular movement in Paris. Roux was arrested and eventually committed suicide. Varlet, Leclerc, and Lacombe also endured persecution and prison, and the enragés had disappeared as an effective political group by October 1793. Elements of their progressive program would later be championed, however, by Jacques-René Hébert and Gracchus Babeuf.

ESPRIT PUBLIC. In the last years of the Old Regime, both critics and defenders of the monarchy regularly appealed to l’opinion public, or “public opinion,” to justify their positions. L’opinion public was a suitably ambiguous and amorphous concept in the 1780s, with no clear or tangible representation. After 1789 sovereignty shifted from the king to the public, with elections and popular societies giving tangible expression to the political views of the citizenry. In this new political order, l’opinion public gave way to esprit public, or “public spirit,” in both official and popular discourse, and the revolutionaries saw a need both to mold and to measure public spirit. In regard to the latter, the government called upon local administrations, and then under the Terror the agents nationaux, to submit regular reports on esprit public in their jurisdictions. Those reports can today be found in the National Archives of France in two separate series of documents devoted to esprit public in Paris and the provinces. With the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte to power, and the accompanying demise of participatory politics, that concern for public spirit gave way to an overriding concern for public order.

ESTATES. Old Regime society was legally divided into three estates, hierarchically arranged. The First Estate, the clergy, enjoyed that status by virtue of its spiritual function and proximity to God. The Second Estate, the aristocracy, enjoyed its status by virtue of military service to the king. Many aristocrats, or noblemen, could trace their lineage back to the knights of the Middle Ages, and they passed that status on by blood from generation to generation. The Third Estate comprised the remaining 97 percent of the population: urban professionals, bourgeois, artisans, workers, peasants, and beggars. The first two estates enjoyed many more privileges, such as exemption from taxation, than the Third Estate, an aspect of the social inequality under the Old Regime that generated increasing resentment on the eve of the Revolution. Each of the three estates elected representatives to the Estates-General when it was convened by Louis XVI in 1789.

ESTATES-GENERAL. The Estates-General (Etats Généraux) was the Old Regime assembly of delegates from the three estates of the kingdom: the clergy, or First Estate, the aristocracy, or Second Estate, and the commoners, or Third Estate. Louis XVI called the Estates-General in August 1788, to meet the following spring, because of the financial crisis confronting the monarchy. The Estates-General had not met, however, since 1614, which meant that no one was quite sure what procedures should be followed. Two questions in particular became quite contentious: should the Third Estate be granted additional delegates, to reflect their greater proportion of the population, as some argued? And how should the delegates vote, by head or by order? A considerable pamphlet literature appeared in the final months of 1788, debating these issues, and the Committee of Thirty played an active role in urging an affirmative response to each question. At the urging of Jacques Necker, the king ordered a “doubling of the Third” by December 1788, but the question of how the delegates would vote remained unresolved until after the Estates-General convened at Versailles in May 1789.

The first months of 1789 were devoted to electoral assemblies, organized by estate, at which delegates were chosen. All adult males were eligible to participate. These assemblies also drafted cahiers de doléances, to be presented at Versailles by the delegates, relaying the concerns and grievances of the people to their king. This process represented a virtual political mobilization of the nation on 4–5 May 1789. In Versailles, 1,139 delegates gathered: 291 representing the clergy, 270 representing the aristocracy, and 578 representing the Third Estate. An opening speech by Necker went badly, and in the absence of a decree mandating that the vote be by head, the Third Estate collectively refused to verify their credentials or to participate in deliberations. A stalemate persisted for more than a month, until 17 June, when at the instigation of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès the delegates of the Third Estate declared themselves a National Assembly. Liberal aristocrats and a number of clergy now rallied to the Third Estate, and when the king ordered their meeting hall locked on 20 June some 578 deputies swore the Tennis Court Oath. Louis XVI attempted to thwart that initiative on 23 June, by ordering the three estates to resume their separate deliberations, but in the face of determined resistance he accepted unified deliberation and voting by head on 27 June 1789. On 9 July 1789 the delegates to the Estates-General officially declared themselves the Constituent Assembly.

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FABRE D’EGLANTINE, PHILIPPE-FRANÇOIS-NAZAIRE (1750–1794). Fabre was the son of a cloth merchant. He was educated at the Doctrinaires in Toulouse, but quit the school in 1771 to become an actor. He led a nomadic life until 1789, traveling throughout France, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. In March 1777 he was condemned to hang in Namur for seducing a young woman, but the sentence was commuted to a fine and banishment. His acting career appears to have been successful, and he was a playwright of some note in the 1780s as well.

Fabre traveled to Paris in 1789 and became active in the politics of the capital. He joined the Cordelier club, where he befriended Camille Desmoulins, and served as secretary to Georges Danton in the Ministry of Justice. Fabre played an active role in the uprising on 10 August 1792. Thereafter he gravitated toward Jean-Paul Marat, perhaps to secure his election to the National Convention. He sat with the Montagnards, and voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI. Fabre refused to vote on the indictment of Marat, was attacked by the Girondins for allegedly favoring a dictatorship, and in return accused Margeurite-Elie Guadet and Armand Gensonné of negotiating with the king. Fabre would later testify at the trial of the proscribed Girondin deputies. Fabre is credited with naming the months of the revolutionary calendar, but in December 1793 was called to defend his reputation before the Jacobin club. He did so successfully, but in subsequently attacking his critics he drew further suspicion to himself, and in January 1794 was expelled from the Cordelier club. As early as July 1793 Fabre suspected manipulation of stock offerings for certain companies, including the Compagnie des Indes. Some of the conspirators, including François Chabot, tried to bribe Fabre to secure his silence. Failing in that, they tricked him into signing a forged document, which later implicated Fabre in the plot. Although innocent, he went to the guillotine in April 1794 with Chabot and the others.

FAUBOURG SAINT-ANTOINE. One of the two celebrated sans-culotte neighborhoods of Paris, along with the faubourg Saint-Marcel, the faubourg Saint-Antoine was located to the east of the place de la Bastille. On the eve of the Revolution it retained a partially rural aspect, with gardens and small fields interspersed among the artisanal shops that dominated the neighborhood. Some two-thirds of the inhabitants were recent immigrants to Paris, drawn chiefly by the furniture trade, but employed as well in small pottery and textile shops. There were a few large factories, most notably the Réveillon wallpaper factory, which would be the focal point of the first popular uprising of 1789. The brasserie of Joseph Santerre was also located in the faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The faubourg established its reputation for militancy on 14 July 1789. Roughly 70 percent of the vainqueurs of the Bastille came from the immediate neighborhood, and they sustained their activism throughout the Revolution. One exception to this was the Champ de Mars rally, but in the uprising of 10 August 1792 and the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, police records and other sources suggest that the citizens of the faubourg Saint-Antoine played a leading role.

FAUBOURG SAINT-MARCEL. The faubourg Saint-Marcel was the second of the activist neighborhoods in Paris during the Revolution. It was located on the left bank of the Seine River, in the southeast section of the city, and included within its boundaries both the Gobelins tapestry works, and the many small tanneries and dyeing shops along the Bièvre rivulette. It was a poorer quartier than the faubourg Saint-Antoine, and was thus the focus of substantial poor relief and police surveillance. It was more densely populated near the Seine, but the southern reaches of the faubourg were essentially rural. The peak of political activism for Saint-Marcel came between 1791 and 1793, and its inhabitants responded in particular during times of rising prices. The sections of Saint-Marcel were among the last to abandon Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, and they played a prominent role in the abortive Germinal and Prairial riots in 1795.

FAUCHET, CLAUDE (1744–1794). Fauchet was born in the small town of Domes, near Nevers just to the southeast of Paris, the son of a prosperous merchant. There were seven children in the family, and Claude was brought up and educated by the Jesuits of Moulins. He then went on to seminary in Bourges, and after ordination as a priest obtained a position in the parish of St. Roch in Paris. Fauchet was a very eloquent orator, and his sermon before the king at an Easter service in 1783 secured for him an appointment as prédicateur du roi at the Abbey of Montfort, in Brittany. In 1786 he pronounced the funeral eulogy for Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, earning more royal favor, but some intemperate remarks in 1788 about the need for kings, rather than tyrants, offended the queen and others at court.

In 1789 Fauchet was an advocate for the cause of the lower clergy, and was among the vanquishers of the Bastille. He took pride in showing the bullet holes in his soutane, and pronounced the eulogy for those who fell on 14 July 1789, to great popular acclaim. In 1790 he founded a newspaper, La Bouche de Fer, and in October of that year joined with Nicolas Bonneville to found the Cercle Social, whose meetings in the Palais Royal were attended by as many as 3,000 people. Fauchet’s was among the most democratic voices in Paris in 1790–91. On 4 February 1791 he delivered a sermon in Notre Dame Cathedral in which he described liberty as the true principle of religion and said that Jesus Christ had died in the name of universal democracy.

On 1 April 1791 Fauchet was elected constitutional bishop of Calvados, where his radical views generated considerable controversy. Still, he was elected from Calvados to the Legislative Assembly and again to the National Convention in 1792. Fauchet presided over the Jacobin club in Paris in October 1791, but over time he drew closer in his politics to Jean-Marie Roland and the Girondins. He was expelled from the Jacobin club in September 1792 after speaking critically of Jean-Paul Marat. He opposed the trial of Louis XVI, refusing to vote on the question of guilt and then voting for banishment and the appel au peuple. In February 1793 Fauchet issued a statement opposing the marriage of priests, and in April voted in favor of the indictment of Marat, both of which alienated the Parisian sans-culottes. He somehow avoided proscription on 2 June 1793, but in July was accused by François Chabot of complicity with Charlotte Corday (Fauchet had accompanied her to the Convention when she first arrived in Paris). Fauchet went to trial in October 1793 with the proscribed Girondin deputies and shared their fate.

FEDERALISM. Federalism was a pejorative term during the Revolution, applied to those who, according to their detractors, wished to undermine the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. Its first use may have been in early 1793, to stigmatize those who called for an appel au peuple in the trial of Louis XVI. As the year wore on, the Girondin deputies were increasingly accused of favoring federalism, because of their criticism of Paris, particularly the radical clubbists and sans-culottes of the sections, and because some of the Girondin deputies called for a departmental guard to protect the National Convention against violent extremists. Departmental administrations often protested the undue influence of Paris in the spring of 1793, and reminded the deputies of the Convention that Paris was only one of 83 departments. Such assertions of departmental sovereignty further fed the charges of federalism, and when a number of departmental administrations protested the proscription of the Girondin deputies following the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, the Montagnards accused them of supporting a federalist revolt. When the Law of Suspects was passed in September 1793, to be a partisan of federalism was identified as a targeted offense.

Some historians have recently written of a “radical federalism,” or “Jacobin federalism.” The sectional movement in Paris in the early summer of 1791 has been characterized in those terms, as has the neighborhood club movement in Lyon in 1790–1791. Similarly, the effort of the Marseille Jacobin club to extend its influence throughout Provence by creating a network of affiliated clubs has been described as “Jacobin federalism.” Most historians, however, would emphasize the Jacobins’ insistence on a strong central government in contrast to the support for federalism among their moderate opponents.

FEDERALIST REVOLT. The federalist revolt occurred in reaction to the proscription of the Girondin deputies from the National Convention in June 1793. Almost from its first meeting, the Convention was riven by divisions between the more moderate Girondin deputies and the more radical Montagnards. The two factions quarreled over the September Massacres, the trial of Louis XVI, the constitution of 1793, the trial of Jean-Paul Marat, and the legitimacy of the sans-culotte movement in Paris and its influence on national politics. That opposition came to a head in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, which led to the proscription of 29 Girondin deputies from the National Convention. Nearly 50 departmental administrations protested the proscription of the Girondins, and 13 departments engaged in prolonged resistance to the Montagnard Convention in what has come to be known as the federalist revolt.

The revolt centered around four provincial cities—Bordeaux, Caen, Lyon, and Marseille—and in each instance it was departmental administrators who took the leading role. In addition to sending delegations or letters of protest to Paris, they declared themselves in a state of resistance to oppression, withdrew their recognition of the National Convention and all decrees issued by it since 31 May 1793, and called upon their constituents to take up arms and march to the capital to restore the proscribed deputies to office. In several of the cities, rebel authorities arrested representatives on mission in the early stages of the revolt. Seven Breton and Norman departments sent delegates to the Central Committee of Resistance to Oppression, meeting in Caen. That assembly sent a small force toward Paris in mid-July, but there was little popular support for the revolt there or elsewhere and the call for a march on Paris failed to mount a serious threat to the capital. The rebel force that embarked from Caen dispersed after a single, rather farcical battle, and none of the other rebel forces ever left the limits of their own departments.

Coupled with the peasant rebellion in the Vendée, however, the federalist revolt presented the young Republic with the very real danger of civil war. The Montagnards, now in control of the National Convention, responded to that danger in several ways. They attempted to present their version of events in Paris to the rest of the country, sometimes by sending representatives on mission to the federalist cities. They eventually prepared an indictment of the proscribed deputies, some of whom fled Paris and went to support the rebellion in Caen, though it would not be until after the collapse of the revolt, in October 1793, that the Girondin leaders would be brought to trial, convicted, and executed. The Montagnards also redoubled their efforts to complete a new constitution, which was presented to the nation in late June. Finally, the Convention sent armed forces to suppress the rebellion in those areas that continued to resist.

The revolt collapsed quickly in Caen, and by late July a small Parisian army had entered the city. The repression of the revolt in Normandy, supervised by Robert Lindet, was remarkably mild. Those officials who had supported the revolt were dismissed from office, and there were a number of arrests, but very few executions. The revolt also ended quickly in Marseille, where an army commanded by General Jean-Baptiste-François Carteaux entered the city on 25 August 1793 after only minor skirmishes. But in Lyon the rebels capitulated only after a two-month siege, in early October, and while there was no violent resistance in Bordeaux, it was late October before national deputies could enter the city in safety. The repression of federalism in those three cities was much more violent, marking the first serious episodes of the Terror. The National Convention declared that “Lyon is no more” as a punishment for the armed resistance there, renaming the city Commune-Affranchie, and the representatives on mission, Georges Couthon, Jean-Marie Collet d’Herbois, and Joseph Fouché, eventually ordered the execution of nearly 1,900 rebels. Approximately 300 people were executed as federalists in both Bordeaux and Marseille.

Although the federalist revolt was nominally a reaction to the proscription of the Girondin deputies, the causes of the revolt ran much deeper. From at least the time of the September Massacres, if not before, political elites in the provinces had grown wary of the militant activism of the Parisian sans-culottes, and resented what they considered the excessive influence of Paris on national politics. Many also resented the interference of representatives on mission in local affairs. In each of the federalist cities, moderate elites had weathered political challenges in 1792–1793 from radical clubbists and advocates of popular democracy. Both the struggle between Girondins and Montagnards in the National Convention, and the federalist revolt that followed, must be seen as part of an ongoing debate over sovereignty and how it should be exercised. In that sense, the federalist revolt represents a crucial moment in the French Revolution, when national and local politics came together around the most basic of political questions: who are the sovereign people?

FÉDÉRÉS. The fédérés were volunteers, principally National Guards, who traveled to Paris from the provinces in July 1790 for the first Festival of Federation. Two years later, with the country at war, the Legislative Assembly once again called fédérés to the capital for the celebration of 14 July. Louis XVI vetoed that decree, which invited 20,000 volunteers, but many came anyway, most notably from Marseille and from the department of Finistère, in Brittany. These fédérés played a prominent role in the uprising of 10 August 1792. Some of the fédérés remained in Paris, some returned home, while many went to join the regular army at the front.

In both of these instances the fédérés were seen as a progressive force. After the September Massacres, some of the leading Girondins suggested that departmental volunteers might be summoned to Paris to protect the National Convention against violent anarchists, and they appealed to that earlier tradition. Now, however, Jacobins denounced those proposed fédérés as potentially leading toward federalism, and the term took on a more negative connotation.

FERSEN, AXEL VON (1755–1810). Fersen was a Swedish count, diplomat, and military figure. He fought in the American War of Independence and rose to the rank of colonel in the Royal-Suédois Regiment. Fersen was introduced at the French royal court in 1779 and fell in love with Marie Antoinette. The precise nature of their relationship is uncertain, but their friendship persisted throughout the 1780s, despite his frequent absences. When the Revolution began, King Gustavus III appointed Fersen as his secret agent at the French court. Fersen played a crucial role in planning and carrying out the flight to Varennes, accompanying the king and queen as far as Bondy disguised as a coachman. He fled to Brussels after the royal family was apprehended, but had a hand in the drafting of the Brunswick Manifesto in July 1792, and returned to Paris after 10 August 1792 in a failed attempt to rescue the king and queen from the Temple. Fersen was killed by an angry mob in Stockholm in 1810, suspected of having poisoned Crown Prince Christian.

FESTIVAL OF FEDERATION. The first Festival of Federation (Fête de la Fédération) was held on 14 July 1790, on the Champ de Mars in Paris, to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. The first such gatherings occurred spontaneously in the provinces, as National Guards in the departments came together in regional centers to pledge their support to national unity and the new regime. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris, drew from those celebrations the idea of a truly national federation. This and other revolutionary festivals responded to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s call for a civic religion, in which the people would be both participants and spectators. Parisians turned out by the thousands to ready the site for the festival, and Louis XVI himself turned a symbolic spade of dirt in preparing the massive amphitheater that would welcome guardsmen from all 83 departments of France. A special throne was erected for the king, Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette played a prominent role as commander of the Paris National Guard, and Charles-Maurice Talleyrand-Périgord presided over a special mass. It was truly a day of national unity and hope. No Festival of Federation would be held the following year, however, due to the king’s flight to Varennes, and in 1792 the fédérés who journeyed to the capital to celebrate the anniversary would play a leading role in the uprising of 10 August.

FESTIVAL OF REASON. The Festival of Reason (Fête de la Raison) was held in Notre Dame cathedral on 10 November 1793, and is considered to have launched the deChristianization campaign that followed. Antoine-François Momoro took a principal role in organizing the event and his wife, Sophie, an actress at the opera, played the part of the Goddess of Reason. Jacques-René Hébert and Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette led a procession from the National Convention to Notre Dame, although many of the deputies declined to follow. According to Louis-Sébastien Mercier, scantily clad women danced the Carmagnole and sang revolutionary songs in Notre Dame. Some have suggested that the excesses of this festival were responsible for turning Maximilien Robespierre against the deChristianization movement, leading eventually to the Cult of the Supreme Being.

FEUILLANTS. The Feuillants were a political club, composed chiefly of constitutional monarchists, which formed in Paris after the king’s failed flight to Varennes in June 1791. On 16 July the Jacobin club voted to support a petition initiated by the Cordelier club and the Cercle Social calling for charges against Louis XVI and the creation of a republic. The next day, the very day of the Champ de Mars massacre, more than 260 deputies walked out of the Jacobin club to create a rival society, the Feuillants. They were led by Antoine-Pierre Barnave, Adrien Duport, and Alexandre Lameth, the so-called Triumvirate. Many other prominent figures joined the Feuillants as well, including Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Bertrand Barère, Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette, and Charles-Maurice Talleyrand. These men were committed to the ideals of 1789, but in the current political crisis were more devoted to order than to liberty and equality. The gains of the Revolution, they argued, should be consolidated under the rule of law, and the popular upheaval of the Revolution should come to an end.

The Feuillants took with them the correspondence committee of the Jacobin club, and its newspaper, and immediately appealed to the network of clubs in the provinces to join them. More than 400 provincial clubs did so, and in the early going it appeared as if the Feuillants would prevail in their struggle with the Jacobins for political supremacy. But when the Constituent Assembly dissolved late that summer, its deputies were legally prohibited from standing for reelection, and the Assembly is where the Feuillants had their strength. Although more than 160 of the newly elected deputies to the Legislative Assembly joined the Feuillants, the club’s open disdain for popular democracy put it at odds with the political currents of the capital. Under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, Jérome Pétion, and Jacques-Pierre Brissot (future rivals, but still allies at this time), the Jacobin club courted the popular movement and redoubled its efforts to secure provincial affiliations. By late fall most of the provincial clubs had returned to the Jacobin fold, while the number of societies affiliated with the Feuillants dropped to barely 80. Clearly the Feuillants had misjudged the political climate. On 10 August 1792 the people of Paris would repudiate their assertion that the day for insurrectionary politics had passed, and the Feuillants, like the monarchy, disappeared from the scene.

FIRST ESTATE. See CLERGY.

FLORÉAL COUP. The coup of Floréal VI (May 1798) was the second of the coups of the Directory aimed at securing the legislative center by purging extremists from office. But while the coup of Fructidor V (August 1797) had been directed against royalists, in this instance the directors acted against the Jacobin left. Paul-François Barras, Louis-Marie La Révellière-Lépeaux, and Philippe Merlin took the lead in attempting to influence electoral assemblies through a combination of propaganda and intimidation. The Directory sponsored “secessionary” electoral assemblies in some 25 departments, allowing the government to then choose which slate of candidates it found acceptable. In the end, 106 deputies were floréalized, or excluded from office, and 53 seats in the two legislative chambers were left unfilled. The legislature would have its revenge on the directors the following year, in the Prairial coup, but the overall result of these transparent attempts to manipulate electoral politics was the undermining of participatory democracy.

FORCED LOAN. The most pressing problem confronting the French monarchy in 1789 was the threat of financial collapse, and this problem would persist throughout the revolutionary decade. A number of measures were taken to address the crisis, including the confiscation of Church lands, the creation of assignats, and the introduction of new, more rational taxes. In a period of political uncertainty, however, the new taxes were difficult to implement and to collect, and inflation plagued the efficacy of the assignats as a new paper currency. At several points, the government therefore resorted to forced loans (emprunts forcés) as a means of revenue.

In August 1789 Etienne-Charles Loménie de Brienne issued special treasury bills bearing 5 percent interest, and these amounted to a kind of indirect forced loan taken from the state’s creditors. On 20 May 1793 the National Convention decreed a forced loan on the rich (defined as those with income equal to or exceeding 1,500 livres), aimed at raising one billion livres for the war effort. Additional forced loans were levied on 22 June and 3 September 1793, with the promise that the sums contributed would be reimbursed after the war was over. The Directory, too, resorted to a forced loan to sustain the war, imposing a 600 million livres loan in December 1795, to be paid by the wealthiest 25 percent of the citizens of each department. This loan was poorly implemented, however, and yielded only a fraction of the goal. A final forced loan of 100 million livres was decreed in August 1799, but this imposition was abandoned after the Brumaire coup.

Those wealthy citizens who had already made “patriotic gifts” were exempted from these forced loans. A number of towns and cities had solicited such patriotic gifts, or imposed forced loans of their own, in the early years of the Revolution, usually in the face of food shortages. Some representatives on mission also introduced forced loans in particular departments on their own authority, much to the chagrin of local elites, and others played a role in collecting the loans levied by the National Convention, particularly during the Terror.

FOUCHÉ, JOSEPH (1759–1820). Fouché, the son of a ship’s captain, attended the seminary of the Oratoire in Nantes. It is not clear that he was ever ordained, though he wore clerical garb. He taught at a number of different collèges in the 1780s, and in 1788 was appointed to teach physics in Arras, where he met Maximilien Robespierre and was rumored to have been engaged briefly to Robespierre’s sister, Charlotte. In 1790 Fouché returned to Nantes as principal of a collège, and joined the local Jacobin club. He antagonized Nantes merchants by expressing his vocal opposition to the slave trade, but in 1792 was elected to the National Convention from the Loire-Inférieure.

Fouché sat with the Montagnards and voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI. In March 1793 he was sent on mission to the west of France for recruitment, where he remained until May, undertaking the first efforts to combat the Vendée rebels. He went on mission again, to the Côte-d’Or and Aube, in June, and in that region imposed forced contributions on the rich and introduced deChristianization measures. In St. Cyr he ordered all priests to either marry or adopt a child within a month, and in Nevers he placed signs at all the cemeteries reading “Death is an eternal sleep.” These actions, accompanied by the wholesale dismissal of local officials, aroused considerable opposition. Fouché accompanied Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois to Lyon in late October 1793, and must share responsibility for the nearly 1,900 executions ordered in that city following the collapse of the federalist revolt. After Collot was recalled to Paris in February 1794, however, Fouché moderated his policies, which alienated local radicals and eventually led to his own recall and ejection from the Paris Jacobin club. Though now an enemy of Robespierre, Fouché appears not to have participated in the planning of the Thermidor coup, but certainly profited by it.

Fouché then returned to the Jacobin club, became tangentially linked to Gracchus Babeuf, and actively opposed the more reactionary Thermidorians behind the leadership of Jean-Lambert Tallien. But Fouché seems never to have kept enemies, or friends, for long. When citizens of the Allier, where he had been on mission in 1793–94, denounced him, Tallien came to his defense. Fouché was imprisoned all the same, but gained his freedom by the amnesty voted on the last day of the Convention’s meetings. He cultivated the patronage of Paul Barras, for whom he did some secret police work, and after the Prairial coup of 1798 was appointed by Barras and Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès to the post of minister of police. Fouché then approached Napoleon Bonaparte, supported his Brumaire coup, and continued on as minister of police until 1802, when his opposition to the Concordat and to Napoleon’s declaration of himself as first consul for life prompted his dismissal. After election to the Senate, however, Fouché embraced the Empire and returned as Napoleon’s minister of police, holding that post until 1810. Even though he came to recognize him for the double-dealer that he was, Napoleon could not do without Fouché’s talents, and he survived until the end of the regime. Remarkably, he emerged as minister of police in the early days of Louis XVIII’s reign, but in 1816 was exiled as a regicide. Having once, as a representative on mission, declared the shame associated with being rich, he died with a fortune of 15 million francs.

FOUQUIER-TINVILLE, ANTOINE-QUENTIN (1746–1795). Fouquier-Tinville was the son of a seigneurial landowner, perhaps of minor nobility. He studied law in Paris, and in 1774 purchased a position as prosecutor at the Châtelet court. Some years later he was forced to sell that post to pay off his debts, and in 1781 took a job as a clerk in the office of the royal police. Fouquier was active in the politics of his section in 1789, and in August 1792 was a supporter of the sans-culotte movement. Late in that month he obtained a position on the court newly created to judge the royalists arrested on 10 August, most likely through the influence of his cousin, Camille Desmoulins.

Fouquier-Tinville is best known, however, as the prosecutor for the Revolutionary Tribunal, created in March 1793. He owed that position, which he would hold until after Thermidor, to Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, and as public prosecutor he would eventually send both men to the guillotine. His manner as prosecutor was dry, to the point, very businesslike. Some would have seen him, no doubt, as cold and unfeeling. Fouquier was denounced and arrested less than a week after Robespierre’s fall, but did not come to trial until April 1795. The trial lasted 41 days, and some 400 witnesses were heard. Fouquier defended himself by claiming to have been only “the axe” of the National Convention, responsible for enforcing laws over which he had no control. He went to the guillotine, along with nine other members of the Revolutionary Tribunal, insisting that he had nothing for which to reproach himself.

FREEMASONRY. Freemasonry (franc-magonnerrie) migrated to France from Great Britain early in the 18th century, and there were those in France during the 1790s and throughout the 19th century who attributed the upheaval of the Revolution to a conspiracy of Freemasons. There is little evidence to support such an assertion, but it cannot be denied that the spread of Masonic lodges throughout France did contribute to the intellectual and social ferment that led to the Revolution.

By mid-century, Masonic lodges existed in virtually every major town in France. There were two competing national organizations, the Grand Lodge and the Grand Orient. The Grand Master of the Masons was Louis-Philippe Orléans, and many other prominent figures who would play a significant role in the Revolution were also Freemasons, including Marie-Jean Condorcet, Georges-Jacques Danton, Jacques-Louis David, Benjamin Constant, and Jean-Pierre-André Amar. Many more names could be added, but even this short list is a diverse group, and suggests the difficulty in sustaining an argument that the Freemasons had some sort of grand plan that launched the Revolution. In most towns, indeed, there were competing lodges at the end of the Old Regime, with distinctive clienteles, and the competition between rival lodges often foreshadowed a rivalry between competing popular societies or conflicting groups during the revolutionary decade. Freemasonry was egalitarian in its ideals, but also hierarchical in its organization, two attributes that would be at odds in the context of the Revolution. Those who joined the lodges, whether liberal or conservative, were universally well educated and drawn from the wealthier classes of society. The sociability of the lodges was therefore important to the political ferment in France both before the Revolution and in its early years. They were as important an element of Enlightenment culture as the salons. Freemasonry grew dormant in France during the Terror, but the organization revived in the latter years of the Directory regime.

FRÉRON, LOUIS-STANISLAS (1754–1802). Fréron was the son of Elie Fréron, the famous publicist and adversary of Voltaire. Louis was educated at the collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he knew Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre. After his father died, Fréron renewed the publishing privilege of l’Annexe littéraire, but the Abbé Royou did all of the work while Fréron led a dissolute life. In 1789, however, he embraced the ideals of the Revolution and in December began publication of a newspaper, L’Orateur du Peuple, which approached in tone that of Jean-Paul Marat’s L’Ami du Peuple. Fréron was a member of the Cordelier club, participated in the 17 July 1791 rally on the Champ de Mars, and after the flight to Varennes called for the king’s head in his newspaper, suggesting that the queen be tied to the tail of a horse and led through the streets of Paris. These intemperate remarks forced him into hiding until after the uprising of 10 August 1792.

Not surprisingly, Fréron participated in both the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the September Massacres. He was then elected to the National Convention from Paris. He sat with the Montagnards and voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI. In March 1793 he was sent on mission for recruitment to the southeast of France with Paul Barras. They prolonged their stay into the summer months, and then went on to Marseille and Toulon, where they ordered harsh repression against those who had participated in the rebellions in those cities and denounced to the Committee of Public Safety those deputies on mission who advocated more moderate measures. Both Barras and Fréron were recalled to Paris in January 1794, and Fréron was denounced before the Jacobin club by Jacques-René Hébert. Pierre-Joseph Cambon also stepped forward to accuse the two of embezzling some 800,000 francs, but a local mayor testified that the money had been lost in a swamp in a carriage accident.

Fréron now allied himself with Jean-Baptiste Carrier and Jean-Lambert Tallien in the conspiracy against Robespierre, and after Thermidor he resumed publication of L’Orateur du Peuple, which now adopted a reactionary tone. Fréron also became a leader and protector of the jeunesse dorée during this period. In September 1795 he was sent again on mission to Marseille, where he lived extravagantly and spent huge sums of public money, shielded from prosecution by his old friend Barras, who had become a director by the time Fréron was recalled to Paris. Fréron was not elected to national office under the Directory, but occupied a number of minor posts. After Brumaire he became intimately involved with Pauline Bonaparte, and there was even talk of marriage until Fréron’s wife and two children reappeared on the scene. Shortly thereafter, Napoleon Bonaparte assigned him to a post in Saint-Domingue, where he died of yellow fever.

FRUCTIDOR COUP. On 18 Fructidor V (4 September 1797), three of the directors—Louis-Marie La Révellière-Lépeaux, Paul-François Barras, and Jean-François Reubell—ordered a purge of their two colleagues, Lazare Carnot and François Barthélémy, along with 53 right-wing deputies. The three directors enjoyed the support of the army in carrying out this action, in particular that of Generals Lazare Hoche and Napoleon Bonaparte. The Fructidor coup consolidated the control of republican deputies within the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred, and was justified to the public by reports of an alleged royalist plot, probably nonexistent. The political legitimacy of the Directory was undermined, however, and would be further damaged by the Floréal coup and the Prairial coup in successive years.

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GARAT, DOMINIQUE-JOSEPH (1749–1833). Garat was born into an old family of Bayonne, near the Pyrenees. His father was a doctor, but Joseph was brought up by his maternal uncle, an abbot, who encouraged him to attend seminary. Garat left seminary for the collège of Guyenne in Bordeaux, however, and went on to study law in Bordeaux as well. He became an avocat in the early 1770s, but went to Paris to indulge his passion for literature and philosophy. There he met Marie-Jean Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, and others. He was particularly drawn to the ideas of Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In 1785 he gained a position teaching ancient history at a lycée in Paris.

Garat returned home in 1789 and was elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Bayonne, as was his older brother. He was present for the swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, joined the Club of 1789, and sat on the left of the assembly. In 1791 he returned to teaching, and is credited with coining the term “social science” in a published letter to Condorcet. In 1792 he went to England on diplomatic mission, but returned to France in October to take up the position of minister of justice, to which he had been recommended by Condorcet and Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Called upon to investigate the September Massacres, he issued a report concluding that while unfortunate, they were a continuation of the uprising of 10 August 1792 against the monarchy and hence not a criminal act. Following the trial of the king, Garat informed Louis XVI of his sentence, and was present on the scaffold at his execution.

In March 1793 Garat succeeded Jean-Marie Roland as minister of the interior, a post he would hold until August 1793. He tried to play a mediating role between the Girondins and Montagnards, but failed in that effort. Garat opposed the creation of the Commission of Twelve, but could do nothing to prevent the proscription of the Girondin leaders in June. That summer, during the federalist revolt, Garat sent agents into the provinces to gather information about public opinion and to spread republican ideals, and appears to have played a role in helping Condorcet elude arrest. He was briefly arrested himself in September 1793, accused of misusing public funds, and remained under surveillance until after Thermidor. In 1795 Garat was elected to the Institut National, where he became associated with the Ideologues, and finding himself once again under suspicion he published his Mémoire sur la Révolution as a form of self-justification. He served as ambassador to Naples in 1797, was elected to the Council of Ancients from the Seine-et-Oise in 1798, and in 1799 entered the Senate. Garat generally supported Napoleon Bonaparte, though he was at times openly critical of his policies. He was named to the Legion of Honor in 1804, and in 1808 was named Count of the Empire. Garat eventually retired to Ustaritz, in the western Pyrenees.

GENSONNÉ, ARMAND (1758–1793). Born in Bordeaux, Gensonné was the son of a chief surgeon in the royal army. He was schooled at the collège of Guyenne in Bordeaux, and went on to a distinguished career in law, with important ties to the merchant community of Bordeaux. Gensonné was elected to the first municipal council of Bordeaux, joined in the founding of both the National Guard and the Jacobin club in that city, and in January 1791 was elected judge on the departmental Tribunal de Cassation. That summer he was sent on a special mission to the departments of the West to investigate the causes of religious troubles there and to recommend ameliorative measures. He advised a major campaign for public education, leniency for those misled, and severe measures against those nobles and priests who incited the peasantry to resist the revolutionary government.

Gensonné was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Gironde, and as a deputy opposed the banishment of refractory priests, and supported the declaration of war against Austria. He presided over the assembly in March/April 1792, and in July signed the infamous letter to Joseph Boze, former court painter, that would later be interpreted as a Girondin effort to negotiate with Louis XVI in order to avert the fall of the monarchy. In September 1792 Gensonné was reelected to the National Convention. He sat with the Girondins, but was not close to the Rolands. Gensonné voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, but had a bitter exchange with Maximilien Robespierre during the debate over the appel au peuple, for which he voted. He also sat on the constitution committee, and joined Marie-Jean Condorcet as the principal drafter of the proposal submitted to the Convention in February 1793. He supported the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, but opposed the Revolutionary Tribunal. He also supported the creation of the Commission of Twelve, but did not serve on it.

Gensonné anticipated his proscription on 2 June 1793, and in the midst of the tumult sat at his post drafting an eloquent protest and testament to his constituents. He was arrested by a gendarme whose life he had saved on 10 August 1792, and who now urged Gensonné to flee. He ignored that advice, as well as that of Joseph Garat and others that he go into hiding, and was critical of the deputies who fled to Caen. At his trial he acknowledged close contact with General Charles-François Dumouriez, but refused to respond to the accusation that he was party to his treason. Gensonné marched bravely to the guillotine with his fellow Girondins on 31 October 1793.

GERLE, CHRISTOPHE-ANTOINE (1736–1801). Dom Gerle, as he was known, was born in the town of Riom, at the heart of the Massif Central, though little is known about his early life or family. He entered the order of the Chartreux in 1761, was tonsured in 1762, and ordained as a priest in 1764. In 1777 he was named prior of Vauclaire, in the Périgord; became prior of an order in Moulins in 1780; and in 1788 became prior of the Chartreuse of Port-Sainte-Marie, in Clermont. Gerle joined the Freemasons in 1785. In 1789 he was elected as a substitute delegate to the Estates-General by the clergy of Rioms, and took his seat in December. He appears in Jacques-Louis David’s sketch of the Tennis Court Oath, though he was not in fact present at that event. In April 1790 Gerle proposed that Catholicism be declared the state religion of France, the only one to be practiced publicly, but he withdrew the proposal when it encountered serious opposition in the Constituent Assembly. Gerle swore the civil oath of the clergy in December 1790, and shortly thereafter was elected constitutional bishop of the Seine-et-Marne, a post that he declined. Gerle was a member of the Jacobin club, which he left temporarily at the time of the Feuillant schism. After the Constituent Assembly dissolved, he became involved with Suzanne Labrousse, a kind of prophetess from the Périgord, and then Catherine Théot, who fancied herself the “Mother of God.” These associations brought him under suspicion, and he was arrested in May 1794 and forgotten in prison until the Directory. Thereafter he lived in Paris on his pension, in relative obscurity.

GERMINAL RIOTS. The riots of 12 Germinal III (1 April 1795) were a response both to the food shortages and rising prices of the winter of 1795, and to the political repression directed against sans-culotte and Jacobin militants by the Thermidorians. The National Convention abolished the maximum in January, and in the months that followed groups of jeunesse dorée invaded the meeting halls of popular societies and clubs in Paris and destroyed the busts of Jean-Paul Marat. In the face of growing popular unrest, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès proposed a law on 1 Germinal, adopted immediately, which established punishments for those who disrupted or attacked the sessions of the National Convention.

The law itself appears to have served as an incitement, for on 12 Germinal as many as 10,000 protesters invaded the hall of the Convention, despite the efforts of the jeunesse dorée, posted as guards, to keep them out. The crowd remained in the hall all afternoon, but the protest, virtually a riot, lacked organization or clearly defined goals. Several speakers called for more adequate bread supplies and the Constitution of 1793, never implemented, as well as the release of militants who had been arrested since Thermidor. Those Montagnard deputies who remained in the Convention did not actively support the movement, however, and by early evening the crowd had dispersed. That same night the Convention ordered the deportation of Bertrand Barère, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, Jean-Marie Collot-d’Herbois, and Marc-Alexis-Guillaume Vadier. Other Jacobin militants, including Léonard Bourdon and Jean-Pierre-André Amar, would soon be arrested. The Convention redoubled its efforts to maintain order, but took only halfhearted measures to address the food shortages, which led to the Prairial riots barely one month later.

GIRONDINS. The Girondins were one of the two principal factions that emerged in the National Convention during the first eight months of its existence, the other being the Montagnards. They cannot be called political parties—they lacked the parliamentary discipline or cohesion to justify that label—but they did coalesce into loose groupings, and the struggle between the two factions came to dominate the sessions of the National Convention by the spring of 1793. In the end, the Montagnards triumphed in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, which led to the proscription of 29 Girondin deputies from the Convention.

The group first became recognizable in the Legislative Assembly, around the leadership of Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and included the deputies Jean-François Ducos, Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud, Armand Gensonné, and Marguerite-Elie Guadet, all of whom came from Bordeaux in the department of the Gironde, which gave the group its future name. In the Legislative Assembly, however, and for some time thereafter, they were more commonly known as Brissotins. Outside of the Assembly, the group included such prominent figures as Marie-Jean Condorcet, Nicolas de Bonneville, and Claude Fauchet, all of whom regularly attended the meetings of the Cercle Social. Jean-Marie Roland, minister of the interior in 1792, also associated with the Brissotins, as did his wife, Manon Roland, who would regularly invite the Girondin leadership to her home for dinners under the National Convention.

The Brissotins in the Legislative Assembly are best known for advocating a preventive war against Prussia and Austria, as a strategy calculated to rally the people to the Revolution and to force Louis XVI to reveal his true colors. When the war went badly, the Brissotins became the most vocal critics of the monarchy. Rather than lead the growing popular movement in favor of declaring a Republic, however, Vergniaud, Gensonné, and Guadet chose to negotiate with the king, through an ill-fated approach to the former court painter, Joseph Boze. Vergniaud presided over the Legislative Assembly in early August 1792, and turned away the petition of the Paris sections demanding that the king be deposed. Uncomfortable with the street politics of the sans-culottes, the Girondins nonetheless profited by the uprising of 10 August 1792, which put them in position to dominate the National Convention.

Virtually all of the Brissotins were reelected to the Convention, where they were joined by Condorcet, Charles-Jean-Marie Barbaroux, François-Nicolas Buzot, Jean-Baptiste Louvet, Jérome Pétion, Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, and François Bergeoing. The deputies from the Gironde, all eloquent orators, quickly emerged as the leaders of the group. Fearful of the revolutionary violence of the Paris crowd, they favored constitutional legality. Although initially quiet, they eventually condemned the September Massacres and demanded that the perpetrators be brought to justice, identifying Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and Jean-Paul Marat by name. These were the leaders of the Montagnards, and the champions of the Parisian sans-culottes, and the Girondins came increasingly to be seen as hostile to Paris.

In the trial of Louis XVI, the Girondins favored the appel au peuple, denounced by the Montagnards as an effort to save the king. They dominated the constitutional committee, which Condorcet chaired, but could not marshal the votes necessary to pass the constitution that the committee drafted. On other issues, too, the Girondins lost in their struggle with the Montagnards. They opposed the adoption of a grain maximum, yet saw it enacted in May 1793. They opposed the creation of a Revolutionary Tribunal, which was established in March. The Girondins had favored the declaration of war in 1792, yet the war continued to go badly, and the defection of General Charles Dumouriez to the Austrians in April 1793 dealt a serious blow to their political fortunes, because of his personal association with several of the Girondin leaders.

The political tension within the National Convention, and in Paris, grew throughout the winter months. Girondin deputies complained on many occasions that they were under the threat of assassins’ blades, and the sacking of Gorsas’s printing press in March seemed to substantiate that allegation. In April they pushed through the impeachment of Marat, for his consistent defense of popular violence, but more specifically for a letter he circulated early that month calling for the dismissal of deputies who had supported the appel au peuple. A Parisian jury acquitted Marat, however, and a jubilant crowd escorted him back to the Convention. Next the Girondins created the Commission of Twelve, to investigate allegations that the section assemblies of Paris were plotting an insurrection against the Convention. This tactic, too, backfired on the Girondins. The arrests of Jacques-René Hébert and Jean Varlet incited Parisian militants rather than cowing them, and the insurrection that the Girondins feared began on 31 May 1793.

Two days later, 29 Girondin deputies were proscribed from the National Convention. Some of the deputies fled to Caen, to support the federalist revolt. Those who remained in Paris were brought to trial in October, after the revolt had been quelled, and were executed on 31 October 1793. Others, including Barbaroux, Pétion, and Guadet, were eventually tracked down in the provinces and either committed suicide or died on the guillotine. Among the most prominent of the Girondins, only Jean-Baptiste Louvet survived the Terror and eventually resumed his place in the National Convention, as did most of the 76 deputies who had been expelled in June 1793 for protesting the proscription of their leaders. But while the Thermidorians pursued an agenda in many ways sympathetic to their past ideals, the Girondins could not be said to have reasserted themselves as a group within the National Convention.

GLUCK, CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD (1714–1787). Christoph Gluck was a German classical composer best known for his operas. He gained fame on the opera stage of Paris in the 1770s, and his works were the dominant force in French opera during the Revolution. Gluck was born in Bohemia, the son of a forester. He left home as a youth, to avoid following in his father’s career footsteps, and went to study music in Prague. He also studied organ in Milan in the 1730s, and spent a number of years in Vienna, where the young Marie Antoinette was his student.

During Gluck’s years in Paris in the mid-1770s, two camps emerged among Parisian opera followers. One preferred the more serious dramatic works of Gluck, while the other favored the more traditional, light opera of Niccolò Piccinni. Gluck prevailed in the “opera battles,” and his operas Iphigénie en Tauride, Iphigénie en Aulide, Orphée et Eurydice, and Armide were regularly performed during the Revolution. Gluck’s work had a substantial influence on André Grétry, the principal French composer of the revolutionary era.

GORSAS, ANTOINE-JOSEPH (1752–1793). Gorsas was the son of a shoemaker in Limoges. He studied at the collège of Plessis, in Paris, where he met Pierre Vergniaud. After finishing school he declined to take orders, as his parents wished (he would remain staunchly anti-clerical during the Revolution), and instead took a position as a clerk on the royal domains at Versailles. Gorsas married in 1775 and in 1779 opened a school in Versailles—half military and half civilian in its enrolment—but the principles of liberty that he espoused brought him notoriety and a short visit to the Bicêtre prison in 1788.

On 5 July 1789 Gorsas began publication of Le Courrier de Versailles à Paris, which became Le Courrier de Paris dans les provinces when he moved to Paris in October, and then Le Courrier des 83 départements in October 1791. It was one of the most widely read revolutionary newspapers, particularly important for its reporting of events occurring outside Paris. Gorsas published the paper, writing almost everything in it himself, up until 31 May 1793. He was considered among the more radical revolutionaries early on, but in April 1792 Maximilien Robespierre denounced him before the Jacobin club, and in June, at the time of the first assault on the Tuileries Palace, the newspaper took on a decidedly more conservative tone. Gorsas was elected to the National Convention from the Seine-et-Oise and sat with the Girondins. He voted for banishment in the trial of Louis XVI and for the appel au peuple. In early March 1793 his printing press was sacked, forcing Gorsas to suspend publication of his paper for more than a week, and this became a subject of harsh recrimination in the debate between Girondins and Montagnards.

Gorsas voted in support of the indictment of Jean-Paul Marat, and in May was denounced himself by the Paris Commune. He was among those deputies proscribed on 2 June 1793, fled to Caen to support the rebellion there, and was declared an outlaw on 28 July 1793. He made the mistake of returning to Paris, and was spotted in a reading room in the Palais Royal. Since he had already been declared an outlaw, no trial was required, and Gorsas became the first deputy of the Convention to die on the guillotine. After Thermidor his widow opened a bookstore in Paris and continued to publish pamphlets and brochures with an anti-Jacobin flavor.

GOUGES, MARIE-OLYMPE (1748–1793). Olympe de Gouges, as she is most commonly known, was born in Montauban, where her mother was a small shopkeeper. The identity of her father is less clear—most sources claim that he was a butcher, while a few suggest that Louis XV may have been her father. Finding the truth is complicated by the fact that Olympe quite self-consciously fashioned her own identity as she developed a public persona in adulthood. Sources suggest that she married while young, in Montauban, and had a child, but left her husband in 1770 to pursue a writing career in Paris. Her first play, Mariage inattendu du Chérubin, was a comedy staged in 1785, but it did not go well. A more serious play, L’Esclavage des Noirs, was a flop at the Theater of the Nation in December 1789.

At that point she became active in revolutionary politics and published a number of pamphlets and brochures, always in support of a constitutional monarchy. De Gouges also defended the rights of women, most notably in her September 1791 pamphlet, Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, which she addressed to Marie Antoinette. This was a lengthy piece, seen today as a feminist manifesto, which demanded for women the natural rights that men had denied them in civil society. De Gouges made several attempts to found a women’s club in Paris, but without notable success. During the trial of Louis XVI she published another pamphlet defending the king, and became a pronounced supporter of the Girondin deputies in that period. In the summer of 1793 she addressed one of her more provocative pamphlets directly to Maximilien Robespierre, and published another that violently attacked Jean-Paul Marat. De Gouges was arrested in late July 1793 as a federalist sympathizer, and was tried on 2 November, charged also as a royalist. She went to the guillotine the following day. See also DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN AND CITIZENESS.

GRAIN MAXIMUM. The National Convention adopted the grain maximum on 4 May 1793, following serious market riots in Paris in February and March, and weeks of acrimonious debate among the deputies. The law directed departmental administrations to establish a maximum price for wheat and flour, based on the average price during the first months of the year, and gave them authority to inventory and requisition grain supplies. Generally speaking, Girondin deputies opposed the grain maximum, favoring free trade, and Montagnard deputies supported it, responding to pressure from the sans-culottes. The law was unevenly applied, in part due to ambivalence among departmental administrators, and in part due to the disruptions of the Vendée rebellion and the federalist revolt. The fact that maximum prices varied by department also encouraged local authorities to retain control over local grain supplies, thereby interfering with national commerce. Peasants tended to resent the grain maximum, and many refused to deliver their grain to market, even after the National Convention imposed the death penalty as punishment for hoarders in July 1793. In September 1793, pressured by the enragés, the National Convention adopted a more general maximum and stiffened its enforcement as part of the legislation of the Terror. See also BREAD RIOTS.

GRANGENEUVE, JEAN-ANTOINE (1751–1793). Grangeneuve, the son of an avocat au Parlement in Bordeaux, was among the most illustrious attorneys in that city at the end of the Old Regime. He joined in the founding of the Jacobin club in Bordeaux in 1789, and in February 1790 was elected as a substitute procureur on the municipal council. In 1791 Grangeneuve was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Gironde, and would be reelected to the National Convention the following year. But it was in the Legislative Assembly that he played his most influential role. In November 1791 he demanded that all émigrés who refused to return to France be immediately declared traitors, and in January 1792 delivered a formal report on the problem of émigrés, focusing in particular on the two brothers of Louis XVI. Grangeneuve supported Jacques Brissot’s call for war against Austria, and was a staunch advocate of free trade. He insisted, in constitutional debates, that the Legislative Assembly and the king were two equal powers, and was among the first of the Girondins to call for an end to the monarchy, in July 1792.

Grangeneuve was appalled, however, by the September Massacres, and became increasingly moderate and withdrawn thereafter. In the trial of Louis XVI, he voted for imprisonment and for the appel au peuple, and in April 1793 voted in support of the indictment of Jean-Paul Marat. Grangeneuve was proscribed from the National Convention on 2 June 1793, fled to Bordeaux, and went into hiding. He was declared an outlaw on 28 July 1793, and upon his discovery and arrest in December was executed along with his younger brother, Jean, who had been a leader on the Gironde departmental administration during the federalist revolt.

GREAT FEAR. The Great Fear (Grande Peur) was a sort of rural panic that swept across much of France in the last two weeks of July and the first week of August 1789. The number of beggars and vagrants had grown in rural France in the wake of the poor harvests of 1788, and the convocation of the Estates-General and the drafting of cahiers de doléances had created a mood of both anticipation and apprehension across the country. In mid-July, news of the dismissal of Jacques Necker and the fall of the Bastille acted like a spark in this very volatile situation.

The Great Fear traveled with astonishing rapidity, following seven currents that covered most of central and south-central France. Each current generated its own variants, but generally speaking the rumor spread that the aristocracy had paid brigands to go out into the fields to cut the grain before it had fully ripened, thereby throwing the peasantry into even deeper economic crisis and thwarting the popular movement for reform. Rumors of roving bands of brigands often turned out to have been generated by flocks of sheep or cattle, but by the time such false alerts could be put to rest the alarm had raced on to the next town or village. In some instances, peasants attacked the châteaux of local seigneurs, drinking the lord’s wine and sometimes seizing and destroying the records of the hated seigneurial dues. Considerable property damage resulted, but very few lives were lost in this violence.

The impact of the Great Fear was twofold. Many communities across France created their own National Guard, to defend against the rumored bands of brigands, and this mobilization of the citizenry into armed militias also presented a force capable of countering royal troops that might oppose the Revolution. Secondly, as news of the Great Fear reached Versailles, the deputies grew concerned, and that concern almost certainly prompted some among them to renounce their seigneurial dues on the Night of 4 August and initiate the legislative process that would eventually lead to the abolition of privilege.

GRÉGOIRE, HENRI-BAPTISTE (1750–1831). Grégoire was born in a small village in northeastern France, where his father was a tailor and member of the village council. Grégoire went to school in the village, then on to a Jesuit collège, before attending the University of Nancy, in 1768, and seminary in Metz beginning in 1772, where he was a student of Adrien Lamourette. From that time until the outbreak of the Revolution, he held a variety of posts as a teacher, a vicar, and a curé. In 1785, at the inauguration of a synagogue in Lorraine, Grégoire gave a sermon in favor of the emancipation of Jews in France, a position that he would advocate throughout the Revolution. In 1789 he was elected to the Estates-General as a delegate of the clergy of Nancy.

Grégoire was among the most active deputies in the Constituent Assembly. He joined the Breton club, and later the Jacobin club, which he left briefly at the time of the Feuillant schism. Grégoire favored the joining of the three orders, and was one of five clergy who went over to the Third Estate, though he continued to meet with the clergy as well. He was present for the swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, and presided over the famous meeting of the Constituent Assembly on 12 July 1789 that went on for 72 hours while the Bastille fell in Paris. In August 1789 he argued that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen should include a Declaration of Duties, and called for the name of God to appear at the head of the declaration. Grégoire was among the founders of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, and would be influential in the abolition of slavery in 1794. He worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the lower clergy, and in late December 1790 was the first to swear the civil oath of the clergy, which he ardently defended in the years to come. Following the adjournment of the Constituent Assembly, Grégoire was elected constitutional bishop in the Loir-et-Cher, where he also served on the departmental administration.

In 1792 Grégoire was elected from the Loir-et-Cher to the National Convention. He was absent during the trial of Louis XVI, but opposed the death penalty as a matter of principle. He is perhaps best known in the Convention for his advocacy of French as the universal language of the republic, and his call for legislation abolishing the use of patois. He was an opponent of refractory priests, but also a vigorous opponent of deChristianization. In 1795 he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred from the Seine, to the Corps Législatif after Brumaire, and to the Senate in 1801. Grégoire opposed the Concordat negotiated by Napoleon Bonaparte with the Catholic Church, and refused to support the Empire. Despite this, he was named to the Legion of Honor in 1803, and made a Count of the Empire in 1808. In that latter year he completed his memoirs, in which he praised the accomplishments of the Constituent Assembly while judging more harshly the National Convention. Grégoire had increasingly come to be an advocate of freedom of religion over the course of the Revolution, and at his death remained unreconciled with the Catholic Church.

GRÉTRY, ANDRÉ-ERNEST-MODESTE (1741–1813). Grétry was born in Liège, the son of a violinist. He was a master of the comic opera under the reign of Louis XVI, and adapted to the changing cultural politics of the Revolution. Grétry studied first in Liège, and then in Rome, before moving to Paris in 1766. En route he stopped in Geneva, where he met Voltaire, who would become one of his early patrons, and whose work would inspire his first opera, Isabelle et Gertrude. Grétry’s first real success was Le Huron, completed in 1768. His lyrical style was influenced by the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and by the music of Christoph Gluck. Grétry’s best-known work was Richard Coeur de Lion (1784), the refrain from which, “O Richard, o mon Roi,” became a rallying song for royalists during the early years of the Revolution. This harmed Grétry’s reputation somewhat, but the appearance of Guillaume Tell in 1791 and La Rosière Républicaine in 1794 (with libretto by Sylvain Maréchal) returned him to favor in the public eye. In 1795 he was elected to the Institut National, and shortly thereafter became inspector of the new music conservatory. He wrote a number of patriotic pieces during the Revolution, including Ronde pour la plantation d’un arbre de la Liberté (1799). In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte named him to the Legion of Honor. He died in 1813 at the hermitage of Rousseau, in Montmorency, which he had bought at the time of the philosopher’s death.

GUADET, MARGUERITE-ELIE (1755–1794). Guadet was born in Saint-Emilion and brought up at home until the age of 15, at which point the widow of a rich merchant in Bordeaux paid for his education at the collège of Guyenne. He eventually inherited 20,000 livres from that same widow, and went on to study law in Bordeaux. Guadet left for Paris in the mid-1770s, where he worked as personal secretary to a lawyer, and returned to Bordeaux in 1781 to take up a position as avocat au Parlement. He enjoyed a good reputation on the eve of the Revolution.

Guadet was among the founders of the Jacobin club in Bordeaux, and in July 1790 was elected to the departmental administration. In May 1791 he was elected president of the departmental Criminal Tribunal, and later that year was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Gironde. Guadet was a member of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, and a vocal critic of French plantation owners in Saint-Domingue. He did not make his first speech in the Assembly until 14 January 1792, but then delivered a stirring call for a declaration of war in defense of the Revolution and the constitution. Guadet was an acerbic speaker, had several barbed exchanges with Maximilien Robespierre, and was among the first deputies to condemn Jean-Paul Marat, in May 1792. Later that summer, however, he signed the ill-considered letter to Joseph Boze, the former court painter, along with Armand Gensonné and Pierre Vergniaud, and even went so far as to meet with the king and queen.

This would harm his reputation when the letter was revealed in January 1793, but by then Guadet had emerged, along with François Buzot, as a leading spokesperson for the Girondin faction in the National Convention. He voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, but for the Mailhe amendment, and for the appel au peuple as well. Guadet took a leading role in the attack on Marat in the spring of 1793, delivering a particularly scathing speech on 12 April that condemned the criminal behavior of Paris militants as well, but in the end declined to vote on the indictment of Marat. In May he proposed that the National Convention be moved to Bourges, should the deputies be attacked by the Paris crowd. Guadet was among the deputies proscribed on 2 June. He fled to Caen, and then on to Brittany after the collapse of the federalist revolt. He eventually took refuge near his home in Saint-Emilion, but was discovered in June 1794 along with Jean-Baptiste Salle and immediately taken to Bordeaux. He died on the guillotine along with his father, aunt, and brother.

GUILLOTINE. The guillotine stands as the principal symbol of the Terror in the French Revolution. On 20 January 1790, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed in the Constituent Assembly that capital punishment be carried out by decapitation, and the deputies eventually adopted that proposal in legislation approved on 25 September 1791. The machine that was designed to carry out the punishment came to bear Dr. Guillotin’s name.

Guillotin’s proposal was motivated both by a sense of humanity and a desire for equality. Executions under the Old Regime were often slow and painful. Commoners were either hung, slowly strangling to death, or if their offense was particularly grievous they might be broken on the wheel or drawn and quartered, procedures that could take hours to complete. Only convicted aristocrats were entitled to be executed by the sword, a method of decapitation that could sometimes be clumsy and painful itself. Death by guillotine was to be both quick and efficient, and was to be applied to all persons sentenced to die, regardless of rank.

A guillotine was first used on 25 April 1792. The machine itself consisted of a wooden frame, roughly 12 feet in height, at the top of which a diagonal, weighted blade was suspended by a rope, the release of which would allow the blade to descend quickly, severing the head of the victim in one blow. The victim lay face down on a bench, his head and neck placed in a lunette directly below the blade. The guillotine was not foolproof. Occasionally the blade failed to sever the neck completely, and the blade had to be raised for a second, or third, descent.

Executions were public, as they had been under the Old Regime, and often drew large crowds. For the execution of Louis XVI, the guillotine was erected on the Place de la Révolution, but most executions in Paris occurred on the Place du Carrousel. During the Terror, however, it returned to the Place de la Révolution, until June 1794, when the National Convention ordered it moved to a less central location. By then, it would seem, the sight of the guillotine had come to offend popular sensibilities.

Initially, though, the guillotine generated considerable curiosity and debate about the moment of death. Was it instantaneous, some asked, or did the head retain consciousness for a split second after being severed from the body? Stories, or myths, soon circulated about the executions of prominent individuals. Georges Danton reportedly admonished the executioner to show his head to the crowd, since it was a sight well worth seeing. Those who witnessed the execution of Charlotte Corday insisted that her face blushed when the executioner lifted her head to the crowd and then kissed her on the cheek. In the fall of 1793, the armées révolutionnaires built ambulatory guillotines that could be rolled from village to village, dispensing revolutionary justice to those who withheld grain from market or sheltered refractory priests.

It is an irony that the guillotine, created out of an impulse to make execution more humane, soon came to be viewed with horror, a symbol of cold, efficient, impersonal death, as the machinery of the Terror claimed its thousands of victims. Yet the guillotine remained the means of execution in France until the 1980s, when the government of François Mitterrand finally abolished capital punishment simply by refusing to approve a budget to pay the executioner.

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HÉBERT, JACQUES-RENÉ (1757–1794). Hébert was the son of a master goldsmith in Alençon, in Lower Normandy, but his father died when he was just eight years old, and his childhood was troubled thereafter. He left home after being accused of petty theft, and held a number of odd jobs while traveling about the provinces. The outbreak of the Revolution drew him to Paris, and in the fall of 1790 he began publication of Le Père Duchesne, which would become one of the most popular, and most maligned, revolutionary newspapers of the capital. Hébert was an activist in the Cordelier club, signed and circulated the Champ de Mars petition calling for an end to the monarchy, was a member of the Insurrectionary Commune in August 1792, and was elected substitute procureur of Paris in December of that year.

But it was through his newspaper that Hébert exercised his greatest influence. Le Père Duchesne was written in the language of the people, some would say in the language of the gutter, and it became the mouthpiece of the Parisian sans-culottes. In 1792–93 Hébert was dogged in his condemnation of the Girondin deputies, who ordered his arrest on 24 May 1793. He was released just three days later, however, and the leading Girondins would be proscribed from the National Convention less than a week after that. Le Père Duchesne now advocated increasingly radical policies, and in September Hébert embraced the economic and social views of Jacques Roux and the enragés. He pushed for the adoption of the first Law of Suspects on 17 September 1793. Hébert had joined the Jacobin club in January 1793, but he offended many Jacobins when he accused Marie Antoinette of incest with her son in October 1793. He further offended Maximilien Robespierre by his atheism and vocal support of deChristianization. As political opinion polarized in Paris over the question of the need for continued Terror, the Committee of Public Safety decided to move first against its critics on the left. Hébert and a number of his supporters in the Cordelier club were arrested on trumped-up charges of conspiring against the Convention and seeking the return of the monarchy. The trial went badly, but Hébert and the others were still found guilty and executed on 24 March 1794, barely a week before Georges Danton and the Indulgents would meet the same fate.

HÉRAULT-SÉCHELLES, MARIE-JEAN (1759–1794). Born into an old noble family, his father died in battle just before his birth. Schooled by the Oratoriens of Juilly, he also studied law in Paris, becoming an avocat du roi at the Parlement at the young age of 26. Hérault-Séchelles no doubt benefited from the patronage of Marie Antoinette and the Polignac family. He met Jean-Jacques Rousseau just before his death. He was present at the fall of the Bastille, but as an observer, and was elected to the Legislative Assembly from Paris, and to the National Convention from the Seine-et-Oise. Described by some as a remarkable orator, his politics were somewhat ambivalent. He supported the Girondins in their war policy, but sat with the Montagnards in the National Convention. In May 1793 he joined the Committee of Public Safety to work on the new constitution. While on mission to the Haute-Savoie some months earlier, however, Hérault-Séchelles had taken a mistress whose husband was an Austrian general. She returned with him to Paris, and this relationship drew suspicion. He further alienated Maximilien Robespierre by his support of deChristianization, and in December 1793 resigned from the Committee. Three months later he was accused by Louis-Antoine Saint-Just of passing diplomatic secrets to foreigners. Hérault-Séchelles went to trial with Georges Danton and the Indulgents, though he did not share their political views, and was executed with them on 5 April 1794.

HERCULES. On 17 November 1793, the National Convention voted in favor of Jacques-Louis David’s proposal that Hercules be adopted as the principal figure on the official seal of state. For a time, then, Hercules replaced Marianne as the symbol of the French Republic. A giant figure of Hercules had first appeared at a festival in Paris on 10 August 1793 commemorating the fall of the monarchy. Hercules stood carrying a club, crushing the hydra of federalism. David conceived of Hercules as a symbol of popular sovereignty, a representation of a virile people defeating the enemies of the Revolution.

The Convention’s adoption of Hercules on the seal of state came at the end of a period in which women had been increasingly active in Parisian politics, and just weeks after the closing of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. The symbolic triumph of Hercules over Marianne thus mirrored the exclusion of women from the political arena of the Jacobin regime. Hercules can be seen again in an engraving of the June 1794 festival celebrating the Cult of the Supreme Being. But with the advent of the Directory and the nullification of popular sovereignty, Hercules disappeared from view, as the deputies of the Council of Five Hundred adopted increasingly abstract symbols to represent the Republic. In the long run, Marianne would triumph over Hercules, even though women did not gain the vote in France until after World War II.

HOCHE, LOUIS-LAZARE (1768–1797). Lazare Hoche was the son of a military man, and like his father he began work as a stable boy in the royal stables at Versailles. He was an autodidact, devouring books on all subjects as a youth. In 1784 he joined the Gardes Françaises, from which he was dismissed, along with his regiment, in August 1789. He then joined the National Guard in Paris, as a sergeant, and as such accompanied the women on their march to Versailles on 5–6 October 1789. Hoche achieved rapid promotion through the ranks after war broke out in 1792, performing well at the defense of Thionville and at the sieges of Namur and Maestricht. The latter battle brought him to the attention of Lazare Carnot, who was impressed by Hoche’s strategy of attacking with massed bayonets. In October 1793 he was named division general of the Army of the Moselle, and shortly thereafter general of the combined armies of the Rhine and Moselle. But in April 1794 Hoche was denounced by a rival, Jean-Charles Pichegru, who had the backing of Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. Hoche was locked up in the Conciergerie, where he would remain until after Thermidor.

After his release Hoche was assigned to command the Army of the Cherbourg coast, where he acted as much as an administrator and politician as a general. He pacified the region, long disrupted by the Vendée rebellion and the chouans, and in January 1795 signed a temporary armistice with François Charette, the most prominent of the Vendéan commanders. In July 1795 Hoche crushed the émigré forces that disembarked at Quiberon, supported by the British, and in early 1796 he defeated and captured both Charette and Jean-Nicolas Stofflet. That summer he met the Irish patriot Wolfe Tone in Paris, and took the lead in planning an expedition to western Ireland to punish the British for the Quiberon attack. The expedition was delayed, however, by indecisiveness within the Directory, and ultimately scuttled by foul weather. In February 1797 Hoche led an army across the Rhine River, and in July declined the post of minister of war, already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him two months later near Coblenz. On 1 October 1797 a full military funeral was held on the Champ de Mars for the man whom Napoleon Bonaparte would describe as the best of the republican generals of the Revolution.

HOSPITALS. Prior to 1789, hospitals in France primarily served the poor and were funded and managed by the Catholic Church. The nationalization of Church lands in November 1789 fundamentally changed that situation, even though hospital properties were in theory exempt from that legislation. Eventually hospitals did lose their income-generating property, and the state took on responsibility for creating a welfare system that would see to the needs of the poor and indigent. Given the economic upheaval of the revolutionary decade, however, the state was never able to achieve its noble aspirations in this area.

By 1793 the situation of most hospitals in France was perilous. Local authorities were responsible for distributing funds to hospitals, but rarely had adequate resources to do so, so that hospital administrators regularly appealed to the national government for emergency support. All Frenchmen were guaranteed free medical care, and hospitals grew even more crowded than they had been under the Old Regime. Hospital budgets were paid almost exclusively in assignats, which were wracked by inflation, further undermining the ability of hospitals to fulfill their mission. From 1792 onward, the impact of nearly continuous war increased the overcrowding of hospitals throughout France, but particularly those near the battle fronts or in large cities. Hospital administration was reorganized under the Directory, with new funding sources introduced in late 1796. But legislation in January 1797 exempting hospitals from paying debts incurred before 1794 is clear evidence of the continuing financial burden under which they operated.

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IDÉALOGUES. The Idéalogues were a collection of intellectuals in the late Directory years committed to the rationalist thought of the Enlightenment. They included Dominique-Joseph Garat, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Pierre-Jean Georges Cabanis, and Pierre-Claude-François Daunou. Most had been active politically in the Revolution before turning toward more academic pursuits. Their institutional bases of influence were the Ecole Normale and the Institut National. They were committed to applying the social philosophy of the Enlightenment to the development of civic man, but worked as well in the fields of anatomy and science. The term Idéalogue had a pejorative connotation, having been coined by Napoleon Bonaparte, who more harshly characterized the group as “vermin,” most likely because they had opposed his seizure of power and then his Concordat with the Catholic Church. Other thinkers of the day also tended to belittle the intellectual contribution of the group, however, and their reputation as impractical day dreamers has endured.

IMPARTIALS. The Impartials were one of the first clubs of the Revolution, forming in the early days of the Estates-General. Pierre-Victor Malouet presided over the club’s meetings, guiding it in an aggressive propaganda campaign against the Jacobin club. With the declaration of the Constituent Assembly in July 1789, the Impartiais disappeared, but supporters of the monarchy would continue to be referred to by that term for some time thereafter. Many members of the club would have belonged as well to the Society of 1789 or, somewhat later, to the Monarchist club.

INDULGENTS. The Indulgents were a loosely defined group of deputies that took shape in the National Convention toward the end of 1793 around Georges Danton. Danton had left Paris for a time in October 1793, and when he returned he spoke publicly at the Cordeliers club and at the Convention about the need to return to normal life, to repeal some aspects of the Law of Suspects, and even to create a committee of clemency. Such views were supported by Camille Desmoulins, in the pages of his newspaper the Vieux Cordelier, by Pierre Philippeaux and Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine. Politics seemed to be polarizing at this moment between extremists gathered around Jacques-René Hébert and the Indulgents who supported Danton’s calls for a relaxation of the Terror.

On 8 January 1794 Maximilien Robespierre denounced both groups in a speech at the Jacobin club, referring to them as ultra-revolutionaries and citra-revolutionaries. In the following months, as the Compagnie des Indes scandal unraveled, implicating Fabre d’Eglantine, and as the rhetoric of Desmoulins’s Vieux Cordelier grew harsher, the Committee of Public Safety moved against both groups. Hébert and his supporters went to trial first, thereby defusing the deChristianization movement, and in late March 1794 the Indulgents were arrested. They were brought to trial with a motley array of defendants, including François Chabot and Marie-Jean Hérault-Séchelles, all accused of conspiring with foreign enemies, and executed on 5 April 1794.

INSTITUT NATIONAL. The Institut National des Sciences et des Arts was created in October 1795 by decree of the National Convention. It replaced the old royal Academies, which had been suppressed by the Convention in August 1793 at the request of Henri-Baptiste Grégoire and Jacques-Louis David. The purpose of the Institut National was to advance knowledge in the sciences and arts through the support of research, the publication of new findings, and correspondence with learned societies in other countries. It was to be composed of 144 members, resident in Paris, an equal number of associates from the provinces, and 24 affiliates from foreign countries. The Directory was to name the first third of the members, who would in turn name the other members.

The Institut National was divided into three sections: the first devoted to mathematics and the physical sciences; a second devoted to the moral and political sciences; and a third devoted to literature and fine arts. A president of the Institut was to be elected every six months, and secretaries for each section were to be elected each year. Napoleon Bonaparte reorganized the Institut into four sections in 1803, eliminating in the process the section devoted to the moral and political sciences, which had been a stronghold of the Idéalogues.

INVALIDES. The Hôtel des Invalides was a military hospital in Paris at the end of the Old Regime. On 14 July 1789, roused by the speech of Camille Desmoulins, a Parisian crowd marched first to the Invalides in search of arms and then across town to the Bastille. The Invalides continued to serve as a hospital for soldiers wounded in battle throughout the Revolution. In the 1840s the remains of Napoleon Bonaparte were returned from St. Helena to find their final resting place in the Invalides, which also houses the ashes of Jean-Claude Rouget de Lisle, composer of the Marseillaise.

ISNARD, HENRI-MAXIMIN (1758–1825). Isnard was the son of a wholesale merchant in Grasse, and eventually inherited his father’s commercial and manufacturing business. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Var, where he sat on the left and associated with the Brissotins. Isnard urged that refractory priests be deported, and in late 1791 spoke eloquently before the Assembly against the plotting of émigrés. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention, again from the Var. He voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple, but in the months that followed he grew increasingly critical of the dissension within the Convention and the militancy of the Paris sections. As president of the Convention, he refused a 25 May demand from the sections for the release of Jacques Hébert and Jean Varlet with these stern words: “I tell you in the name of the whole of France that if these perpetually recurring insurrections ever lead to harm to the parliament chosen by the nation, Paris will be annihilated, and men will search the banks of the Seine for traces of the city.”

Isnard was not included in the proscriptions of 2 June 1793, but at the urging of Bertrand Barère he withdrew from the Convention, and when his arrest was ordered on 3 October 1793 went into hiding. He returned to the Convention on 26 February 1795, and the Committee of Public Safety approved an indemnity of 150,000 livres for the loss of his manufactory, either pillaged or sold during the Terror. Isnard was among the most reactionary of the Thermidorians. He was sent on mission to the Bouches-du-Rhône in May 1795 to calm troubles, but instead stirred up reprisals against former terrorists. He stood by while a group of Jacobins was massacred in the Fort St. Jean in Marseille, and in Aix-en-Provence urged on an angry crowd with these words: “If you have no arms, take up sticks; and if you have no sticks, unearth the bones of your buried relatives and use them to strike the terrorists.” Isnard was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, where he sat until 1797, at which point he returned to the Var and took up a post in the departmental administration. He remained active in local politics until 1810, and in 1813 was named a Baron of the Empire. Isnard reportedly grew more religious as he aged, and claimed late in life that he had come to regret his sometimes intemperate rhetoric during the Revolution.

– J –

JACOBIN CLUBS. The Jacobin clubs were the most important of the popular societies in France during the Revolution. The first Jacobin club emerged out of the Breton club, formed at Versailles in April 1789 by delegates to the Estates-General. Not long after the Constituent Assembly moved to Paris, in October 1789, the Jacobin club installed itself in the former monastery of the Jacobins on the rue Saint-Honoré. Its meeting place gave it its popular name. The club’s full title was Société des Amis de la Constitution, and later Société des Amis de la Liberté et de l’Egalité.

At first, the membership in the club was composed almost entirely of deputies in the Constituent Assembly. The purpose of the club was to debate and discuss issues before the Assembly, to support the drafting and acceptance of a constitution, and to correspond with like-minded societies throughout France. Dues for the club were at first quite substantial, and as membership grew it was drawn almost entirely from the ranks of middle-class professionals. By early 1790 there were roughly 1,000 members in the Paris club, and that number more than doubled by June 1791.

Critics of the Jacobin club, including the king himself at the time of the flight to Varennes, charged that it was usurping the proper role of the Constituent Assembly, functioning as a shadow parliament and exercising an undue influence on national politics. The Monarchist clubs that appeared in late 1790 challenged the Jacobins in those terms, and the resultant controversy and conflict led to a movement of consolidation in provincial towns, with the “mother society” in Paris choosing to affiliate with only one club per town. The network gradually grew, to 426 clubs nationwide in March 1791 and 934 by July 1791, with about half of those formally affiliated with the Paris club. At that time, however, a split occurred as members in Paris disagreed over how to respond to the political crisis caused by the flight to Varennes. Moderate deputies, convinced that a constitutional monarchy should be preserved, broke away to form the Feuillants, and at first the new club attracted a majority of the membership. Under the leadership of Jérome Pétion and Maximilien Robespierre, however, the Jacobins rallied and soon redoubled their membership, both in Paris and the provinces.

Jacobin clubs played an active role in the elections to the National Convention and the local elections that followed, with Jacobins achieving political dominance in Paris and some provincial cities, most notably Lyon and Marseille. In Paris, the September Massacres of 1792 prompted many of the Girondin deputies to leave the Jacobin club. The proscription of the Girondin leaders in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793 and the ascendancy of the Montagnards to power brought the Jacobin clubs to the height of their influence. Jacobin clubs throughout France now functioned as unofficial adjuncts to local authorities. Representatives on mission turned to local Jacobins for allies in their efforts to purge federalist administrations. Jacobin club members filled the ranks of the committees of surveillance and the armées révolutionnaires. The clubs themselves were often purged of moderate members in 1793–94, and the membership shifted from professional middle class to more of an artisan/shopkeeper composition.

Given the close association of the Jacobin clubs with the policies of the Terror, it is not surprising that their influence waned after Thermidor. The shift was not immediate, since a number of Jacobins had in fact participated in the coup against Robespierre, but in the autumn of 1794 the clubs came under attack by the jeunesse dorée. The National Convention ordered the closure of the Paris Jacobin club on 12 November 1794. The White Terror of early 1795 targeted former Jacobin club members, and the law of 23 August 1795 prohibited all political clubs. There was a clandestine resurgence of Jacobin clubs under the Directory, but they operated on the margins of legality and faced the constant threat of suppression.

JALÈS (CAMP DE). Jalès is a plain on the southeastern edge of the Massif Central, at the border between the departments of the Gard and the Ardèche, where an assemblage of nobles, clergy, and Catholic peasants came together in loose camps, or federations, on several occasions in the early years of the Revolution. The first was in August 1790, following the bagarre de Nîmes, in which Catholics and Protestants had clashed. The local aristocracy, perhaps in contact with émigrés in Turin, appealed to National Guardsmen who were disillusioned with the Revolution, and as many as 25,000 may have gathered in the plain below the towering château of Jalès. No battle or confrontation resulted, but a loosely organized leadership did emerge from the camp, and Jalès came to be synonymous with counterrevolution in southern France thereafter.

Camps occurred on the plain of Jalès on at least two subsequent occasions, the first in February 1791. Local authorities learned of the plan in advance, however, and easily dispersed the small band that gathered. A third camp de Jalès took place in July 1792, after local leaders had contacted émigré princes in Coblenz. Once again, local authorities responded, putting a force of some 10,000 volunteers into the field against the assembled royalists. Several hundred rebels were killed, bringing an end to the camps de Jalès until the final years of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire, when supporters of the monarchy once again gathered there.

JANSENISM. Jansenism was a movement within the French Catholic Church, with its origins in the 17th century. French Jansenists were followers of Cornelius Jansen, a bishop who championed the ideas of Saint Augustine, particularly his emphasis on grace as the key to salvation. Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine were two prominent 17th-century Jansenists. Early in the 18th century, in 1713, Pope Clement condemned the writings of the leading French Jansenist of the time, Pasquier Quesnel, in his papal bull, Unigenitus.

Although Jansensists would face persecution in France for the remainder of the century, they were not driven from the kingdom, and from mid-century onward Jansenists constituted a significant percentage of the judges in the Parlement of Paris. Not only did the Jansenists challenge the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, by emphasizing its conciliar tradition, they also challenged the absolutist tendencies of the monarchy and defended the Gallican tradition of the French church. Jansenism was thus an important contributing current to French republicanism in the 18th century, and has long been credited as a formative influence on the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Among the revolutionaries, Henri-Baptiste Grégoire is the most notable Jansenist.

JAVOGUES, CLAUDE (1759–1796). Javogues was the son of a notary, in a long line of notaries. He attended a Jesuit collège in Montbrison, went on to study law at the University of Valence, and returned to Montbrison as an avocat in 1785, where he was a bit of a social outcast. Javogues joined the local National Guard in 1789, and in 1791 was elected to the Montbrison district administration. The following year he was elected to the National Convention from the Rhône-et-Loire. He sat with the Montagnards, voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. In April 1793 he spoke in defense of Jean-Paul Marat.

In July 1793 Javogues was sent on mission with two other deputies to assist in preparations for the siege of Lyon. He preferred to work alone, and over the next six months ordered a tax on the rich in Saint-Etienne, the execution of 64 alleged counterrevolutionaries in Feurs, and severe repression in Montbrison as well. Javogues was twice recalled to Paris by the Committee of Public Safety, and was denounced before the Convention by Georges Couthon, to whom he apologized, thus avoiding formal accusation until April 1795, when a torrent of accusations poured forth from the department of the Loire. Javogues went into hiding, but in September 1796 was implicated in the failed Grenelle conspiracy that followed the arrest of Gracchus Babeuf and his supporters. Javogues was tried before a military commission and found guilty of treason, punished more for his past deeds than for the farcical Grenelle uprising. He sang the Marseillaise on his way to the firing squad.

JEANBON SAINT-ANDRÉ, ANDRÉ (1749–1813). Jeanbon Saint-André was born into a family of Protestant artisans in Montauban. His father was a fuller, and as a youth André joined the merchant marine and became a ship’s captain. He returned to Montauban, though, in 1773 to become a minister. When the Revolution began, he joined the Jacobin club and was elected to the Montauban municipal council in 1790. Violence between Protestants and Catholics forced him to flee Montauban in May 1790. He was elected to the National Convention from the Lot, sat with the Montagnards, and voted for death at the king’s trial. He served on the Committee of Public Safety from June 1793 until July 1794, with principal responsibility for the navy. He pronounced the funeral eulogy for Jean-Paul Marat. In March 1795 he was arrested, along with Robert Lindet, and accused as a terrorist. Both were amnestied later that year. Jeanbon Saint-André served the Directory as a diplomat, was imprisoned by the Turks in 1799–1802, subsequently served Napoleon Bonaparte as a prefect and was named to the Legion of Honor, and, in 1810, proclaimed a Baron of the Empire. He is featured prominently in the painting of the Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David, who was a close friend.

JEUNESSE DORÉE. The jeunesse dorée, or “gilded youth,” were officially tolerated bands of young thugs, drawn principally from well-to-do families, which were active in most large cities in the period after Thermidor. They were essentially reactionary, but played a role somewhat analogous to that of the sans-culottes in 1792–1793. In Paris, where they had a particularly high public profile, the deputies Louis-Stanislas Fréron and Jean-Lambert Tallien gave them tacit support.

The Parisian jeunesse dorée numbered between 2,000 and 3,000, met frequently at the Café des Chartes in the Palais Royal, and targeted former militants for public abuse. They broke the busts of Jean-Paul Marat throughout Paris, and mounted a campaign of violent disruption of Jacobin club meetings, leading finally to the November 1794 order by the National Convention for the closing of the club. The jeunesse dorée, like the sans-culottes before them, also hooted and taunted the deputies from the galleries of the National Convention, pressuring them to bring ex-terrorists like Jean-Baptiste Carrier, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, and Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne to trial. In cities of the southeast, including Lyon and Marseille, the jeunesse dorée went so far as to resort to murder against their political enemies, and their actions fed the White Terror in that region. They were less violent in Paris, but were in the streets during the Germinal and Prairial riots of 1795, and spearheaded the Vendémiaire uprising of October 1795, the suppression of which brought an end to the jeunesse dorée movement in the capital.

JEWS. In 1789 there were approximately 40,000 Jews in France. The majority of them were Ashkenazim who lived in the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine along the German border, but there was also a population of nearly 2,300 Sephardic Jews in the city of Bordeaux, with others scattered in smaller communities along the southwest coast. As with Protestants, Jews did not enjoy official religious tolerance under the Old Regime. In 1788, however, the year following the Edict of Toleration for Protestants, a delegation of Jews from Bordeaux traveled to Versailles to request similar treatment.

Jews did not achieve civil rights in France until the Revolution. Because they had assimilated more fully into French society, the Sephardim of the southwest were allowed to vote in elections to the Estates-General while the Ashkenazim were not. The Jews of the southwest, originally immigrants from Spain and Portugal, were granted full citizenship in January 1790. The Constituent Assembly did not grant the same rights to the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim until 27 September 1791. In both instances the deputies made clear that Jews were granted civil rights as individuals, not as a group, following the argument first expressed by Stanislas Clermont-Tonnerre in late 1789 that “there cannot be a nation within a nation.” Jews endured persecution under the Terror much as Catholics did, but prospered under the Thermidorian regime.

JOURDAN, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1762–1833). Jourdan’s father was a surgeon in Limoges, but Jean-Baptiste was orphaned at a young age. He worked briefly as a clerk in a silk shop, but in 1778 joined the Auxerrois regiment and went to fight in America. Jourdan participated in the battle of Savannah and in the conquest of Grenada. He returned to France in 1782, was decommissioned in 1784, and returned to Limoges to work as a haberdasher. Early in the Revolution he became a captain in the National Guard, and joined the Limoges Jacobin club. In 1792 Jourdan assumed command of the Second Battalion of Haute-Vienne volunteers and performed well at the battles of Jemmapes (November 1792) and Neerwinden (March 1793). By July 1793 he was a division general, and after the Battle of Hond-schoote (September 1793), where he performed brilliantly, he was promoted to General of the Army of the Ardennes. In October 1793 he stopped the Austrians at Wattignies, but when he advised a defensive posture following that victory he was sacked and replaced by Jean-Charles Pichegru. Jourdan was protected by Lazare Carnot, and within months was back in command of the Army of the Moselle. His troops scored an impressive series of victories in northern France and Belgium through the spring and summer months of 1794.

Jourdan was relieved of his command once again in 1796 and returned to Limoges. The following year he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred from the Haute-Vienne, but in October 1798 accepted command of the Army of the Danube. After defeat at the hands of an army commanded by Archduke Charles of Austria in March 1799, Jourdan retired from the army and was elected once again to the Council of Five Hundred. Jourdan was a spokesperson for the Jacobin minority in that assembly, and halfheartedly opposed the Brumaire coup. Despite that opposition, Napoleon Bonaparte named him ambassador to Turin and then General of the Army of Italy. In May 1804, Jourdan was named a marshal and accompanied Joseph Bonaparte to Spain. He was named a Count and Peer of France under the Restoration, but refused to take his seat on the Council of War that was convened to judge Marshal Michel Ney in 1815.

JOURNÉES. There were several important journées in the French Revolution, days on which the people rose up in armed demonstrations to protest government policies or actions and demand change. These include 14 July 1789, the storming of the Bastille; the October Days, 5–6 October 1789, when the women of Paris marched to Versailles to protest rising bread prices and return the king to his capital; the uprising of 10 August 1792, when the monarchy was toppled; the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, when the Girondin deputies were proscribed from the National Convention; and 5–6 September 1793, when the sans-culottes demanded an extension of the maximum and a declaration of Terror as the order of the day. Each of these journées could be said to have moved the Revolution forward. Radicals saw them as an expression of popular sovereignty, while moderates and conservatives saw in them the threat of popular violence and anarchy. The last journées of the Revolution, the Germinal riots and Prairial riots of 1795, were directed against the Thermidorians. Each failed in its objectives and was easily suppressed by authorities now increasingly eager to bring the Revolution to an end and reestablish order and the rule of law. See also RÉVEILLON RIOTS.

JULLIEN, MARC-ANTOINE (1744–1821). Jullien’s father was a barber-surgeon in a small village in the Dauphiné. Marc-Antoine was self-taught and went on to become a schoolteacher and man of letters. His poetry drew the attention of the abbé Mably, and when he moved to Paris in the 1770s he became acquainted with Marie-Jean Condorcet and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. Jullien embraced the ideals of 1789, and corresponded with friends back home to encourage them to do the same. Electors in the Drôme responded by choosing him as an alternate deputy to the Legislative Assembly and then as a deputy to the National Convention in 1792. Jullien joined the Jacobin club and sat with the Montagnards, voting for death in the trial of Louis XVI. In the summer of 1793 he declined to go on mission first to Nantes and then to Bordeaux, though his son, Marc-Antoine Jullien fils, would visit both cities on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety. Jullien played no political role under the Directory, and refused to support Napoleon Bonaparte during the Hundred Days, which spared him exile as a regicide.

JULLIEN, MARC-ANTOINE fils (1775–1848). Routinely referred to during the Revolution as “Jullien de Paris,” to distinguish him from his father, “Jullien of the Drôme.” His father moved to Paris in the 1770s in part to attend to the education of his children, and young Jullien was immersed in the politics of the Revolution from its outset. He regularly attended Jacobin club meetings and came to the attention of leading deputies in the Legislative Assembly. In May 1792 Marie-Jean Condorcet sent him to London as a special intermediary between the Girondin leadership and Lord Stanhope. Jullien was barely 17 at the time. Later that year Jullien was sent as a commissioner to the Army of the Pyrenees, stationed in Toulouse. During that period he began a personal correspondence with Maximilien Robespierre, and in 1793–94 functioned as something of a personal envoy for the Incorruptible in the provinces. Most notably, he traveled to Nantes in December 1793 and denounced the excesses of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, and then journeyed to Bordeaux in April 1794, where he reported critically on the repression being overseen by Jean-Lambert Tallien and Claude Ysabeau. On a second mission to Bordeaux in May 1794, Jullien brought to justice the last of the Girondin fugitives.

Jullien was imprisoned following Thermidor, renounced his loyalty to Robespierre, and was eventually released. He joined the Panthéon club in 1795, attracted by the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf, but did not participate in the Conspiracy of Equals. Jullien was ambivalent about Napoleon Bonaparte, though he served his regime for a time in Italy. He withdrew from politics, but continued to publish pamphlets and articles, often on education, well into the 19th century. Jullien lived to see the Revolution of 1848 and the declaration of a second French republic.

– K –

KING’S TRIAL. There were many dramatic moments in the French Revolution, but a good argument could be made that none was more pivotal than the trial of Louis XVI. The uprising of 10 August 1792 toppled the monarchy, and the National Convention declared France a republic on 22 September 1792, but the fate of the king would not be decided for nearly four more months. When he did come to trial, much more was at stake than the life of a single man.

The September Massacres changed the political atmosphere not only in Paris, but in the rest of France as well. Even among those who favored a republican government, many now feared the threat of popular violence and the possibility that continued political upheaval might throw the country into anarchy. Some feared the conflict that a trial of the king might bring.

Debate over the fate of the king began in early November. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just opened the debate by arguing that Louis XVI was guilty simply by virtue of being king, asserting that no man could reign innocently. Maximilien Robespierre disputed the necessity of a trial, claiming that the people of Paris had already found Louis XVI guilty in their insurrection and that, if Louis XVI could be found innocent in a trial, then the Revolution itself must in consequence be guilty. Deputies on the right opposed a trial on the grounds that the king enjoyed inviolability. In the end, those in the middle prevailed and the deputies decided that the National Convention itself would try the king.

A Commission of Twenty-One was formed to gather evidence, and Robert Lindet prepared the charges against Louis XVI. The discovery of a hidden safe in the Tuileries Palace produced damning, if not conclusive, evidence that the king had conspired with other European monarchs against the revolutionary government. The trial began on 11 December 1792. The king’s defense was prepared by François-Denis Tronchet, Lamoignon de Malesherbes, and Raymond Desèze, and Louis XVI testified on 25–26 December.

The deputies found Louis XVI guilty by unanimous vote on 15 January 1793. Jean-Baptiste Salle proposed that his sentence be decided by an appel au peuple, a popular referendum, but that motion was defeated by a margin of some 120 votes. The deputies themselves voted on the king’s sentence by roll call vote between 16 and 18 January. Most deputies gave lengthy speeches to explain or justify their vote. Of the 721 deputies who voted, 361 voted for death without conditions, and another 26 voted for death with conditions, a slim majority. The sentence was carried out without delay—Louis XVI went to the guillotine on 21 January 1793.

The consequences of the king’s trial and execution were enormous. By the dignity with which he presented himself both in his testimony and on the scaffold, Louis XVI enhanced his posthumous reputation, earned the respect of many of his enemies and the devotion of his supporters. His execution made virtually inevitable the entry of Great Britain and Spain into war against France. The trial itself raised fundamental issues of sovereignty and cemented the division between Montagnards and Girondins within the National Convention. The opposition between those two groups eventually led to the expulsion of the Girondins, triggering the federalist revolt, which along with the deepening war crisis led to the imposition of the Terror. It may not have been possible politically to spare Louis XVI, but his execution certainly rendered vulnerable the future of the Republic that his death was intended to secure.

– L –

LACOMBE, CLAIRE (1765–?). Little is known about Lacombe’s youth, other than the fact that she was born in Pamiers, near the Spanish border, where her father was a shopkeeper. Claire was an actress of reputation in the years before the Revolution, appearing on stage in Lyon, Paris, Marseille, and Toulon. She returned to Paris from Toulon in early 1792, befriended Pauline Léon, regularly attended meetings of the Cordelier club, and became active in the neighborhood political scene. In July 1792 she spoke before the Legislative Assembly, offering to join the war against the tyrants of Europe and calling for the arrest of Charles Dumouriez. Lacombe participated in the 10 August 1792 assault on the Tuileries Palace, for which she was accorded a civic crown by the Marseille fédérés. In the winter of 1792–93 she became engrossed by questions of subsistence and poverty, and in May 1793 joined with Léon to found the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women.

The women’s club played an active role in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, and in the summer months Lacombe played a dominant role in the club. She lobbied actively for women’s suffrage, and spoke before the National Convention on 28 August and 5 September, calling for the dismissal of all aristocrats from the army and for a second purge of all moderates from the government. Her remarks drew a denunciation from François Chabot, prompting Lacombe to appear once again before the Convention on 7 October 1793 to aggressively assert women’s rights. At the end of that month, she was thrashed at the central market by a group of female supporters of the Jacobins, and shortly thereafter the National Convention ordered that the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women be shut down. Lacombe went into hiding briefly, reemerged after the trial of Jacques Hébert, and was arrested herself on 2 April 1794. She was jailed in the prison of Sainte-Pélagie, where she continued to write, until August 1795. She signed all of her writings “Lacombe, free woman.” Lacombe returned to the stage in 1796, but there is no trace of her after 1798.

LAFAYETTE, MARIE-JOSEPH-PAUL-YVES-ROCH-GIBERT DU MOTIER (1757–1834). The Marquis de Lafayette was born into a very rich and old noble family of the Auvergne. His father died two months before his birth, of a wound suffered in battle in the final months of the Seven Years War. At the age of 17, Lafayette married Adrienne de Noailles, then 14, the daughter of an equally prominent and even more fabulously wealthy noble family. Two years later Lafayette set sail for America, in a ship that he bought and outfitted himself, eluding a royal lettre de cachet to do so. He had met several Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, in Paris and was inspired by their cause. The United States Congress named Lafayette a major-general and he fought alongside George Washington, whom he looked upon as a second father. He distinguished himself in battle, was slightly wounded, and returned briefly to France in 1779, only to return to the United States in March 1780. Following the victory at Yorktown (1781), Louis XVI rewarded Lafayette with the rank of maréchal de camp.

Lafayette returned to France again in 1785. He attended the 1787 Assembly of Notables, and antagonized Marie Antoinette by calling for the convocation of the Estates-General. He was elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of the Auvergne, and supported the doubling of the Third Estate and the unification of orders in June 1789. Lafayette participated in the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and presented the first draft of that document to the Constituent Assembly on 13 July 1789. Two days later he was named commander of the Paris National Guard, and in that capacity he received Louis XVI at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on 16 July, along with Jean Bailly. Lafayette later ordered the demolition of the Bastille on his own authority and sent the keys to George Washington as a symbol of the end to despotism in France. Lafayette was now at the peak of his popularity, but the killings of Louis-Bénigne-François deBertier and Joseph-François Foulon by an angry crowd in July, and the women’s march to Versailles in October, which he failed to control, tarnished his reputation somewhat. Both Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau and Jean-Paul Marat were critical of him at this early stage of the Revolution.

In July 1790 Lafayette organized the Festival of Federation, well received by the populace of Paris, but less so by the royal court. In late August he expressed his approval of the violent suppression of the Nancy mutiny, which had been ordered by his cousin and widely denounced among patriots. The flight to Varennes and the Champ de Mars massacre were his undoing, however. The king’s attempted escape prompted members of the Cordelier club to circulate petitions calling for an end to the monarchy, and when a large crowd gathered on the Champ de Mars on 17 July 1791 Lafayette ordered the National Guard to open fire. This bloodshed put the radical movement temporarily on the defensive, and Lafayette joined Antoine-Pierre Barnave in founding the Feuillant club, a moderate offshoot of the Jacobin club. But his actions in July had both alienated the Parisian sans-culottes and earned for him the enduring hatred of Marie Antoinette. He resigned his command of the National Guard in October 1791.

Late in 1791 Lafayette took command of the Army of Metz. Patriots in Paris continued to denounce him, though, and after the failed uprising of 20 June 1792 Lafayette published a pamphlet protesting the violence of the crowd and travelled to Paris to condemn the Jacobin club at the rostrum of the Legislative Assembly, leaving himself open to charges of having abandoned his command. After the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, he tried to lead his army back to Paris to defend the king, but failed in that effort and left for Belgium with a few of his closest officers. There he was arrested by the Prussians, who turned him over to the Austrians. He was imprisoned at Olmütz, where he remained until September 1797, when a special clause in the Treaty of Campoformio secured his release. Lafayette played no public role under the Empire, nor the Restoration, but embraced the July Monarchy in 1830, appearing on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville with Louis-Philippe, once again the focus of public adulation.

LAKANAL, JOSEPH (1762–1845). Lakanal was the son of a prosperous artisan, an iron-worker, in a small town in southern France. He appears to have pursued a religious education in Toulouse, was ordained, probably in Bourges, and completed his Doctorate at the University of Angers. On the eve of the Revolution he was a professor of logic in Moulins. In 1791 he was named episcopal vicar to the Constitutional Bishop of Pamiers, in the Ariège, the department that would elect him to the National Convention in 1792. While in Pamiers he became a member of the Jacobin club, and he would sit with the Montagnards in the Convention. Lakanal voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. In March 1793 he discovered a million livres in gold and silver in an underground passage at Chantilly, while on mission for recruitment. Lakanal is best known for his role on the Committee of Public Instruction in the Convention. He had a hand in the creation of the Ecole Normale in Paris in October 1794, and would oversee its operation along with Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès for some time, and in November 1794 the Convention adopted his report on primary education. Lakanal supported the creation of a two-chamber legislature in constitutional debates in 1795, was elected to the Council of Five Hundred from the Finistère, and sat as a deputy until 1797. He was also named to the Institut National in 1795. In August 1799 the Directory sent him to organize the new departments along the Rhine, and at the end of that year he accepted an appointment to the Chair in Classical Languages at the Ecole Centrale of the rue St. Antoine in Paris. Lakanal was exiled as a regicide in 1816. He emigrated to the United States and became president of a university in New Orleans.

LALLY-TOLLENDAL, TROPHIME-GÉRARD (1751–1830). Count Lally-Tollendal was born into an old Parisian family of the aristocracy. His father, whom Trophime-Gérard barely knew, served as Viceroy in India and was executed in 1766 after the defeat of French forces by the British. Voltaire secured the reversal of that judgment in 1778, and Lally-Tollendal resigned his own military commission in 1785 in order to work for the rehabilitation of his father’s name, which came in 1786. Lally-Tollendal was educated at the collège d’Harcourt, and in 1773 entered the first company of the Musketeers, on the express order of the king. By 1776 he was a captain of cavalry, and in 1782 was promoted to second captain of the king’s regiment of cuirassiers.

In 1789 Lally-Tollendal served as secretary of the assembly of the nobility of Paris, and was the third of 10 delegates elected to the Estates-General by that assembly. He took a conservative stance at Versailles, favoring vote by order and separate deliberations for the three orders, though he ended up among the 47 nobles who joined the Third Estate in June. Lally-Tollendal was a supporter of Jacques Necker, a member of the close circle of deputies around Pierre-Victor Malouet, and among the hundred most active speakers in the Constituent Assembly. He supported Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette’s call for a Declaration of the Rights of Man, but also called in late July for punitive measures against those causing troubles in the countryside. His most important speech came on 31 August 1789, in which he proposed a tricameral legislature and an active legislative role for the king, who would also enjoy unlimited veto power. These proposals did not find favor in the Assembly, and on 14 September 1789 Lally-Tollendal withdrew from the constitutional committee.

In early November he resigned his seat, citing health problems, and took refuge in Switzerland. Only later did he cite the October Days as a principal factor in his decision to emigrate. He returned to France in 1792 to defend Louis XVI from his detractors, was briefly imprisoned following the uprising of 10 August 1792, but escaped to England before the September Massacres. Lally-Tollendal wrote a series of moderate monarchist pamphlets during the 1790s, including a two-volume defense of French émigrés published in 1797. He returned to France after Brumaire and lived quietly near Bordeaux. Lally-Tollendal later sat on the privy council of Louis XVIII, and in 1825 was named a Grand Officer in the Legion of Honor and a Chevalier of Saint-Louis.

LAMARCK, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1744–1829). It is said of Lamarck that he experienced the Revolution from his laboratory, where the work that he did established him as among the most influential of French scientists of the time. He was born into a modest family in a small town in Picardy, attended a Jesuit collège in Amiens, and served a short stint in the military until the age of 24. Lamarck then went to Paris to further his education in medicine and science and became a student of Antoine-Laurent Jussieu. In 1778 he published the three-volume Flore Française, which established his reputation. In 1788 he became conservator of the royal botanical gardens. The Revolution changed the course of his career. When Joseph Lakanal created the National Museum of Natural History in June 1793, Lamarck was appointed to the chair for insects and worms. Lamarck was the first to propose a classificatory system for invertebrates (a word that he coined), and also established the field of paleontology. He published voluminously in these areas, and over the course of the following decade laid the foundations for what would become, in the 19th century, Darwinian evolutionary science (though Lamarck’s ideas about evolution were quite different from those of Charles Darwin). Lamarck is credited with coining the word “biology” in 1802, and was also among the founding members of the Institut National in 1795.

LAMBALLE, MARIE-THÉRÈSE-LOUISE (1749–1792). The Princess de Lamballe was a devoted servant and friend to Marie Antoinette. She was born in Turin and married at the age of 17 to the son of the duke of Penthièvre, a dissolute young man who died the following year at the age of 21. In 1774 Lamballe became principal lady-in-waiting to the queen, and in that role became her close friend as well. When the royal family fled toward Varennes, in June 1791, the princess embarked from Boulogne for England. When she heard of their capture, she returned to Paris to be with the queen. She was present on the night of 10 August 1792, and accompanied the royal family to the Temple. Nine days later she was transferred to La Force prison, which was invaded by the crowd during the September Massacres. Lamballe was killed and her head was placed on a pike, to be paraded below the windows of the Temple for the eyes of the queen. She assumed thereafter a prominent place in counterrevolutionary iconography.

LAMETH, ALEXANDRE-THÉODORE (1756–1854). The eldest of the three Lameth brothers, he went by the name Théodore to distinguish him from his younger brother. He also outlived his two younger brothers, and during his long lifetime witnessed five kings, two republics, and two empires in France. His father was in a long line of sword nobility, and his mother was the daughter of the duke de Broglie. The three brothers were either grandsons or nephews to four marshals of France. All three brothers visited the United States and were much influenced by the ideas they encountered there. Their father died in 1761, and the boys relied to some degree on royal patronage for the completion of their education.

Théodore entered the navy at age 14, but then joined the army at the time of the American War of Independence. He was a Knight of the Order of Malta. In 1790–91 he sat on the departmental administration of the Jura, and in the fall of 1791 was elected to the Legislative Assembly from that department. He was one of only seven deputies to vote against the declaration of war against Austria, a war that he saw as a mortal risk for the monarchy. Fearing for the king’s safety, he collaborated with Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette and Adrien Duport to prepare an escape for Louis XVI to Compiègne, but the king refused to flee a second time. Lameth denounced the September Massacres, and then fled France for England, allegedly with the help of Georges Danton. He returned to France, however, in December 1792 to assist in a failed effort to rescue Louis XVI, and then remained in obscurity on his property at Pontoise until a final emigration to Switzerland in March 1793. He eventually joined his brothers in Hamburg. Lameth returned to France after Brumaire, but with the exception of a brief term in the Chamber of Deputies during the One Hundred Days he played no further political role. See also ÉMIGRÉS.

LAMETH, ALEXANDRE-THÉODORE-VICTOR (1760–1829). Alexandre was the youngest, and most influential, of the three Lameth brothers who were active in the Revolution. Like Théodore, he was a member of the Knights of Malta and pursued a career in the army. By 1779 he was a captain in the royal cavalry, and went with Théodore to fight in the American War of Independence in 1782–83. Lameth was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1788, but then retired from the military the next year.

On the eve of the Revolution, Lameth joined the Society of the Friends of Blacks, and was a member of the Society of Thirty. In 1789 he was elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Péronne, near Amiens. At Versailles he sat with the liberal nobility and favored the verification of credentials in common. He was among the 47 nobles who joined the assembly of the Third Estate on 25 June. Lameth served on eight different committees and was among the most active orators of the Constituent Assembly. On the Night of 4 August 1789 he enthusiastically embraced the proposals for the abolition of privilege (although some biographers have observed that, as the youngest son in the family, he stood to lose very little), and on 3 November moved the abolition of the parlements. He was also among the founders of the Jacobin club. Indeed, along with Antoine-Pierre Barnave and Adrien Duport, Lameth was a dominant force in the Jacobin club in 1791–92, so much so that the three came to be referred to as the Triumvirate.

Lameth’s was a liberal voice, then, in the early years of the Revolution. He favored a suspensive veto for the king, rather than an absolute veto, as a step in the direction of liberty. He spoke critically of Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau’s alleged overtures to the court in 1790–91, and voted in favor of the creation of assignats. But following the flight to Varennes, Lameth tried, along with Barnave and Duport, to steer the Jacobins toward a rapprochement with Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette (with whom Lameth had fought in America), and when that effort failed the three led the effort to found a rival club, the Feuillants. Lameth supported the violent suppression of the demonstration on the Champ de Mars in July 1791, and now devoted his efforts to trying to save the monarchy, whose power and authority he had seemingly been determined to curtail up until that point. When the Constituent Assembly dissolved in late 1791, Lameth resumed his military career, as a colonel in the 14th Regiment of dragoons, and also took a seat on the departmental administration of Paris.

After the monarchy fell, on 10 August 1792, the Paris Commune ordered the arrest of Lameth, and he fled France with Lafayette, under whose command he had served on the eastern front. Both were imprisoned by the Austrians at Olmütz, but Lameth was freed in 1795 due to failing health. He then fled to England, where he was not welcomed, before joining his brothers in Hamburg. He returned to France in 1797, but left again after the Fructidor coup. Lameth returned definitively after the Brumaire coup and served Napoleon Bonaparte as a prefect in 1802, a post that he would continue to hold, off and on, into the Restoration. In 1810 Lameth became a Baron of the Empire, was appointed to the Legion of Honor in 1811, and was named a Peer of France in 1815.

LAMETH, CHARLES-MALO-FRANÇOIS (1757–1832). Count Charles Lameth shared the same family history and military career as his brothers. He was wounded at the battle of Yorktown. In 1789 he was elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Arras. Like Alexandre, he sat with the liberal nobility in the Constituent Assembly, but did not join the Third Estate until after the king’s order on 27 June. Charles was somewhat less active in the Assembly than Alexandre, serving on only three committees, but he spoke often. In January 1790 he criticized Jean-Siffrein Maury for opposing a luxury tax, and one week later praised Maximilien Robespierre for his defense of those less fortunate in society. Lameth supported the creation of assignats, and was a consistent opponent of excessive royal power. He took a moderate stance on the issue of slavery in the colonies, influenced perhaps by the plantation holdings of his wife’s family in Saint-Domingue.

As president of the Constituent Assembly after 5 July 1791, Lameth took the lead in organizing those opposed to the resignation of Louis XVI, and played a direct role in authorizing the repression of the 17 July demonstration on the Champ de Mars. He left the Jacobin club shortly thereafter and joined the Feuillants. When the Constituent Assembly dissolved, Lameth resumed his military career, but resigned his commission after the uprising of 10 August 1792. He emigrated to Hamburg with his wife, and founded a commercial business there. They returned briefly to France in 1797, and again after Brumaire. Lameth resumed his military career in 1807 and fought in Spain. In 1809 he was decorated as a Chevalier in the Legion of Honor. Lameth lived to applaud the Revolution of 1830, which he saw as fulfilling the ideals of 1789.

LAMOURETTE, ANTOINE-ADRIEN (1742–1794). Lamourette was a member of the Lazarist Order and Grand Vicar of Arras before 1789. He became a close friend of Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau, swore the civil oath of the clergy in late 1790, and in February 1791 was elected Constitutional Bishop of Lyon. In late 1791 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Rhône-et-Loire. Lamourette was a moderate and pacific individual who made no great impression on the Legislative Assembly until the session of 7 July 1792, following the king’s flight to Varennes. Alarmed by the dissension within the meeting hall, Lamourette rose and called on his fellow deputies to cease their divisions and swear “to have but a single will, a single sentiment; to swear to unite as a single body of free men. The moment that foreigners see that we are united in our mission, will be the moment that liberty triumphs and that France is saved.” Moved by these words, the deputies leapt to their feet and embraced, in what has come to be known as “the kiss of Lamourette.” Unfortunately, that spirit of unity did not persist. After the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly, Lamourette returned to Lyon, where he remained during the siege that followed the federalist revolt. Thus compromised, he was arrested and taken to Paris for trial. Just before his execution, Lamourette retracted the oath he had sworn to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.

LANJUINAIS, JEAN-DENIS (1755–1827). Lanjuinais was born into a Jansenist family in Rennes, the son of an avocat au Parlement. He was an outstanding student in Rennes, receiving his doctorate in law at the age of 17. The following year he presented himself for a Chair in Law at the University of Rennes, having passed all of the tests and requirements, but was turned down because of his youth. By 1780 he stood among the first rank of avocats in Rennes. In 1779 he was elected to the Estates of Brittany, and shortly thereafter published a pamphlet denouncing the aristocratic privilege of monopolizing dovecotes. The pamphlet aroused a furor and was suppressed by the Parlement of Rennes, but the lawyers of the city rallied to Lanjuinais’s defense. He soon published two more pamphlets critical of aristocratic privilege, was elected by the Third Estate to the Estates-General, and drafted the cahier de doléance for the Third Estate of Rennes.

Lanjuinais was among the most active deputies in the Constituent Assembly. He was one of the founders of the Breton club, swore the Tennis Court Oath, and supported the suppression of parlements. As a member of the ecclesiastical committee he played a role in the abolition of monastic orders and contributed to the drafting of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Although his politics were moderate, Lanjuinais joined the Jacobin club, which he left temporarily in 1791 for the Feuillants. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, he returned to Rennes as an officer on the municipal council. In late 1792 he was elected to the National Convention from the Ille-et-Vilaine. Lanjuinais supported the proposal for the creation of a departmental guard to protect the National Convention, and joined the call for charges against those responsible for the September Massacres. On 26 December 1792 he gave a very controversial speech demanding the repeal of the decree that had constituted the Convention as a court to judge Louis XVI, and went on to vote for banishment and the appel au peuple. Lanjuinais opposed the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and in April 1793 voted in favor of the indictment of Jean-Paul Marat.

On 2 June 1793 Lanjuinais called for the dissolution of the revolutionary authorities of Paris, and as a result was proscribed from the Convention along with the leading Girondin deputies. He fled the capital and passed briefly through Caen, but did not linger there during the federalist revolt. For the next 18 months he hid in his house in Rennes. His wife aided his evasion from justice by divorcing him, but his mother, sister, and brother were all arrested. Lanjuinais returned to the Convention in March 1795 and contributed to the drafting of the Constitution of 1795. He was now denounced by Jean-Lambert Tallien as a royalist, but defended by Louis Legendre, who had been among his accusers in June 1792. Lanjuinais was elected to the Council of Ancients in 1795 from 73 departments, but once again chose to represent the Ille-et-Vilaine. He rotated out in 1797, returned to Rennes to teach law, but was named to the Senate after Brumaire. Lanjuinais opposed the declaration of Napoleon Bonaparte as consul for life, and then the creation of the Empire, but was still named to the Legion of Honor in 1803, made a Count of the Empire in 1808, and elected to the Institut National in that same year. Under the Restoration he served in the Chamber of Peers, where he resolutely defended the liberal gains of the Revolution.

LANTHENAS, FRANÇOIS-XAVIER (1754–1799). Lanthenas was the son of a wax merchant in Puy, where he attended collège before being apprenticed to a commercial house in Lyon in 1770, much against his will. He later traveled to Holland, Germany, and then Italy, where he met Jean-Marie and Manon Roland in 1777. The Rolands helped get him into medical school, first in Paris and then in Reims, where he completed his medical studies in 1784. Lanthenas returned to Puy as a doctor in 1786.

Lanthenas moved to Paris on the eve of the Revolution, still linked to the Rolands. He joined the Jacobin club and began writing for the Patriote français, edited by Jacques-Pierre Brissot. When Roland became minister of the interior after 10 August 1792, Lanthenas obtained a position as a division chief in the ministry, though he was not terribly competent in this job. He was elected to the National Convention from the Rhône-et-Loire, sat with the Girondins, and came to be referred to by the Montagnards as the master of ceremonies for Madame Roland’s salon. In late November 1792 he was expelled from the Jacobin club along with Roland and Jean-Baptiste Louvet. Lanthenas voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. He voted against the indictment of Jean-Paul Marat, and although he was associated with the Girondins avoided proscription on 2 June 1793 and spoke out against the federalist revolt that followed. He was an admirer of Thomas Paine, and the principal translator of his works into French. In 1795 he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred from the Ille-et-Vilaine. He rotated out in 1797, took up a minor post in Paris, and hosted the final meetings of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, of which he had been a member since 1789. In his last years, Lanthenas also became an advocate of Theophilanthropy.

LA RÉVELLIÈRE-LÉPEAUX, LOUIS-MARIE (1753–1824). Born into a bourgeois family of Angers, La Révellière-Lépeaux’s father had been a conseiller du roi and served as mayor of the small town of Montaigu, in the Vendée, for 30 years. Louis-Marie was brought up by a priest, who beat him, leaving him with a bent spine and an intensely anti-clerical attitude. La Révellière-Lépeaux studied law in Angers, became an avocat au Parlement in Paris in 1775, but did not much like legal work. He married well in 1780, and this allowed him to devote his time to Parisian literary culture. He was elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Anjou, joined the Jacobin club but sat with the centrists, and quit the Jacobins after the Champ de Mars massacre. La Révellière-Lépeaux returned to Angers in late 1791 to serve on the departmental administration, and organized “patriotic tourneys” in the countryside in an effort to win peasants over to the cause of the Revolution.

He was elected to the National Convention in 1792, again from Angers, sat with the Girondins but voted with the Montagnards in the trial of Louis XVI. In July 1793 he protested the proscription of the Girondin deputies and went into hiding to escape arrest. Back home, his brother would be executed in 1794 along with a number of other departmental administrators. He returned to the National Convention in March 1795, served briefly on the Committee of Public Safety, and helped draft the Constitution of 1795. He was elected to the Council of Ancients in October 1795 and was among the first directors. As such, La Révellière-Lépeaux carried out the Fructidor coup against the royalists in 1797 and supported the Floréal coup against the Jacobins in 1798, making him a classical Directory politician in this regard. He remained an ardent supporter of deChristianization throughout this period, supported the cult of Theophilanthropy, and opposed Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power, which ended his own political career.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, LOUIS-ALEXANDRE (1743–1792). La Rochefoucauld, the Prince of Marcillac, was born into a noble family that traced its lineage back to the 11th century. His father was a lieutenant-general in the army. Louis, too, was an officer in the army and a Chevalier de St. Louis (1781). He was a friend of General Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin, and an admirer of the United States. In 1787–88 La Rochefoucauld sat on both Assemblies of Notables. He was a member of the Society of Thirty and in 1789 was the second delegate to be elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Paris. La Rochefoucauld was among the 47 noble deputies who joined the Third Estate in June 1789, and was one of the most active orators in the Constituent Assembly, where he sat on nine committees. He saw no need for the king to sanction the constitution, which he argued would stand on its own authority, supported a suspensive veto for the king, and also supported the decrees that emerged from the Night of 4 August 1789. He voted for the sale of Church lands, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and the suppression of monastic orders. The popular disorders of October 1789 caused him alarm, however, leading him to support Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau’s proposal for a declaration of martial law.

In July 1791 La Rochefoucauld left the Jacobin club for the Feuillants. When the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, he was elected to the directory of the departmental administration of Paris, where he adopted an increasingly reactionary attitude. He quarreled with Jérome Pétion, mayor of Paris, and took a dim view of the militancy of the sans-culottes. La Rochefoucauld fled the capital after 10 August 1792, but was recognized by a crowd on the road near Gisors in early September and stoned to death.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD-LIANCOURT, FRANÇOIS-ALEXANDRE-FREDERIC (1747–1827). His father was the Duke of Liancourt, Count of Roucy. François added La Rochefoucauld to his name to honor his cousin (See LOUIS-ALEXANDRE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD), murdered near Gisors in September 1792. François studied at the collège La Flèche, served in the king’s Musketeers, was named a Chevalier de St. Louis in 1781, and was grand-master of the king’s wardrobe, as his father had been before him. He accompanied Louis XVI on his 1786 trip to Cherbourg, the king’s only trip away from the royal châteaux of the Paris basin. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt frequented a number of the Paris salons in the late 1780s, including that of Marie-Jean Condorcet. He was a member of the Society of Thirty, and was elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis.

La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt sat with the liberal nobility in the Estates-General, though he did not go over to the Third Estate in June 1789. He was among those who insisted that they would need a new mandate from their constituents when the deputies declared themselves a National Assembly later that month. Throughout July he served as an intermediary between the Constituent Assembly and Louis XVI, and on 12 July it was he who replied to the king, “No, Sire, it is a revolution,” when the king asked, “But, is it then a revolt?” in reference to the brewing insurrection in Paris that would shortly topple the Bastille.

At the end of the session of 4 August 1789, La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt proposed a medal to commemorate the sincere union of all three orders, though he would later support the royal veto. After the flight to Varennes, in June 1791, he commented that one thing missing from their remarkable revolution was the liberty of the king. He was a member of the Club of 1789, the Jacobin club, and then the Feuillants. In 1791 he purchased some 200,000 livres of biens nationaux near the family château in the Yvelines, where he had operated a model farm in the years prior to the Revolution. After 10 August 1792, and the murder of his cousin, he resigned his post in the army and fled to England. From 1794 to 1797 he traveled in the United States and Canada. In 1810 he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and in 1814 entered the Chamber of Peers.

LA ROCHEJAQUELIN, HENRI DU VERGIER (1772–1794). Henri La Rochejaquelin was born into an old noble family of Anjou. At the age of 13 he joined the cavalry regiment in which his father was an officer. His father emigrated early in the Revolution, and Henri joined the Constitutional Guard of the king. As such, he was present at the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, when Louis XVI was deposed. La Rochejaquelin returned to his family estate, and in the spring of 1793 joined with his cousin, the Marquis de Lescure, as a leader of the peasant insurrection in the Vendée. He was present at the battle of Fontenay in May 1793, was leader of the successful assault on Saumur on 9 June 1793, and went on to defeat Generals François-Joseph Westermann and Jean-Antoine Rossignol at Châtillon. Following the defeat of the rebels at Cholet in October 1793, a battle at which Lescure was killed, La Rochejaquelin was named general of the Royal and Catholic Army of the Vendée rebels. He scored several more victories in the next month before defeats at Granville and Angers, and then a serious defeat at Le Mans on 12 December 1793 in which 15,000 rebel troops were lost. La Rochejaquelin’s small army then suffered a decisive defeat at Savenay on 25 December. He was killed in an ambush in late January 1794 while in pursuit of a republican soldier. Dead at the age of 21, La Rochejaquelin became a legendary figure among the Vendéen rebels.

LAVOISIER, ANTOINE-LAURENT (1743–1794). Antoine Lavoisier is known to posterity as the father of modern chemistry, but he was also a tax official under the Old Regime and a victim of the Terror. He was born into a family of wealthy merchants, although his father was an avocat at the Parlement of Paris. Lavoisier inherited a large sum of money from his mother, and with this he purchased an office in the Farmers General, in 1769, the income from which allowed him to pursue his experiments and to share his laboratory at the Arsenal with colleagues and young researchers. Both James Watt and Benjamin Franklin visited his laboratory. Lavoisier was admitted into the French Academy of Science at the age of 25 for his work in chemistry, but he was also interested in agronomy and political economy. In 1775 Lavoisier published a major work, Opuscules chimiques, and two years later made public the results of his experiments with oxygen, with Emperor Joseph II of Austria in attendance. His laboratory at the Arsenal, and the salon that his wife hosted, were among the intellectual centers of Paris.

It was his position as a tax farmer, not his scientific work, that compromised Lavoisier. In 1775 Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot named Lavoisier a commissioner of gunpowder, responsible for overseeing the collection of excise tax. He introduced measures unpopular in Paris, and would further alienate Parisians in 1787 when he promoted the building of an octroi wall around the capital to make more efficient the collection of transit taxes on goods. This wall would be a primary target of insurgents in July 1789. But he also favored reform, and as a member of the Provincial Assembly of the Orléannais he proposed the abolition of the corvée and the creation of an old-age fund for the poor. Lavoisier welcomed the Revolution, but played no prominent political role. He did, however, prepare a remarkable statistical report for the Constituent Assembly, Richesse Territoriale du royaume de France. After 10 August 1792 he thought it prudent to leave Paris. One year later the Academy of Science was abolished, and in November 1793 an order was issued for the arrest of all former Farmers-General. Not all would be sent to the guillotine, but the memory of the octroi wall may have cost Lavoisier his life. There were rumors, too, that he had played a key role in denying admission to the Academy of Science to Jean-Paul Marat, an exclusion that the Friend of the People certainly resented. Lavoisier was executed on 8 May 1794. One year later his reputation would be rehabilitated. See also TAXATION.

LAW OF 14 FRIMAIRE. The Law of 14 Frimaire (4 December 1793) established the administrative structure of revolutionary government that would rule France for the next eight months. It centralized power in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety, formalizing its authority, and brought the machinery of the Terror under administrative control. Representatives on mission now found their authority more clearly defined, and somewhat restrained, and were henceforth answerable directly to the Committee of Public Safety. In reaction to the federalist revolt, in which departmental administrations had challenged the authority of the National Convention, the Law of 14 Frimaire reduced their size and powers and increased the role of district administrations. The law also mandated the appointment of agents nationaux, who were attached to district administrations and expected to report to the Committee of Public Safety every 10 days. Representatives on mission were to oversee purges of local councils, and local elections were suspended. The Law of 14 Frimaire remained the charter of government until the Thermidorians countermanded many of its provisions in the decree of 24 August 1794.

LAW OF SUSPECTS. The National Convention passed the Law of Suspects on 17 September 1793. It empowered local committees of surveillance to draw up lists of suspects and to order their arrest. The law also defined a number of categories of suspect, including enemies of liberty, advocates of tyranny, supporters of federalism, those who were denied certificats de civisme, those without gainful employ, those émigrés who had left France between 1 July 1789 and 8 April 1792, and ex-aristocrats who had not shown support for the Revolution. An estimated 70,000 people were arrested as suspects during the year of the Terror.

LAW OF 22 PRAIRIAL. The Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) ushered in the final phase of the Terror. Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Couthon took sole responsibility for drafting the legislation, and there is evidence that others on the Committee of Public Safety opposed it. The law both streamlined the procedures of the Revolutionary Tribunal, in order to alleviate overcrowding in prisons, and broadened the definition of those considered suspects or enemies of the people.

In addition to those identified in the original Law of Suspects, the law of 22 Prairial included those who had deceived the people or their representatives, those who circulated false news, those who sought to undermine public morality, and those who opposed republican principles. Nearly anyone who spoke critically of official policy might have been included in these categories, and many national deputies now grew fearful for their own safety. The new law split the Revolutionary Tribunal into four courts, meeting simultaneously; made the death penalty the only option to acquittal; eliminated cross-examination of witnesses; allowed juries to consider “moral” evidence as well as material evidence in reaching a verdict; and declared that once a jury had arrived at a verdict, no further witnesses needed to be heard.

From 10 June 1794 to the end of July, the Revolutionary Tribunal sentenced 1,594 people to death, roughly 500 more than in the previous 14 months of its existence. This acceleration of the Terror, at a time when the threat to public safety from both domestic rebellion and foreign war had subsided, alarmed both the populace and the deputies of the National Convention. The coup of 9 Thermidor, which toppled Robespierre and Couthon from power, was at least in part a response to the law of 10 Prairial, which was repealed by the Convention five days later.

LE BAS, PHILIPPE-FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH (1764–1794). Philippe Le Bas’s father was a notary and steward on the estate of the Prince de Rache. Le Bas studied at the collège Montaigne in Paris, went on to study law, and became an avocat at the Parlement of Paris just before the Revolution. He returned home to the Pas-de-Calais at the behest of his father, however, joined the National Guard in Saint-Pol, and was a delegate to the 1790 Festival of Federation. In 1791 he was elected to the Saint-Pol district administration, and in 1792 was elected to the National Convention from the Pas-de-Calais.

In the National Convention he became close to Maximilien Robespierre, and in August 1793 married Elisabeth DuPlay, daughter of the family with whom Robespierre lodged in Paris. Le Bas initially had sympathy for Girondin positions, but gravitated slowly toward the Montagnards through his friendship with Robespierre. He voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. In September 1793 he was elected to the Committee of General Security, where he would be one of Robespierre’s few allies. In the last months of 1793 he went frequently on mission to the armies with Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. He presided over the Jacobin club in April 1794, but late that month went again on mission with Saint-Just to the Army of the North. While on mission the two ordered the arrest of all former nobles in the Pas-de-Calais, Nord, Somme, and Aisne, an order that angered Lazare Carnot. On 9 Thermidor, Le Bas, like Augustin Robespierre, demanded to share the fate of Robespierre and Saint-Just. Unlike the others, Le Bas succeeded in killing himself with a pistol shot when the troops of the National Convention arrived at the Hôtel de Ville to arrest them.

LEBRUN-TONDU, PIERRE-MARIE-HENRI (1754–1793). Little is known of Lebrun’s family other than the fact that it was of comfortable means. He began his education in his natal town of Noyon, to the north of Paris, but went on to the collège Louis-le-Grand in the capital. He then took orders under the name Abbot Tondu, but soon renounced his monastic vows and went on to lead a varied life—as an employee at the Paris Observatory, as a soldier, and then as a typesetter and journalist in the Dutch Lowlands. In 1787 he participated in the revolt of Liège, and returned to Paris in the early 1790s. There he became a protégé of Charles Dumouriez and Jacques-Pierre Brissot, whom he first met in Brussels. Through their influence Lebrun obtained a position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rising to the position of minister following the uprising of 10 August 1792. After the French victory at Valmy, Lebrun advocated and pursued a separate armistice with the Prussians, but failed to achieve it. His close ties to Brissot and Dumouriez made him vulnerable in the struggle between Girondins and Montagnards, particularly after the April 1793 treason of General Dumouriez. Lebrun was not included among those proscribed on 2 June 1793, but was arrested later that month. He managed to escape in September and fled to Brittany, but was captured on 22 December 1793 and returned to Paris for trial. Lebrun was convicted of complicity with the Girondins and the loss of Belgium and went to the guillotine on 27 December 1793.

LE CHAPELIER, ISAAC-RENÉ-GUY (1754–1794). Le Chapelier was born into a family with a long legal tradition as avocats au Parlement, stretching back into the 17th century. His father was ennobled in 1779. Isaac studied law in Rennes, joined the Freemasons in 1775, and in 1780 became a councillor in the Estates of Brittany. In 1788 he petitioned the nobility of Brittany, asking that annoblis be eligible to sit as delegates of the aristocracy to the Estates-General, but without success. Le Chapelier was then elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Rennes. At Versailles he was a founder of the Breton club and became known as an early advocate of the unification of the three orders. On 15 June 1789 he supported the call of the Abbé Sieyès for the declaration of a National Assembly, and participated in the Tennis Court Oath. Le Chapelier was among the most active orators in the Constituent Assembly, presided over it twice, and sat on four committees, most notably the constitutional committee. On that committee he favored the separation of powers, the suspensive veto, and the separation of the king from legislative proceedings.

Prise des armes aux Invalides, dans la matinée du 14 juillet 1789, in Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: L. 1984-253-14

Taking weapons from the Invalides in the morning of 14 July 1789. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: L. 1984-253-14

Assemblée nationale. Abandon de tous les privilèges. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: MRF. 1989-67

National Assembly. Relinquishing all privileges. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: MRF. 1989-67

Retour de Varennes. Arrivée de Louis Capet à Paris, in 25 juin 1791, in Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: L. 1984-253-54

Return from Varennes. Arrival of Louis Capet in Paris, 25 June 1791. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: L. 1984-253-54

La Séparation de Louis XVI, d’avec sa famille. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: MRF. 1983-324

The separation of Louis XVI from his family. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: MRF. 1983-324

Exécution de Louis XVI. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: MRF. 1984-477

Execution of Louis XVI. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: MRF. 1984-477

Jugement de Marie-Antoinette d’Autriche. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: MRF. 1983-323

Trial of Marie-Antoinette of Austria. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: MRF. 1983-323

Intérieur d’un comité révolutionnaire sous le régime de la Terreur. Année 1793 et 1794 in Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Collection du musée de la Révolution française. Vizille. Inventaire: L. 1984-253-103

Inside a revolutionary committee during the Reign of Terror. Years 1793 and 1794. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: L. 1984-253-103

Bonaparte, premier Consul de la République française, le 18 brumaire, an VIII, in Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Collection du musée de la Révolution française, Vizille. Inventaire: L. 1984-253-P49

Bonaparte, First Consul of the French Republic, 18th Brumaire, year VIII. Collection of the Museum of the French Revolution, Vizille. Inventory number: L. 1984-253-P49

Le Chapelier is best known for two reasons. He presided over the celebrated session of the Constituent Assembly on 4 August 1789, and reported to the king on the measures taken that night, bringing an effective end to privilege in France. Consistent with that action was the law that he proposed on 14 June 1791, which came to be known as the Le Chapelier Law. It prohibited the formation of intermediary organizations by workers or any other individuals with shared interests, and would stand as an effective legal deterrent to the formation of labor unions in France until 1884.

In September 1791 Le Chapelier alienated Maximilien Robespierre by arguing that clubs and popular societies, like the Jacobin club, were governed by this law. Following Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes, Le Chapelier had left the Jacobin club for the Feuillants, and in the final months of the Constituent Assembly he consistently argued that it was time to bring the Revolution to an end. When the Constituent Assembly dissolved, he returned to legal practice in Rennes. A short trip to London in late 1792 brought him under suspicion of being an émigré. He lived discreetly for the next year, but in February 1794 Le Chapelier wrote a letter to the Committee of Public Safety, offering to serve as its spy in England. He was arrested in March, on Robespierre’s orders, and charged with the reverse, of being in the pay of a foreign power. Le Chapelier was tried and executed in April 1794.

LECLERC, JEAN-THÉOPHILE-VICTOIRE (1771–?). Théophile Leclerc was born in Montbrison, just west of Lyon, the fifth and final child of an engineer in the royal Department of Bridges and Highways. His father took charge of his schooling at home. Leclerc joined the National Guard in Clermont-Ferrand in the summer of 1789, but early in 1790 he left for Martinique to join two of his brothers. While there he participated in the island’s uprising and in March 1791 was arrested and put back on a ship to France. He landed in Lorient, enlisted in the army, but within a year had been dismissed for once again getting involved in revolutionary agitation. In March 1792 he carried an address from the Lorient Jacobin club to Paris, where he quickly became active in the militant political movement of the capital. Leclerc was assigned briefly to the Army of the Rhine, fighting at the battle of Jemappes in November 1792, but by February 1793 had been reassigned to the headquarters of the Army of the Alps in Lyon.

In Lyon Leclerc immediately reconnected with Joseph Chalier, whom he had met the year before in Paris, and became involved in radical politics in Lyon. Chalier soon sent him back to Paris, to seek support for Lyon Jacobins, and in the capital Leclerc became embroiled in the insurrectionary movement against the Girondin deputies. On 29 May he was named to the revolutionary committee that prepared the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, and in the days following the proscription of the Girondins, his was among the most strident voices calling for more arrests and continued insurrection. Leclerc now took his place among the leading enragés, and supported Jacques Roux’s infamous speech of 25 June, which got both of them expelled from the Jacobin club. After the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, Leclerc took over publication of his newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, but his rhetoric was so violent that Marat’s widow went to the National Convention to demand that he be stopped. He did cease publication, in September, after 24 issues had appeared, and in November 1793 married Pauline Léon, one of the leaders of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. By then Leclerc had distanced himself from Jacques Roux and re-enrolled in the army. Léon traveled with him to the Aisne, where his battalion was assigned, and in April 1794 both were arrested. They remained in prison until September, and disappeared without a trace thereafter.

LEGENDRE, ADRIEN-MARIE (1752–1833). Legendre was born in Paris and educated at the collège Mazarin. He taught mathematics at the Ecole Militaire from 1775 to 1780, and in 1782 won the annual prize from the Berlin Academy for a problem in ballistics. The following year he was admitted to the French Academy of Science. Legendre’s principal contribution during the Revolution was his work related to the introduction of the metric system. He held a variety of minor government posts in the early 1790s, and in 1795–96 sat on the Agence temporaire des poids et mesures, which oversaw the introduction of the metric system. In 1795 he was elected to the Institut National, and was also appointed to teach at the Ecole Normale. Legendre’s most important publication was his Eléments du Géométrie (1794), which made several important departures from Euclidean geometry and remained the standard text in the field well into the 19th century. This work was commissioned by the Committee on Public Instruction of the National Convention, evidence that there was more going on in 1794 than the Terror. In his later years, Legendre made important contributions in the fields of elliptic integrals and number theory.

LEGENDRE, LOUIS (1752–1797). Known to contemporaries as “the butcher of Paris,” Legendre was the son of a butcher and eventually took up that trade himself, in the Saint-Germain neighborhood. As a youth he worked for 10 years as a cabin boy and then as a sailor. Though without formal education, he was a capable speaker with a strong voice. On 14 July 1789 he was on the streets urging people to march to the Invalides, and he was among the vanquishers of the Bastille. Legendre met and befriended Georges Danton through neighborhood politics, helped him to found the Cordelier club, and came to be known as Danton’s lieutenant. In December 1791 he led a delegation from his neighborhood to the Legislative Assembly to demand pikes so that they might defend the city, as the Romans had done against their enemies. Legendre was in the vanguard of the assault on the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, and shortly thereafter was elected from Paris to the National Convention.

Legendre joined the Jacobin club, sat with the Montagnards, voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and opposed the appel au peuple. He tried to play the role of conciliator between the Montagnards and Girondins in the spring of 1793. He succeeded in removing the name of Jean-Baptiste Boyer-Fonfrède from the list of deputies to be proscribed, and after 2 June spoke up to protest the violation of Girondin letters. From 15 June to 15 August 1793, Legendre served on the Committee of General Security, and his moderation during this period brought him under suspicion. In January 1794 he would be questioned about his vote on the indictment of Jean-Paul Marat, to which he replied that while he had been absent from the Convention on that occasion, for nearly two years he had hidden Marat in his cellar. Legendre’s credentials as a Parisian sans-culotte could not be easily questioned. In March 1794 he presided over the Jacobin club, just on the eve of the arrest of Danton and the Indulgents.

Legendre initially came to the defense of his old friend and mentor, but within two weeks he renounced Danton at the Jacobins, saying that he was now convinced of his guilt. From that point on, Legendre seemed to have lost his spirit and energy. After Thermidor he joined the reactionaries in denouncing ex-terrorists. He was elected to the Council of Ancients in 1795, but by then was a shell of his former self. Legendre was long remembered, however, for his famous exchange with Jean-Denis Lanjuinais on 2 June 1793. When Legendre yelled at Lanjuinais to cede the speaker’s rostrum, “Step down or I will fell you,” the deputy replied, “First you must decree that I am a cow.” Even at a moment of crisis, some revolutionaries maintained their sense of humor.

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY. The Legislative Assembly was the second legislature of the revolutionary decade, convening for its first meetings on 1 October 1791 and holding its final session on 20 September 1792. It consisted of 745 deputies, none of whom had sat in the Constituent Assembly, by virtue of the decree of ineligibility proposed by Maximilien Robespierre. The deputies were chosen by electoral assemblies in the 83 newly created departments, with the size of departmental delegations determined by three variables: the number of active citizens in each department; the direct taxes paid by its inhabitants; and the geographic territory of each department. Very few clergy were elected to the Legislative Assembly, and only some two dozen members of the former aristocracy. Although the deputies were new to national politics, the majority had experience on departmental administrations, in municipal politics, or as local judges. Many had been trained as lawyers, or were substantial landowners.

Three groups of deputies were discernable within the Legislative Assembly. By the last months of 1791, not quite half of them belonged to the moderate Feuillant club and took as their principal goal the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy. A smaller group of deputies, perhaps 140 at this same period, belonged to the more radical Jacobin club, and they were much more suspicious of Louis XVI’s commitment to the Constitution of 1791. Over time, the numbers in the Jacobin contingent grew, led by Jacques-Pierre Brissot, while those adhering to the Feuillants shrank. The remainder of the deputies, never a majority, belonged to neither club.

The main task of the Legislative Assembly was to draft legislation consistent with the Constitution of 1791. The Assembly did not have the power to name ministers, nor could it override a royal veto, which Louis XVI exercised on a number of occasions. Two key issues remained controversial throughout the 12 months of the Legislative Assembly’s existence: official policy toward émigrés and official policy toward refractory priests. Louis XVI vetoed punitive legislation directed against both groups in November 1791. The declaration of war against Austria and Prussia in April 1792, urged by Brissot and welcomed by Louis XVI, for very different reasons, heightened tensions around both issues, and early defeats on the battlefields focused popular resentment on the person of the king.

The Legislative Assembly played no active role in the failed insurrection of 20 June 1792 or the uprising of 10 August 1792, which toppled the monarchy. Indeed, under the presidency of Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud in early August, the Assembly turned away a petition from the sections of Paris calling for the deposing of Louis XVI, and on 10 August offered refuge to the king and his family. In the weeks that followed, the Legislative Assembly stood in seeming opposition to the more radical Paris Commune, but it did pass legislation calling for the election of a National Convention by universal manhood suffrage, ushering in the declaration of the First French Republic and the radical phase of the French Revolution.

LÉON, PAULINE (1768–?). Pauline Léon was the daughter of Parisian shopkeepers. Her father was a chocolate maker, and when he died in the 1780s Pauline and her mother took over the operation of the business. Pauline was active in neighborhood politics from the outset of the Revolution. She was in the streets on 14 July 1789, though she appears not to have participated in the march to Versailles during the October Days. In February 1791 she and a group of women publicly broke a bust of General Lafayette, and from that date on Léon regularly attended the meetings of the Cordelier club as well as those of the Luxembourg section. Léon delivered a dramatic address to the Constituent Assembly in March 1791, demanding the right of women to bear arms in defense of the country. That summer she signed the petition initiated by the Cordeliers against the monarchy, and was present with her mother on the Champ de Mars on 17 July, near the line of fire. One year later, Léon was again active in the streets during the 10 August 1792 assault on the Tuileries Palace.

Along with Claire Lacombe, Léon was co-founder of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in May 1793. The Society played an active role in the agitation in Paris against the Girondin deputies. Léon herself sat on the insurrectionary assembly that convened in the Bishop’s Palace to plan the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793, and on 2 June she spoke before the National Convention as president of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. Léon and the women’s club maintained their activism throughout the summer, shifting over time toward support of the enragés and their radical populist agenda. In November 1793 Léon married Théophile Leclerc, and after their arrest the following April she disappeared from the political scene.

LE PELETIER DE SAINT-FARGEAU, LOUIS-MICHEL (1760–1793). Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau was born into an enormously wealthy family. His father was president of the Parlement of Paris. Michel received his early education at home, from an array of illustrious tutors, went on to study law in Paris, and in 1777 became an avocat du roi at the Châtelet court. In 1779 he joined the Parlement of Paris, rose to the ranks of conseiller and avocat-général in the mid-1780s, and succeeded his father as président à mortier between 1785 and 1790.

Le Peletier was elected to the Estates-General by the nobility of Paris in 1789. He sat with the liberal minority, but did not join the Third Estate until after 25 June, and was among those who insisted on receiving a new mandate from their constituents when the National Assembly was declared. Le Peletier was among the most active orators in the Constituent Assembly. When the Assembly abolished noble titles in June 1790, he shortened his name to Michel Le Peletier. His most notable contribution came on the committee for criminal legislation, where he urged severe restrictions on the death penalty (along with Maximilien Robespierre), and introduced legislation to eliminate torture from criminal proceedings.

After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Le Peletier was elected president of the departmental administration of the Yonne. One year later, the department sent him as a deputy to the National Convention, despite the fact that he urged the electoral assembly to heed the advice of the Paris Jacobin club that no priests or ex-nobles be elected. When he returned to Paris, Le Peletier joined the Jacobin club, which he had refused to do back in 1790. In October 1792 he defended complete freedom of the press, in the context of a debate over the September Massacres. He sat with the Montagnards in the Convention, voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. On 20 January 1793, the eve of the king’s execution, Le Peletier was assassinated in the Palais Royal by a member of the king’s bodyguard, Michel Antonin de Pâris. His final words were, “I die, content, for the liberty of my country.” Le Peletier became the first martyr of the Revolution, and the National Convention accorded him the honors of the Panthéon. After Thermidor, however, the deputies voted that one could not be so honored until 10 years after death, and his remains were moved to the family estate.

LETTRES DE CACHET. Lettres de cachet were sealed orders by which the king could order the arrest or imprisonment of anyone without charge or trial. They were widely denounced at the end of the Old Regime as the most egregious example of royal despotism, although they were most often issued at the request of prominent families who wished to discipline unruly members. Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau, for example, was imprisoned in the Château d’If in 1774 by a lettre de cachet obtained by his father, and would later denounce them in his Des Lettres de cachet et des prisons d’état (1779). Voltaire, too, was imprisoned in the Bastille by royal lettre de cachet, and denounced the abuse in his novel, L’ingénu. A great number of the cahiers de doléances called for the elimination of lettres de cachet, and they were abolished by decree of the Constituent Assembly in January 1790.

LEVÉE EN MASSE. The National Convention decreed the levée en masse on 23 August 1793, responding to pressure from the sans-culottes of Paris and the realization that the volunteer army was dwindling in numbers. The decree stopped short of mandating universal conscription into the military, but did amount to a mobilization of the populace in defense of the nation. All unmarried men and widowers without children between the ages of 18 and 25 were called upon to enlist. Married men were encouraged to assist in the manufacture of arms, and women were to volunteer in military hospitals or sew uniforms or tents for the soldiers. The army soon grew to 750,000 men, at least 300,000 mobilized by the levée en masse.

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. Some credit Maximilien Robespierre with coining this motto of the French Revolution, while others insist that Antoine-François Momoro first put it forward in 1791 and later persuaded Jean-Nicolas Pache, then mayor of Paris, to inscribe the three words on the facades of all public buildings. Each word evokes an ideal of the Revolution, though in each case much debated throughout the revolutionary decade. Liberty and equality were often paired in Jacobin club propaganda, and the ideal of fraternity was closely associated with the 1790 Festival of Federation, which brought National Guards from throughout the nation to a fraternal celebration in Paris. Critics of the Terror denounced it for having trampled on the ideal of liberty, while Gracchus Babeuf and his fellow conspirators would later denounce the Thermidorians for having allegedly abandoned the ideal of equality.

Each of the three words was associated with particular symbols. Liberty was symbolized in the planting of liberty trees, and also in the female figure of Marianne. The phrygian cap was also a powerful symbol of liberty. Two symbols commonly evoked the ideal of equality—the scales of justice and the equilateral triangle—while the fasces of grain was the most common symbol of fraternity. Alexis de Tocqueville would argue in the 19th century that the French, unaccustomed to the exercise of political liberty under the Old Regime, ultimately sacrificed liberty when Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in order to preserve legal equality. Political liberty would remain an elusive ideal for French republicans throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, but the motto “liberty, equality, fraternity” remains still today the best-known symbol of the French Republic, enshrined as it is on all French coins.

LIBERTY TREES. Liberty trees were among the first symbols of the Revolution, and among its most enduring. The earliest reports of the planting of liberty trees date from the autumn of 1789. Peasants, hopeful that seigneurial dues would be abolished outright following the Night of 4 August, rioted in protest in many parts of France, and in the midst of those uprisings often planted, or erected, liberty trees. This symbolic act grew spontaneously out of a traditional peasant custom in the southwest of France, the raising of a maypole at the time of the spring planting. The liberty tree thus borrowed from the maypole the symbolic meaning of fertility, but as a living tree, rather than a dead pole, it also came to connote growth and regeneration. The planting of liberty trees became a common feature of revolutionary festivals in 1790, with National Guards or municipal officials most often responsible for carrying out the ritual, and played a central role in the Festival of Federation on 14 July 1790. By the Year II, the planting of liberty trees was a legislated part of virtually all republican festivals. As a central symbol of the Republic, these trees were to be tall, broad in girth, and long-lived. Oak, linden, fir, ash, and elm were among the varieties most commonly planted. When the symbolism of these trees was expanded to include fraternity, revolutionaries sought to plant trees that were not native to France.

If the planting of liberty trees was a powerful symbol of revolutionary regeneration, it is hardly surprising that the felling of these trees should have emerged as a potent counterrevolutionary symbol. Under the Terror, the cutting down of a liberty tree became a capital offense. Eight men died on the guillotine in Rouen in September 1793 for having committed that crime. Throughout the 19th century, liberty trees were planted during periods of republican revival, and cut down during times of monarchist restoration. But one can still see in France today liberty trees that were planted in 1790. See also LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

LINDET, JEAN-BAPTISTE-ROBERT (1746–1825). Robert Lindet is the only member of the “Great” Committee of Public Safety to be buried in Paris. The son of a prosperous wood merchant in Bernay, in Lower Normandy, Robert studied at the local collège and went to study law in Paris. His brother, Thomas, who chose a clerical career, would later join Robert in the National Convention and served as Constitutional Bishop of the Eure. Robert Lindet was elected mayor of Bernay in 1790, served on the district council in 1791, and late that year was elected to the Legislative Assembly from the Eure, which would also send him to the National Convention. Lindet came to national prominence in November 1792, when he served on, and reported for, the Commission of Twenty-one that drafted the charges against Louis XVI. He sat with the Montagnards, voting for death in the king’s trial, but did not join the Jacobin club.

Lindet joined the Committee of Public Safety in April 1793, went on mission that summer to both Lyon and Caen, where he showed great restraint in his repression of the federalist revolt, and devoted considerable energy to matters of food supply and military requisitions. Lindet remained aloof from the political struggles of 1793–94, and was the only member of the Committee to refuse to sign the indictment of Georges Danton. Lindet was denounced as a terrorist himself after 9 Thermidor, was arrested in May 1795 but amnestied in November. He consistently defended the policies of the Committee of Public Safety, both in speeches and pamphlets, and in 1796 supported the Conspiracy of Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf. Lindet was acquitted, however, by the High Court of Vendôme, and went on to serve the Directory as finance minister. He then refused to support the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte and retired to private life.

LOMÉNIE DE BRIENNE, ETIENNE-CHARLES (1727–1794). As the youngest son in a family of the aristocracy, Loménie de Brienne chose the traditional route and pursued a career in the Church. He studied theology at the Sorbonne, where his thesis was censured for its liberal views, and was ordained as a priest in 1752. In 1761 Loménie was appointed Bishop of Condom, and two years later was named Archbishop of Toulouse. In 1766 he was charged by Louis XV to investigate the decadence of monastic orders, and he produced a very critical report. Twenty-one years later, Louis XVI named him his minister of finance, after Loménie had helped to engineer the ousting of his predecessor, Charles-Alexandre Calonne. Loménie oversaw the second Assembly of Notables, to which he presented a fiscal reform plan not unlike that of Calonne. The aristocrats refused to accept it, however, forcing the convocation of the Estates-General. With the treasury teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in August 1788, Loménie decided to suspend certain payments, which led to his own sacking and the recall of Jacques Necker.

Loménie was then named Archbishop of Sens and was rewarded for his service to the crown by being named a cardinal in December 1788. In early 1791 he swore the civil oath of the clergy, one of the few bishops to do so, and was then elected Constitutional Bishop of the Yonne. In February 1792 Pope Pius VI condemned him for swearing the oath, and Loménie resigned his archbishopric and returned his cardinal’s cap. He then retired to private life, but came under suspicion early in the Terror and was placed under house arrest on 9 November 1793. Three months later he died of apoplexy, in the arms of his brother.

LOUIS XVI (1754–1793). Louis XVI was the grandson of Louis XV. In 1770 he married an Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette, and in 1774 was crowned King of France in the cathedral at Reims. The failure of the royal couple to have a child for seven years, accompanied by the frivolous and sometimes scandalous behavior of Marie Antoinette, fed public rumors of the king’s impotence and weakness of character. Historical assessment of Louis XVI’s effectiveness in the final decade of the Old Regime has diverged widely. Some have praised his efforts at reform, pointing to his appointment of men such as Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Jacques Necker to important ministries. But others, while acknowledging his good intentions, characterize him as a man of limited abilities who rarely left the palace at Versailles to observe the problems of his kingdom. Whatever one’s view of Louis XVI’s leadership prior to 1789, there can be little doubt that once the crisis of the Revolution had erupted, he failed to act in a decisive and resolute manner.

The decision to call the Estates-General was a bold move, but it unleashed forces that the king had not anticipated. He did not manage well the opening of the meeting, and when the Third Estate announced the declaration of a National Assembly, the king moved to obstruct their initiative, first by calling troops to the environs of Paris and then by dismissing Necker from office. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 thwarted those efforts and forced the recall of Necker, but the king squandered the good will earned by that decision when he refused to sign both the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the decrees issued following the Night of 4 August 1789. Urged by his advisers to be resolute in the face of the October Days, Louis and his family instead returned with the crowd to Paris.

The king’s willingness to participate in the Festival of Federation on 14 July 1790 seemingly returned him to the good graces of his people. But Louis XVI was uncomfortable in the role of constitutional monarch, and his strong faith made him unwilling at first to accept the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. When he fled to Varennes with his family on 21 June 1791, he left behind a note expressing dismay at the constraints on his power and denouncing in particular the excessive influence of the Jacobin club. Only with reluctance did he sign the Constitution of 1791 later that summer.

It seems clear that Louis XVI had fled toward the eastern border with the intention of allying with the émigré forces gathering in the German states, and in the year following that failed escape, his refusal to deal forcefully with the émigrés earned him growing suspicion and denunciation. He was similarly reluctant to support harsh measures against refractory priests. Urged on by Marie Antoinette and her advisers, Louis declared war on Austria in April 1792, perhaps hopeful that the other monarchs of Europe might defeat the Revolution where he had failed. The war went badly, of course, but ultimately it brought about the fall of the monarchy, on 10 August 1792, and the declaration of a republic. The discovery of a hidden safe in the Tuileries Palace revealed the king’s correspondence with the other monarchs and sealed his fate. The dignity with which he carried himself at his trial and at his execution earned for him a respect in death that he had not enjoyed in life. Some 80,000 National Guards lined the streets of Paris when he marched to the guillotine on 21 January 1793.

LOUIS XVII (1785–1795). Louis-Charles was the second son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and became dauphin in June 1789 on the death of his older brother. The king took an active role in the education of Louis-Charles, who underwent a number of traumatic experiences in his youth, including the October Days, the flight to Varennes, and the uprising of 10 August 1792. In the months after the fall of the monarchy, Louis XVI tutored his young son personally during the family’s incarceration in the Temple. After Louis XVI’s execution, the comte de Provence declared the dauphin Louis XVII, naming himself regent.

Louis XVII’s fate became a matter of debate and controversy in the two years following his father’s death. In the months leading up to the trial of Marie Antoinette, Jacques-René Hébert interviewed the young boy and coerced him into signing a statement alleging an incestuous relationship with his mother, evidence that was introduced at the queen’s trial. Louis-Charles was a sickly child by this time—some have asserted that this was due to ill treatment at the hands of his guardian, the shoemaker Simon. Several European monarchies petitioned the French government for the child’s exile, but the deputies of the National Convention feared that Louis XVII in exile would become a rallying figure for émigré royalists, and refused to release him. Louis XVII died of scrofula on 8 June 1795. Myths of his escape inspired a number of pretenders to the throne to step forward in the early 19th century.

LOUIS XVIII. See PROVENCE, LOUIS-STANISLAS-XAVIER.

LOUVET, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1760–1797). Louvet’s father was a stationer with a shop on the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. His education was incomplete, but he took an early job as a clerk in a bookstore and there fell in love with literature. In 1790 he published Aventures du chevalier de Faublas, a sentimental novel that was a huge success and established his reputation. With the outbreak of the Revolution, Louvet became an activist in the Lombards section of Paris and joined the Jacobin club. He turned his writing talent to social and political topics, with a pamphlet defending the October Days and a second novel advocating divorce and the marriage of priests. In March 1792 he began to publish La Sentinelle, a Girondin newspaper with financial backing from Jean-Marie Roland. Louvet was elected to the National Convention from the Loiret, and on 29 October 1792, delivered a famous speech against Maximilien Robespierre, whom he charged with responsibility for the September Massacres. This speech established many of the battle lines for the ongoing struggle between Girondin and Montagnard deputies.

Louvet voted for the death of Louis XVI, but also favored the appel au peuple to decide his fate. He was among the 29 deputies proscribed from the National Convention on 2 June 1793. He fled first to Caen, then to Bordeaux, trying to encourage provincial resistance to Paris. Louvet managed to elude arrest throughout the Terror, even though, as a point of honor, he refused to emigrate. After 9 Thermidor Louvet returned to the Convention, but did not join other Girondin deputies in their reactionary politics of vengeance. He continued to defend the Republic, both as a deputy to the Convention and then to the Council of Five Hundred, and in the pages of his newspaper. Louvet’s ardent, though moderate, republicanism made him a target for the jeunesse dorée, who sacked his bookstore in the Palais Royal. He left the Council of Five Hundred in May 1797, fell ill shortly thereafter and died in August. His wife, Lodoiska (she took her name from the heroine in Louvet’s first novel whose character she inspired), poisoned herself out of grief, but survived and lived on until 1824.

LYON. Lyon was the second largest city in France in 1789, with approximately 140,000 inhabitants. The city had prospered and grown through most of the 18th century, largely on the basis of its silk industry, but the last quarter of the century brought decline and the 1786 trade treaty with England dealt a serious blow to the Lyonnais economy. An air of malaise and social tension hung over the city as the Revolution began.

There was violence in Lyon in 1789–90, as patriots clashed with royalists over control of the local militia and access to arms. Although there was a substantial merchant class in the city, they were not active politically, leaving control of local administration to the aristocracy. The proximity of Lyon to the German and Swiss borders, plus the size of the city and its complicated urban geography, made it a haven for émigrés as the Revolution progressed. In contrast to Marseille, its sister on the Rhône River, Lyon developed an early reputation for hatching counterrevolutionary plots.

The city also generated a vibrant popular movement, however, and a network of popular societies appeared in 1790. Jean-Marie Roland and Joseph Chalier both figured prominently in the revolutionary politics of Lyon in 1790–91. Violence erupted in the city following the September Massacres of 1792, and local Jacobins gained control of the municipal council in the elections that followed. Lyon moderates mobilized their supporters through section assemblies in the spring of 1793 and regained control of the city in late May, just as the Montagnards were ousting the Girondin leaders from the National Convention in Paris. At odds with the current in national politics, the Lyonnais threw their support behind the federalist revolt. Republican troops laid siege to the city in August, finally defeating the rebels in October 1793.

Declaring that “Lyon is no more,” the Committee of Public Safety sent representatives on mission and a revolutionary army from Paris to carry out the punishment of those who had joined the revolt. Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois and Joseph Fouché oversaw the imposition of the Terror in Lyon. Despite an order that the homes of all wealthy merchants and aristocrats be razed, relatively little destruction of property was carried out, though the city had certainly suffered physical damage during the siege. But between October 1793 and March 1794, nearly 1,900 Lyonnais were executed. So many were condemned to death that the guillotine was not equal to the task. Hundreds died by grapeshot fired from cannons. Royalists and moderates would take their revenge in July 1795, under the White Terror, killing dozens of Jacobins in a prison massacre.