SADE, DONATIEN-ALPHONSE-FRANÇOIS (1740–1814). The Marquis de Sade was born into a wealthy, aristocratic family. He studied at the collège Harcourt in Paris and then entered the army, rose to the rank of captain in the cavalry, and fought in the Seven Years War. In 1763 he married Renée Pélagie de Montreuil, and five months later was imprisoned for excesses committed in a house of prostitution. He was arrested again in 1768, for several months, and in 1772 was pursued for having given aphrodisiac candies to prostitutes. In 1778, at the de Sade family estate, he was accused of sexual improprieties with young girls, and his mother-in-law secured a lettre de cachet. He was imprisoned first at Vincennes, before being transferred to the Bastille in 1784, where he remained until 4 July 1789. During those 11 years of incarceration he wrote Justine, Aline et Valcourt, and Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome.
Over the course of the revolutionary decade, there is a striking concurrence between the periods of political liberty for the populace in general, and the periods of Sade’s personal freedom; and likewise between periods of political repression and the periods of Sade’s confinement. In July 1789 he was transferred to the asylum at Charenton, and then released on 2 April 1790, when all lettres de cachet were nullified. He then published Justine, wrote a few plays (one of which would be produced at the Comédie Française), and became active in Parisian politics. Indeed, he became secretary and then president of the Piques section, and used his influence to safeguard his in-laws early in the Terror. But in December 1793 Sade was arrested as a former noble, and returned to prison. As the Terror came to an end following Thermidor, Sade was once again released. He now published an expanded edition of Justine, wrote Philosophie dans le Boudoir, and in 1797 published l’Histoire de Juliette. His works sold well through the period of the Directory. On 6 March 1801, however, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered his arrest, and in 1803 he was returned to Charenton, where he organized theatrical presentations among the patients, their plays attended by Parisian socialites. He died in 1814, having spent 28 of his 74 years in prison. Sade was long forgotten, or reviled, but in the early 20th century Guillaume Apollinaire would play a crucial role in establishing his literary reputation, which is substantial.
SAINT-DOMINGUE. Saint-Domingue was the most important French colony in the West Indies, located on the western third of the island of Hispaniola. In the debate in the Constituent Assembly over the issue of slavery, the planters of Saint-Domingue supported the Massiac Club, which opposed the calls for emancipation issuing forth from the Society of the Friends of Blacks. The failure to abolish slavery in the colony led to rebellion in 1791 and the creation of the first independent black state in the western hemisphere, led by François-Dominique Toussaint-Louverture. French armies attempted to regain the colony under Napoleon Bonaparte, but ultimately failed in that effort. Saint-Domingue retained its independence and is known today as Haiti, among the poorest of Caribbean nations.
SAINT-JUST, LOUIS-ANTOINE (1767–1794). Saint-Just was the son of a soldier, who earned the Cross of Saint-Louis for his battlefield valor and was ennobled for his military service. His father died in 1776. Saint-Just’s mother came from a comfortable bourgeois family. He quarreled with his mother in 1786 and left home for Paris, allegedly having stolen the family silver to finance his trip. His mother obtained a lettre de cachet against her son, and he spent six months in prison. Schooled at the Oratoriens in Soissons, Saint-Just was a talented, though rebellious, student. He went on to study law in Reims.
In 1789 Saint-Just returned to Blérancourt, his father’s hometown, where he moved freely among artisans and workers, an experience that seems to have profoundly affected his later political views. He became active in local politics, rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard, and in 1792 was elected to the National Convention (its youngest member) from the Aisne. Saint-Just made his mark on the national political scene with his maiden speech in the National Convention, on 13 November 1792, boldly asserting in the debate over whether or not to try Louis XVI that, “No man can reign innocently. The folly is all too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. . . .”
Saint-Just joined the Paris Jacobin club and became a close political ally of Maximilien Robespierre. He entered the Committee of Public Safety in late May 1793, assigned to draft a new constitution, and in July wrote the preliminary report on the proscribed Girondin deputies. He was frequently on mission in 1793–94 to the armies and departments of the north and northeast. Saint-Just was a political idealist, and as such was also inflexible. He is associated with the Ventôse Decrees of the Year II, which, though never implemented, were the most egalitarian social legislation of the Revolution. In that same month he asserted in a speech before the Convention that “happiness is a new idea in Europe.” Saint-Just was denounced with Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, and accompanied him to the scaffold the following day.
SALICETI, CHRISTOPHE (1757–1809). Saliceti was born into an old Italian family, expatriated from the duchy of Plaisance to Corsica during a period of warfare in the 14th century. Christophe attended a Jesuit collège in Corsica, and then went on to study law in Pisa, returning to Corsica to practice. He took principal responsibility for drafting the cahier de doléance for the Third Estate of Corsica, and was elected by the Third Estate as a deputy to the Estates-General. Saliceti was influential in repatriating Pascal Paoli to Corsica from his London exile and in securing his appointment as commander of the Corsican National Guard. After the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Saliceti returned to a position in the departmental administration of Corsica.
In 1792 Saliceti was elected to the National Convention, where he sat with the Montagnards. He voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and against the appel au peuple. Saliceti was frequently on mission for the Convention. He went first to Corsica in April 1793 to meet with Paoli, who was in rebellion against France by that time, but gained nothing for the effort. He then joined up with General Jean-Baptiste Carteaux’s army, en route to occupy Marseille, and from there went on to Toulon, where he gave Napoleon Bonaparte his first artillery command. Saliceti allied himself in Toulon with Augustin Robespierre, in opposition to the excessive repression being imposed by Paul-François Barras and Louis-Stanislas Fréron.
In March 1794 Saliceti was attached to the Army of Italy, where he remained until November 1794. At that point he and Jeanbon Saint-André were assigned by the Convention to prepare a secret expedition against Corsica, an enterprise that ended in failure. Suspected as a Montagnard sympathizer after Thermidor, Saliceti was back in good graces by late 1795, and the Directory sent him once again as a commissioner to the Army of Italy, principally to keep an eye on Napoleon. In 1797 he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred from the new department of Golo, and after Brumaire he rallied to Napoleon. In January 1806 Saliceti became minister of police in Naples, first under Joseph Bonaparte and then Joachim Murat. Neither Joseph nor Murat much liked Saliceti, but he was popular among the Italians. Napoleon had great respect for his abilities and fortitude, and insisted that he remain at his post. In 1803 he was named to the Legion of Honor.
SALONS. Salons played an important role in the social and intellectual life of Paris from the last decades of the Old Regime up into the middle years of the Revolution. They were an outgrowth of court society, but operated independently from it, and as such fostered the unfettered exchange of ideas that was so characteristic of the French Enlightenment. The salons were nearly all hosted by women, and thus were a social milieu in which women and men interacted, as well as being a milieu in which aristocrats and commoners might interact. Individual salons had their own clientele and character, though discussions in all tended to focus on literary topics and current events. The discussions were lively, but polite, conversations more than arguments, but free from the gaze of censors or the court, those conversations could range as widely as those participating liked.
The salons met regularly, generally once a week, and one attended only by invitation. Some of the salons were quite celebrated and enjoyed a public reputation, such as those of Madame Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Madame Stéphanie de Genlis, and Madame Julie de Lespinasse. They were not only sites for the exchange of ideas, but exercised a tangible influence in the Parisian world of letters. Madame Marie du Deffand, for example, helped to secure Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s election to the Académie Française. The salons not only played an important role in shaping public opinion on the eve of the Revolution, they could also provide an indirect contact between Parisian society and courtly circles. Thus, the wife of Jacques Necker was hostess to a regular salon where matters of finance and politics were discussed.
A few of the salons bridged the divide between the Old Regime and the Revolution, including that of Madame Necker and the salons of Madame Pancoucke and Madame Condorcet. In 1792–1793, Manon Roland hosted weekly dinner parties that a number of the leading Girondins attended regularly, and Germaine de Staël hosted an influential salon in the early years of the Directory. The central role played by salons in the 1780s, however, was assumed by popular societies and section assemblies in the more open political atmosphere of the 1790s.
SANS-CULOTTES. The image of the sans-culottes has evolved considerably over the two centuries since the French Revolution. For those sympathetic to the ideals of 1789, the term conjured up images of the menu peuple, the little people who took to the streets of Paris during the great journées of the Revolution. For Hippolyte Taine, a historian writing late in the 19th century, the sans-culottes were nothing more than the mob or the rabble. In the 20th century, social historians such as George Rudé and Albert Soboul put a face on the sans-culottes, whom they described as a sort of proto-proletariat composed of artisans and small shopkeepers, the vanguard of the Revolution in Marxist terms. With the demise of the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution over the past two decades, a new image of the sans-culotte has emerged, one that emphasizes political and cultural aspects more than class or social origins.
The literal meaning of the term is a reference to the long trousers worn by artisans and shopkeepers, in contrast to the knickers (culottes) more commonly worn by the aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie. The classic representation of the sans-culotte during the Revolution was the Père Duchesne, the rustic artisan and family man, man of the people, always ready to speak his mind in sometimes vulgar language, whom Jacques-René Hébert took as the title for his popular newspaper. Many of the sans-culottes would have been among the passive citizens prior to September 1792, those excluded from electoral politics whom Maximilien Robespierre championed as “the people” following the collapse of the monarchy. But we know today that the sans-culottes also included rather more substantial shopkeepers or manufacturers, some of them even wealthy.
While the social definition of the sans-culottes has thus grown a bit fuzzy, the term is still clearly associated with popular politics in the Revolution, particularly in Paris. Without the sans-culottes there would have been no fall of the Bastille, no assault on the Tuileries Palace, no uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793. The Montagnards were willing to ally themselves with the sans-culottes, and their sometimes violent demonstrations, whereas the Girondins grew increasingly uncomfortable with the politics of the street. The apogee of sans-culotte influence may have come in September 1793, when demonstrations in Paris forced the adoption of the general maximum and the addition of Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois to the Committee of Public Safety. Shortly thereafter, however, the Montagnards moved to control the popular movement, with the trial of the enragés, and the sans-culottes would never again constitute a truly potent political force. They could not be mobilized to defend Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, and the inability of Gracchus Babeuf to organize the sans-culottes was a crucial reason for the failure of the Conspiracy of Equals. The ultimate failure of the sans-culottes, as well as the ambiguity of their social definition, have both, no doubt, contributed to the enduring power of their image in the revolutionary mythology of 1789.
SANSON, CHARLES-HENRI (1739–1806). Charles-Henri Sanson succeeded his father, Charles-Jean-Baptiste Sanson, as royal executioner in 1778. Charles-Henri was the fourth Sanson to hold the position, his ancestor, Charles, having been appointed royal executioner by Louis XIV in 1688. Despite the fact that Sanson played a central role in the drama of the Revolution, overseeing the executions of Louis XVI, Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre, little is known of his personal life and no known portraits of the man survive. He resigned his position in August 1795 and was replaced by his son, Henri. Henri, in turn, would be succeeded by his son, Henri-Clément, but he would be the last of the Sansons to serve as executioner. He was dismissed in 1847, after having pawned the guillotine to pay off a debt.
SANTERRE, JOSEPH (1752–1809). Santerre was the son of a well-to-do brewer in Cambrai who relocated to the faubourg Saint-Marcel in Paris. By 1772 Joseph Santerre was the owner of a brasserie in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the very center of sans-culotte activism during the Revolution. Santerre was a wealthy bourgeois with aristocratic tastes—he loved horse racing, for example, and fancied himself the second-best horseman in the kingdom, after Louis-Philippe Orléans. But he was also popular among the common folk of the quartier, to whom he was generous with handouts during hard times. In early July 1789 Santerre was elected battalion chief of the National Guard in his neighborhood. He participated in the taking of the Bastille, as well as the march to Versailles during the October Days. The 20 June 1792 uprising was planned (though badly) in his brasserie, and in the uprising of 10 August 1792 he served as the commanding general of the Paris National Guard. On 21 January 1793 Santerre commanded the military escort that conducted Louis XVI to the guillotine, and it was he who ordered the drum roll that drowned out the king’s final words.
Thinking himself destined to be a military commander, Santerre requested assignment to the Vendée in May 1793. The campaigns he commanded went badly, however, and he was recalled to Paris and eventually imprisoned, where he remained until after Thermidor. While he was in prison his wife bankrupted the brasserie and left him. Under the Directory, Santerre obtained a contract to purchase horses abroad for the army, and by that means, as well as speculation in biens nationaux, he rebuilt his fortune. In 1804, however, he made an ill-considered purchase of a château in Normandy and lost his fortune once again. He died five years later in relative poverty.
SECOND ESTATE. See ARISTOCRACY.
SECTION ASSEMBLIES. As part of the administrative reorganization of France in 1789, major towns and cities were divided into sections for electoral purposes. The Constituent Assembly left it to local authorities to determine the size and number of sections, which therefore varied across the country. Caen, for example, with a population near 32,000, was divided into five sections, while Marseille, with 76,000 inhabitants, was divided into 24 sections; Bordeaux, with 83,000 inhabitants, was divided into 28 sections; and Lyon, with 139,000 inhabitants, was divided into 32 sections. Paris, the largest city in France at 525,000, was divided into 48 sections.
Section assemblies met just once a year for electoral purposes, but when the Legislative Assembly declared la patrie en danger in July 1792 it also granted the sections of Paris the right to meet en permanance, and many sections of the capital were soon meeting on a daily basis. A number of provincial cities followed suit, and for the next year section assemblies became the principal arena for direct democracy and sans-culotte militancy. In both Lyon and Marseille, however, local moderates used section assemblies to challenge the political power of the more radical Jacobin clubs in 1793, and those sectional movements succeeded temporarily in ousting municipal councils dominated by Jacobins.
Section assemblies in Paris played an important role in the uprising of 10 August 1792, and in the campaign that ultimately led to the proscription of the Girondin deputies. In September 1793 the National Convention authorized a modest stipend to be paid to the poor in Paris for attending up to two section assemblies per week. Ironically, this measure contributed to the bureaucratization of the popular movement in Paris, as section assemblies began to lose their vitality. The persecution that fall of the enragés, who had been activists in section assemblies, contributed to that trend. Section assemblies, once the cradle of Parisian radicalism, failed to rise up in support of Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, and in the wake of the Germinal and Prairial riots of 1795 the Convention ordered the disarming of section militants. In October 1795 the Convention finally abolished the section assemblies.
SEIGNEURIAL DUES. Peasants throughout France still owed in the 1780s an array of seigneurial dues (droits féodaux), or duties, to their lords. These lords were often, though not always, members of the aristocracy. Seigneurial dues included the cens (a cash payment), the champart (a portion of the harvest), the lods et ventes (a kind of inheritance tax), as well as the obligation to bake bread in the lord’s oven or mill grain in his mill (the banalités), and the obligation to labor for a certain number of days each year on the lord’s land (the corvée). These dues tended to be more common in the north (where as the saying went, there was no land without lord) than in the south (where it was said that there was no lord without legal title), and weighed more heavily on the peasants in some provinces, such as Burgundy, than in others.
All across France, however, peasants complained bitterly about seigneurial dues in the cahiers de doléances that they prepared in advance of the meeting of the Estates-General in 1789. During the Great Fear that summer, peasants invaded the châteaux of their seigneurial lords in many parts of the country and destroyed the deeds that documented the hated dues, which they henceforth ceased to pay or perform. Responding to that wave of violence, a number of liberal aristocrats stood up in the Constituent Assembly on the night of 4 August and renounced their seigneurial dues, along with a host of other privileges. The Assembly subsequently drafted legislation abolishing seigneurial dues, which Louis XVI reluctantly signed after the October Days. Since they viewed those dues as a form of property, however, they were to be suspended only after the peasants paid compensation to seigneurial landowners. Although most peasants refused to make such payments, the system was not abolished outright until the summer of 1793. It is in connection with this abolition of seigneurial dues that the Revolution has sometimes been said to have abolished feudalism.
SEPTEMBER MASSACRES. Between 2 and 6 September 1792, as Prussian troops advanced on Paris, militant sans-culottes invaded a number of prisons in the capital and massacred more than a thousand prisoners. Less than one month earlier, the monarchy had fallen in the uprising of 10 August, and some would later argue that the September Massacres were an extension of that journée, a necessary blow against the enemies of the Revolution. At times the killing took on the appearance of summary justice, preceded as it was by trials in the streets or courtyards of the prisons. But more often, popular vengeance was visited indiscriminately on those whom the militants, including National Guardsmen and fédérés from the provinces, found in the prisons. The mood of panic in the country fostered violence in some provincial cities as well, but none on the scale of what occurred in Paris.
The initial reaction to the massacres was one of stunned acceptance. Many deputies adopted the attitude of Jean-Marie Roland, then minister of the interior, who described the massacres as a regrettable but necessary measure, “over which perhaps a veil must be drawn.” But on 16 September 1793, Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud demanded that those responsible for the massacres be brought to justice, and pointed an accusatory finger toward the Paris Commune, suggesting that he and other Girondin deputies had been targets for assassination. Near the end of October, Jean-Baptiste Louvet escalated the rhetorical attack, explicitly accusing Maximilien Robespierre of having instigated the violence and suggesting that Georges Danton and Jean-Paul Marat had conspired with him in a plot to install themselves as a Triumvirate in power.
From this point forward, the issue of the September Massacres, and popular violence more generally, became a focal element in the struggle between the Girondins and Montagnards within the National Convention. The Girondins denounced the perpetrators as bloodthirsty anarchists, and Marat, who defended the massacres in his newspaper and called for more heads to roll, came in for particular opprobrium. The Montagnards did not go so far as to defend the massacres, but did describe them as a regrettable instance of popular justice. To attack the September Massacres, in the view of the Montagnards and Jacobins, was to deny popular sovereignty, while to defend the perpetrators of the violence, in the view of the Girondins, was to deny the rule of law. In the end, the stance of the Girondins alienated them from the Parisian populace and led to their proscription from office. None of those responsible for the prison massacres was ever brought to trial. But they became a political issue once again after Thermidor, and those who had defended the killings back in 1792 now found themselves denounced as terrorists.
SERVAN, JOSEPH-MARIE (1741–1808). Son of a minor nobleman, Servan entered the Dauphiné infantry as an ensign in 1762 and moved quickly up through the ranks. A man of literary talent as well, he contributed articles on the military to the Encyclopédie and in 1781 published a small book entitled Le Soldat Citoyen, which gained for him a certain celebrity. During the first two years of the Revolution, Servan was on leave in Paris, and moved in the circles of Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau. In November 1791 he became lieutenant-colonel of the Vermandois Infantry, and by 1792 had been promoted to maréchal de camp. Servan was appointed minister of war in the Girondin ministry in May 1792, at the suggestion of Jean-Marie Roland, only to be dismissed along with Roland and Etienne Clavière on 12 June. It was Servan who ordered the transfer to Paris of 20,000 fédérés that summer, against the wishes of Louis XVI. He returned as minister of war after the uprising of 10 August 1792, remaining in that post only until 30 September, when he took command of the Army of the Pyrenees. Servan lost that post, too, accused in July 1793 of being a Girondin sympathizer. He remained in prison until January 1795, represented the National Convention as a plenipotentiary minister to Spain in July 1795, and was recommissioned as a general under the Directory. Servan served Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s in campaigns against brigands within France, and retired in 1807, having been decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
SIEYÈS, EMMANUEL-JOSEPH (1748–1836). Few men played as substantial a role in French politics throughout the revolutionary decade as the Abbé Sieyès. His father was a contrôleur des actes and directeur de la poste aux lettres, and his mother was the daughter of a local notary. Sieyès attended religious school in Draguignan and went on to the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. In 1780 he was appointed canon and vicar-general of the Cathedral at Chartres, where he met the future mayor of Paris, Jérome Pétion. In 1787 he represented the clergy in the provincial assembly at Orléans. His pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, published in early 1789, was among the most influential pre-revolutionary pamphlets, offering a virtual script for the events leading up to the declaration of a National Assembly. Although he reserved his most pointed barbs for the aristocracy, the notoriety of the pamphlet alienated his fellow clergymen to the point that he could not be elected to the Estates-General from any of the assemblies of the First Estate. His membership on the Committee of Thirty made him well-known in Paris, however, and Sieyès was elected from that city as its final delegate for the Third Estate.
In the Estates-General he played an active role in the declaration of the National Assembly and in the swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, and participated in the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. But he faded from public view after 1789. Upon the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Sieyès obtained a seat on the departmental directory of the Seine, a post from which he resigned late in 1791, somewhat discredited politically. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention from the Sarthe. He voted for the death of Louis XVI, but remained aloof from political factions. At the moment of the Girondins’ proscription, in June 1793, Sieyès remained publicly silent, leading Maximilien Robespierre to label him “the mole of the Revolution,” because he was always busy “in the underground passages of the assembly.”
Sieyès returned to the political forefront, however, after 9 Thermidor, serving a term on the Committee of Public Safety, urging the reintegration into the National Convention of the proscribed Girondin deputies and sympathizers, and actively participating in both foreign affairs and the debate over the Constitution of 1795. He was elected to the Council of Five Hundred in 1795 and named ambassador to Berlin in May 1798. Sieyès was elected director in May 1799, and played a key role in the coup of 18 Brumaire that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power. He subsequently served as consul along with Napoleon and Pierre Roger-Ducos. In 1799 he was elected to the Senate, over which he later presided, and in 1808 was named a Count of the Empire. Sieyès went into self-imposed exile to Brussels in 1815, but returned to Paris in 1830. See also DIRECTORY.
SLAVERY. The institution of slavery, and the slave trade, were integral to the growth of the French economy in the 18th century. The Atlantic port cities of Bordeaux, La Rochelle, and Nantes all participated in the traffic of black slaves and profited enormously from it. A number of Enlightenment figures, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote eloquently against slavery, but this produced no public opposition to the practice until 1788, when the Society of the Friends of Blacks was formed in Paris. Many prominent deputies to the Estates-General joined the club, which called for the abolition of the slave trade, though not for an end to slavery itself. French planters formed a rival group, the Massiac Club, to lobby for the continuation of the slave trade. With the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the legitimacy of slavery grew more tenuous, at least in theory.
The Constituent Assembly proved incapable of confronting the issue, however, managing only to abolish slavery within France, a rather meaningless gesture since the relatively few blacks on French soil had nearly all been granted their freedom on arrival. The failure of the Constituent Assembly to abolish the slave trade, or slavery in French colonies, led to the 1791 slave uprising in Saint-Domingue. Not until February 1794, under the ascendancy of the Montagnards, did the National Convention vote to abolish slavery outright. The new laws were not aggressively enforced, however, and in 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte restored both slavery and the slave trade. Both would survive until the Revolution of 1848.
SMITH, ADAM (1723–1790). Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and moral philosopher. Smith visited Paris in 1766 and at that time was introduced to a number of Enlightenment thinkers from the French school of economists collectively known as the physiocrats. Smith’s ideas about the market economy were thus well-known in France on the eve of the Revolution, and clearly influenced those who advocated free trade after 1789, particularly among the Girondins. It is also noteworthy that the agents/observers sent out into the provinces in the summer of 1793 by Minister of the Interior Dominique-Joseph Garat were given copies of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) to guide them in their work.
SOCIETY OF 1789. The Society of 1789 was a moderate political club in Paris, formed in April 1790 to counter the growing influence of the Jacobin club. Its leading figures included Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly. They were constitutional monarchists, interested in consolidating the gains of 1789 and in strengthening the monarchy. The Society’s membership was drawn from among the wealthy, and it met in an upper balcony overlooking the park of the Palais Royal. As the political currents of the Revolution shifted in 1791, some of the members of the Society of 1789 turned toward the Jacobins, while others gravitated toward the Feuillants, as the Society itself disappeared from the scene.
SOCIETY OF THE FRIENDS OF BLACKS. The Society of the Friends of Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) was founded in February 1788, inspired initially by the ideas expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, but also by the creation of a similar society in London. Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Marie-Jean Condorcet were among the founders of the Society, which included in its early membership Nicolas Bergasse, Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette, and Gabriel-Honoré Mirabeau. Many Enlightenment thinkers had written critically of the institution of slavery, including Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Abbé Raynal, but those philosophical critiques had inspired no call to action until 1788. The Society of the Friends of Blacks was a small group initially, drawn principally from elite circles and the world of freemasonry. Their publications called for the abolition of the slave trade, but not slavery itself, which they thought would naturally follow later.
The Revolution brought an expansion in the membership of the Society, but also cleavages. Bergasse, the Lameth brothers, and Adrien Duport left the Society because of the dominance of Brissot, but Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, François Buzot, and Jérome Pétion soon joined, and the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen brought an added urgency to the issue of slavery. To abolish the slave trade, however, would threaten the economic interests of merchants in the port cities of Bordeaux and Nantes, as well as those of French planters in Saint-Domingue. A rival society, the Massiac Club, formed in 1789 to defend those interests and oppose the abolition of the slave trade. No progress was made by the Constituent Assembly, and in August 1791 a massive slave revolt in Saint-Domingue made the issue both more pressing and more contentious.
After elections to the Legislative Assembly, a number of Girondin deputies joined the Society of the Friends of Blacks, including Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud, Armand Gensonné, Marguerite-Elie Guadet, and Jean-François Ducos. Despite the fact that they represented Bordeaux, these men spoke eloquently in opposition to the slave trade, and the influence of the Girondins in the Legislative Assembly and then in the National Convention in its early months kept the issue in public view. The Society continued to advocate the abolition of the slave trade, not slavery itself, but no action was taken until February 1794, months after the proscription of the Girondins, when the National Convention voted to abolish slavery outright. By then the Society of the Friends of Blacks had ceased to meet, crippled by the loss of its Girondin leadership. The laws abolishing slavery were never aggressively enforced under the Directory, and in May 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte repealed them and restored both slavery and the slave trade in French colonial territories.
SOCIETY OF REVOLUTIONARY REPUBLICAN WOMEN. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (Société des Citoyennes Républicaines Révolutionaires) took shape in the winter and spring of 1793, after the Jacobin club denied the use of their meeting hall to a group of women concerned about rising food prices. The Paris Commune granted formal recognition to the new women’s club in May. Its founding members had been active in section assemblies over the past year, and some, like Pauline Léon, had regularly attended meetings of the Cordelier club. Alongside Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe took an active leadership role in the new club.
Both Léon and Lacombe had participated in past journées in Paris, and members of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women joined in the agitation leading up to the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793. As many as 100 women sat in the insurrectionary assembly that met in the Eveché palace in May, and club members harassed Girondin deputies at public speeches and were posted at the doors to the National Convention meeting hall when the uprising began. Women in the club were sympathetic to the enragé movement, and both Léon and Lacombe had personal ties to one of the enragé leaders, Jean-Théophile Leclerc, although they did not support Jacques Roux’s controversial speech to the National Convention on 25 June 1793. But as the political and economic situation worsened that summer, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women joined the enragés in their demands for an extension of the maximum and for a declaration of Terror as the order of the day. Those demands were largely achieved in September 1793, after which point the Montagnards turned against both groups. The National Convention did adopt a law proposed by the women’s club, mandating that all women wear the tricolor cockade. But when the dames de la halle denounced that decree and attacked a meeting of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in late October, the Convention moved quickly to close its meeting hall and the club ceased to function. Leading Jacobins, most notably Jean-Pierre-André Amar and Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, took advantage of the occasion to remind women that their natural place was in the home.
SOVEREIGNTY. The issue of sovereignty was of central importance in the French Revolution. Sovereignty resided in the person of the king under the Old Regime, but the convocation of the Estates-General initiated a transformation of that reality. In the Tennis Court Oath, the deputies asserted that sovereignty resided in the nation, of which the king was only one part. The “nation” itself was an abstract category, and in their debates over a proposed constitution, the deputies of the Constituent Assembly began to give clearer definition to what sovereignty might mean under the constitutional monarchy. They divided the populace of France into two categories, active citizens and passive citizens, with only the former accorded the full rights of sovereignty. Only active citizens would have the right to vote in elections.
Voting was not the only means by which sovereignty might be exercised, however. More than 80,000 Parisians took to the streets on 14 July 1789 and viewed the storming of the Bastille as an expression of their sovereignty. By the end of that year, political clubs had begun to appear, most notably the Jacobin club. Their critics argued that they should not be allowed to exist, since they represented a usurpation of the sovereignty that legitimately resided in the National Assembly alone. As people began to lose trust in their elected representatives, certainly by the time of the king’s flight to Varennes in June 1791, they began to reclaim their sovereignty. Maximilien Robespierre argued that the toppling of the monarchy in August 1792 was a victory for the people, and in the wake of that event the distinction between active and passive citizens was abolished. All adult males were now eligible to vote. Women, though they had played a part in the uprising of 10 August, were still excluded from the sovereign people.
The divisions within the National Convention reflected disagreement over the issue of sovereignty. The Girondins, by and large, were skeptical of the notion of popular sovereignty, and particularly of the assertion that Paris somehow embodied it. The Montagnards were more willing to embrace the ideal of popular sovereignty, although they, too, were wary of the danger that popular politics might degenerate into popular violence. Sovereignty was also contested at the local level during this period. Jacobins in both Lyon and Marseille presented organized slates of candidates for municipal office in the elections of 1792, a tactic denounced by moderates as a violation of the people’s sovereignty. At both the local and the national levels, radicals argued that the electorate did not transfer their sovereignty to their elected officials, but retained the right to recall them at any time.
The Constitution of 1793 incorporated the most liberal definition of sovereignty of any of the constitutions of the Revolution—universal manhood suffrage—but it was never implemented in practice, and there were no elections until 1795. By that time, a new constitution had once again reduced the electorate to those adult males who owned substantial property. Under the Directory, sovereignty would similarly be confined to the propertied elite. Napoleon Bonaparte restored universal manhood suffrage, but the opportunity for the voters to exercise their sovereignty was restricted to the occasional plebiscite.
STAËL, ANNE-LOUISE-GERMAINE (1766–1817). Germaine de Staël was the daughter of Jacques Necker. She met many of the literary and philosophical luminaries of the day at her mother’s salon, and was a cultivated and well-educated young woman herself. In 1786 she married the Baron de Staël, the Swedish ambassador to the French court. Two years later, her first work was published, a short book entitled Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many more would follow, but this early interest in Rousseau would inspire her particular synthesis of the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the emerging Romantic spirit of the time.
Staël was swept up in the excitement of the Revolution, always supportive of her father’s affairs and initiatives. She was distressed at Necker’s resignation in 1790, and grew quite wary after the September Massacres in 1792, leaving first for the family estate outside Geneva, and then for a year living among émigrés in London. Staël returned to Paris after Thermidor and established a salon on the rue du Bac. She soon became the lover of Benjamin Constant, and her salon became a gathering place for political liberals. In 1796 she published De l’Influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus, a pre-Romantic work. Both Staël and Constant were critical of Napoleon Bonaparte’s usurpation of power, and the infringement of civil liberties that his regime embodied. Both were in turn persecuted by Napoleon. He forbade Staël from entering Paris after the 1802 publication of Delphine, and in 1803 forcibly exiled her from France on the pretext that she had something to do with the publication of her father’s book, Dernières vues de politique et de finance.
In 1807 the publication of Corinne placed Staël at the very center of the Romantic movement. Her 1813 work, De l’Allemagne, is considered by some to be the equal of Voltaire’s Lettres sur les Anglais and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for its ability to capture the national spirit of a people. Staël’s final work, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution française, was published posthumously. Her legacy, an important one, is as a pioneer of the psychological novel, a literary theorist, and one of the earliest advocates of political liberalism. See also ROUSSEAU, JEAN-JACQUES.
SWISS GUARDS. The Swiss Guards were first created by order of Charles IX in 1573, were organized as a military regiment under the reign of Louis XIII, and served henceforth in the royal household as personal guards of the king. Two Swiss guards were killed during the October Days, when the women of Paris invaded the palace at Versailles. They defended the Tuileries Palace valiantly during the uprising of 10 August 1792, but perished almost to a man at the hands of the angry crowd after Louis XVI ordered them to lay down their arms. The Swiss Guards were bitterly reviled by the populace, having come to be seen as a symbol of royal despotism.
TALLEYRAND-PÉRIGORD, CHARLES-MAURICE (1754–1838). Charles-Maurice Talleyrand was the eldest son in an old noble family of the Périgord, in southwestern France. Denied a military career by his physical disability (he was lame), he studied instead for a life in the Church. Talleyrand attended Saint-Sulpice seminary in Paris, obtained an administrative appointment in 1780, and was named bishop of Autun in 1788.
Talleyrand was drawn more to Enlightenment philosophy than to Catholic theology, and in 1789 joined the ranks of the liberal aristocracy in the Estates-General. Along with Armand-Désiré Duplessis-Richelieu Aiguillon and Alexandre-Frédéric Liancourt, he favored the abolition of privilege, and in November 1789 was the first to propose that Church lands be confiscated as biens nationaux in order to eliminate the royal debt. Talleyrand swore the civil oath of the clergy, celebrated mass at the Champ de Mars for the Festival of Federation on 14 July 1790, and consecrated the first constitutional bishops. After being condemned by Pope Pius VI, Talleyrand left the Church and pursued a diplomatic career.
Talleyrand traveled to London in February 1792, sent as a diplomatic envoy by the Legislative Assembly to secure British neutrality in France’s war with Austria and Prussia. After the discovery of Louis XVI’s secret papers, in November 1792, Talleyrand was denounced by the National Convention. He fled to the United States in 1794, where he remained for two years, until his name was removed from the list of émigrés. Under the Directory, Talleyrand was named minister of foreign affairs, due in part to the influence of Germaine de Staël. He supported the coup of 18 Brumaire and served Napoleon Bonaparte as foreign minister through much of the Empire. In the end, however, he abandoned Napoleon and sold his services to the Austrians and Bourbons. Napoleon is reported to have once told Joseph Fouché that he regretted not having killed Talleyrand long before.
Talleyrand represented France at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, but supported the Orléans branch of the royal family thereafter. At the end of his life he reconciled with the Catholic Church and received the final sacrements due a bishop, despite the fact that he had fathered a number of children, most notably the painter Eugène Delacroix.
TALLIEN, JEAN-LAMBERT (1767–1820). Tallien was born in Paris, where his father was maître d’hôtel for the Marquis of Bercy. Tallien attended the collège of Cardinal Lemoine and went on to study law. He worked briefly in the 1780s as clerk to a prosecutor, and then as personal secretary to the Lameth brothers. Swept up in the revolutionary politics of Paris in 1789, he obtained a job as a typesetter in the printing shop of the Moniteur Universel, which put him close to the action at Versailles. Tallien joined the Paris Jacobin club, and in August 1791 began publishing a newspaper, L’Ami du Citoyen, which he modeled on the more famous newspaper of Jean-Paul Marat. He participated in the uprising of 10 August 1792, and became secretary of the Paris Commune thereafter. But both Marat and Maximilien Robespierre viewed him as something of an opportunist, which forced him to seek election to the National Convention from the Seine-et-Oise. In the Convention he sat with the Montagnards, voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI, and played an active role in the May 1793 uprising against the Girondin deputies.
Tallien was sent on mission to Bordeaux in October 1793, where he supported deChristianization and organized a Festival of Reason. Despite this, he was accused of political moderation and recalled to Paris, where he played a central role in the conspiracy against Robespierre. Tallien served on the Committee of Public Safety after 9 Thermidor, principally charged with matters of commerce and food supply. In the spring of 1795 he dealt harshly with both the insurgents of the Prairial riots and the émigré rebels of Quiberon. Tallien was elected to the Council of Five Hundred in 1795, but was increasingly viewed with hostility by those on both the left and the right. He accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte on the Egyptian campaign in 1798, where he endured the double misfortune of being captured by the British and contracting yellow fever. He never fully recovered from his illness, though it spared him exile as a regicide in 1816.
TALMA, FRANÇOIS-JOSEPH (1763–1826). Talma was the most celebrated actor on the Paris stage during the Revolution. His father was a valet, and François accompanied him to his various posts throughout his youth, most of them in Flanders and England. His acting abilities first became apparent at the collège of Clermont, and in 1786 he enrolled in the école royale dramatique. Talma joined the Comédie Française in 1787, and became a sociétaire in 1789. His first triumph on stage came in November 1789, in Marie-Joseph Chénier’s Charles IX.
Talma was impassioned by the ideas of the Revolution, which gave him the opportunity to realize one of his earlier dreams, to dress in period costume on stage, appropriate to the roles in historical dramas. He visited museums to study details, and worked with Jacques-Louis David on the design of costumes. In April 1791 the Comédie Française split, and Talma led the dissidents to found the Théatre français de la rue de Richelieu, which became the Théatre de la République in 1792, occupying the site where the Comédie Française stands today. Talma’s marriage in 1790 to Julie Carreau was viewed by some as scandalous, as she was a former dancer at the Opera. She operated a salon on the rue Chantereine that was much frequented by Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud and some of the other Girondins, and Vergniaud became a dévoté of Talma as well. Talma played in both Othello and Hamlet during the Revolution, his leading role in the latter making a particular impression on Germaine de Staël. He survived the politically treacherous waters of the Terror, and then those of Thermidor, and eventually became both the favorite actor and good friend of Napoleon Bonaparte.
TARGET, GUY-JEAN-BAPTISTE (1733–1807). Target was an avocat at the Parlement of Paris from 1752, and a member of the Académie Française from 1780. He made a public name for himself under the Old Regime by publicly protesting the Maupeou reforms in 1771, and by defending Cardinal Rohan in the 1785 Diamond Necklace Affair. Target was elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Paris. He served on the constitutional committee, where he favored a single-chamber legislature and supported a suspensive veto for the king. He presided over the Constituent Assembly in January 1790.
Target was a member of the Jacobin club, but no longer attended meetings after the fall of 1790. He supported the proposal of Maximilien Robespierre that deputies in the Constituent Assembly be declared ineligible for election to the Legislative Assembly. He withdrew from politics thereafter, and in August 1792 declined an invitation from Louis XVI to serve as defense counsel in his trial before the National Convention. Target grew increasingly alarmed as the Revolution entered its radical phase, and maintained a low profile through the period of the Directory. He supported Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power, was named to the Tribunal de Cassation in 1800, and participated in the drafting of Napoleon’s criminal code. In 1802 he was named to the Tribunat.
TAXATION. Taxation under the Old Regime was both inefficient and unfair. A confusing array of both direct and indirect taxes varied from one part of the country to another, and the system of privilege meant that certain groups, provinces, and cities were exempt from particular taxes. The aristocracy, for example, was exempt from most direct taxes, as was the clergy, and the Church as an institution paid no taxes on its substantial landholdings. Among those who did pay the land tax, there was no guarantee that landowners of comparable estates in two different provinces would pay a similar amount. Much of the monarchy’s revenue derived from indirect taxes, but the crown’s reliance on tax farmers to collect those taxes meant that much of the money collected never reached the royal coffers. Taxes weighed more heavily on the peasantry than on other, generally wealthier, groups in French society. The whole system of taxation was thus the focus of bitter complaints in the cahiers de doléances that were drafted in 1789.
The challenge that the Constituent Assembly faced was to address the inequality of the old tax system at the same time that it addressed its inefficiency, and this proved an impossible task. As early as 15 September 1789, the deputies decreed that all future taxes would be equally applied, with no distinction for either person or place. Due to the financial crisis, the revolutionary governments were forced to resort, on several occasions, to forced loans, or patriotic contributions, and the first of these was levied on 6 October 1789. In November 1790 a new land tax was introduced, the contribution foncière, which was projected to yield just over 200 million livres per year. In January 1791 the Constituent Assembly created a new tax on moveable property, the contribution mobilière, which was projected to yield 60 million livres per year. The levy of the taxes was left to departmental administrations, however, which meant that the actual tax on property might still vary from one part of the country to another. In a climate of political uncertainty, some citizens simply refused to pay these new taxes, in the hope that they would eventually go away.
The contribution foncière and contribution mobilière were the two principal taxes introduced during the Revolution, but persistent financial shortfalls brought the addition of other forms of taxation. A tax on those practicing trades and professions, the patente, was created in March 1791, and was projected to yield 12 million livres per year (it brought in less than a tenth of that in its first year). The patente was abolished in 1793, and the contribution mobilière was repealed in May 1794, although both were later reintroduced. The Directory attempted to rationalize the taxation system in the summer of 1797, with some success, and in November 1797 introduced a new tax on doors and windows, which survived into the 20th century. Not until the regime of Napoleon Bonaparte, however, did the government reestablish financial solvency. See also SEIGNEURIAL DUES.
TEMPLES OF REASON. In towns and villages throughout France, churches were converted to Temples of Reason in the autumn of 1793, as the deChristianization campaign gathered force. Local Jacobin clubs took the initiative in most cases, often prodded by representatives on mission. The most celebrated Temple of Reason was Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, where a Festival of Reason took place on 10 November 1793. Young women were typically selected to play the role of the goddess of Liberty or Reason, and those assembled sang revolutionary songs. This was an effort to introduce a civic religion, built on the ideals of the Enlightenment. But many Frenchmen, and particularly Frenchwomen, resented this usurpation of their churches. Maximilien Robespierre attempted to defuse the deChristianization campaign by introducing the Cult of the Supreme Being, but that effort, too, proved controversial and the Temples of Reason eventually reverted to their original function as Catholic churches.
TENNIS COURT OATH. The swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, on 20 June 1789, is among the most dramatic events of the French Revolution. Three days before, the deputies of the Third Estate had declared their intention to form a National Assembly, and were joined in this gesture by a number of clergy. On the morning of 20 June, those deputies found their meeting hall locked and guarded by royal troops, ostensibly to allow preparation for a royal session two days later. The deputies responded with anger and concern, convinced that the king planned to dissolve the National Assembly. At the suggestion of Jean-Joseph Mounier, they moved to a nearby indoor tennis court to swear an oath composed by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, by which they pledged to remain together until a new constitution was written and firmly established. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, soon to become mayor of Paris, was the first to swear the oath, and he then administered it to the others gathered, who completed the ceremony by affixing their signatures to a copy of the oath. Among the 577 deputies present, only Martin Dauch, from Castelnaudary, refused to swear the oath. One week later, after initial resistance, Louis XVI accepted this initiative and ordered the three estates to meet in common as the National Assembly.
A substantial crowd witnessed the Tennis Court Oath, and revolutionaries almost immediately acclaimed it as a symbolic expression of social reconciliation, unity, and national regeneration. Jacques-Louis David declared his intention to capture the moment in a painted canvas, and in 1790 the Jacobin clubs launched a voluntary subscription campaign to subsidize the project. The effort fell short, and David never completed the painting, but the unfinished canvas remains a stirring evocation of the emotion and idealism that motivated the deputies that day.
TERROR. Terror became the “order of the day” in revolutionary France in the autumn of 1793, following the uprising of 4–5 September. Whether the Terror began with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, or with the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal in March 1793, or with the consolidation of the Committee of Public Safety in July 1793 is open to debate, but generally speaking we think of the Terror as encompassing 1793–94, with its endpoint more precisely identified by the fall of Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor.
Revolutionary government, government by terror, meant essentially two things. First, it meant price controls on staple goods and the creation of an armée révolutionnaire to ensure an adequate supply of food to the cities. This was particularly important to the people of Paris, who had seen their city dangerously under-supplied in the summer of 1793. Second, the Terror involved the suspension of many civil liberties, and the repression of those believed to be enemies of the Revolution. The Terror was most severe in areas of civil war, counterrevolution, and in some of the departments near the frontier. In some departments the Terror claimed fewer than 10 victims. Seventy percent of the death sentences were handed down in just five departments. In some areas the Terror was particularly harsh. In Nantes, near the center of the Vendée rebellion, Jean-Baptiste Carrier ordered the drowning of 3,000 suspected counterrevolutionaries. In Lyon nearly 2,000 were executed, some by guillotine and others shot down by cannon. Under the Law of Suspects, some 70,000 people were arrested during the Terror, roughly 0.5 percent of the population. Our best estimates suggest that 40,000 people were executed during the Terror, but if one includes those who died in the repression of the Vendée rebellion, the death toll mounts considerably higher.
Prominent in the history of the Terror are the “show trials” of the Girondin deputies, of Georges-Jacques Danton and the Indulgents, and of Jacques-René Hébert and the enragés. Those trials did as much to discredit the revolutionary regime as the overall death tally of the Terror. Historians have long debated the meaning of the Terror. Some see it as an inevitable outcome of the ideology of the Jacobin clubs or the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while others interpret the Terror as an unfortunate, but understandable, response to the circumstances of war and counterrevolution. Supporters of the Revolution tend to downplay the scope of the Terror, while its opponents tend to exaggerate its scope. For virtually all who study the Revolution, however, the ideals of 1789 are tarnished by the violence of the Terror.
THEOPHILANTHROPY. Theophilanthropy emerged as a semi-official cult during a second campaign of deChristianization in the last years of the Directory regime. It was first proposed by Jean-Baptiste Chemin Dupontès, a bookseller in Paris, in a September 1796 pamphlet titled Manuel des Théoanthrophiles, later amended to Théophilanthropes, which literally means “lovers of God and man.” The practices he described grew out of the deism of the Enlightenment and borrowed from the rituals of freemasonry. A number of prominent individuals took an interest in theophilanthropy, including Marie-Joseph Chenier, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Thomas Paine, and Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours. The first public service was held in January 1797 in the former chapel of Saint Catherine. With the support of Louis-Marie La Révellière-Lépeaux, one of the directors, the cult grew and soon enjoyed the use of more than a dozen Paris churches, including Notre-Dame cathedral.
The hope of those who practiced theophilanthropy was that it would succeed as a movement where the Cult of the Supreme Being had failed, as an alternative to Catholicism that would inculcate republican morality and patriotism while addressing the spiritual needs of the populace. In addition to services, held initially on Sundays and later on the décadi, the movement also published a newspaper, l’Ami des théophilanthropes. Though concentrated in Paris, there were pockets of support in the provinces as well, most notably in the department of the Yonne, southeast of the capital.
After the Floréal coup in 1798, the Directory withdrew some of its support for theophilanthropy, deeming it too closely associated with former Jacobins, and Napoleon Bonaparte banned the cult entirely in October 1801.
THERMIDOR. On 9 Thermidor II, Maximilien Robespierre was denounced before a session of the National Convention and toppled from power. It was more a coup than a journée. As Bertrand Barère would say the next day, “If the people made their revolution on 31 May 1793, the National Convention made its revolution on 9 Thermidor, and liberty applauded both equally.”
Robespierre had been for some months a dominant force on the Committee of Public Safety, and the most prominent public defender of the policies of the Terror. Two assassination attempts against him in the spring of 1794 had resulted in the Law of 22 Prairial and a surge in the number of executions, at a time when many felt that revolutionary justice should be relaxed. The introduction of the Cult of the Supreme Being in early June 1794 convinced some that Robespierre aspired to dictatorial power, and when he spoke in the Jacobin club on 8 Thermidor about the need to expose more enemies of the Republic, those conspiring against him were galvanized into action.
Joseph Fouché and Jean-Lambert Tallien were prominent among those planning the coup, but Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois and Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne also played important roles, along with a number of others. This was a coalition of deputies from both the left and the right, with a variety of conflicting motivations, but a common fear. Some among them hoped that the policies of the Terror would be extended, not curtailed. The conservative reaction against the Jacobin policies of the Year II, often referred to as the Thermidorian reaction, actually did not set in until some months later.
On 9 Thermidor those involved in the plot prevented Robespierre from speaking before the Convention. Others were denounced as well, most notably Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, Georges Couthon, and Augustin Robespierre. The accused took refuge in the Hôtel de Ville that evening, but the sections of Paris, so loyal to Robespierre in the past, did not rise in his support on this occasion. Robespierre went to the guillotine on 10 Thermidor, joined by 21 others. Dozens more would join them in the following days, 107 all told. Their execution marks the symbolic end of the Terror.
THERMIDORIANS. Narrowly defined, the Thermidorians were those men who led the coup of 9 Thermidor against Maximilien Robespierre and his supporters, men on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. More broadly speaking, the Thermidorians were those men, predominantly conservative republicans, who dominated the National Convention over the next 15 months, dismantling the institutions of the Terror and laying the groundwork for the regime of the Directory. They included ex-terrorists such as Louis-Stanislas Fréron and Jean-Lambert Tallien, as well as former Girondins such as Jean-Baptiste Louvet.
The Thermidorians brought a number of the most extreme terrorists to justice, including Jean-Baptiste Carrier, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois; oversaw the closing of the Jacobin clubs; encouraged the jeunesse dorée in their tactics of political intimidation; dismantled much of the economic and social legislation introduced by the Montagnards; and created a liberal parliamentary regime that favored the interests of property owners and stifled popular democracy. Their policies were in some regards contradictory. They brought an end to the Terror and punished its perpetrators, but unleashed a White Terror against former Jacobins. They attempted to create a political system, in the Constitution of 1795, that would preserve a moderate republic, but undermined its legitimacy by decreeing that two-thirds of their number would be guaranteed reelection to either the Council of Ancients or the Council of Five Hundred. To posterity, the term Thermidorian has come to seem synonymous with reactionary.
THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT, ANNE-JOSEPHE (1762–1815). Théroigne de Méricourt was the daughter of well-to-do Belgian peasants in the countryside near Liège. At the age of 20 she moved to England, where she remained for some years, before traveling to Italy and then Paris, where she arrived in June 1789. Swept up by the events of that summer, Théroigne relocated to Versailles, where she assiduously followed the debates of the Estates-General. She joined the protests of the market women who marched to Versailles during the October Days, and subsequently followed the royal family back to Paris. Her continued attendance at sessions of the Constituent Assembly put her on familiar terms with a number of the leading deputies.
In May 1790 Théroigne was threatened with arrest for her participation in the October Days, and she fled to Belgium. In February 1791 she was seized by émigrés and held captive in the château of Kufstein for some nine months, by order of Joseph II. Théroigne returned to Paris in early 1792, and supported the war party of Jacques-Pierre Brissot. She called on women to join men at the battlefront, and made efforts to form a women’s political club. Active in the uprisings of 20 June 1792 and 10 August 1792, Théroigne was presented a civic crown by the Marseille fédérés for her role in the latter. She supported the Girondins in their struggle with the Montagnards, and in May 1793 was beaten for her moderate views by a group of radical republican women outside of the central markets. Whether as a result of that beating, or of her nine months in an Austrian prison, Théroigne descended into madness and spent her final years in the Salpêtrière asylum.
THIRD ESTATE. The Third Estate consisted of the common people in Old Regime French society, the third of the three orders, the first two being the clergy and the aristocracy. The Third Estate thus constituted approximately 97 percent of the population. In response to the question posed by the title to his famous pamphlet, What is the Third Estate?, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès offered this answer: “Everything; but an everything shackled and oppressed. What would it be without the privileged order? Everything; but an everything free and flourishing.”
Sieyès and others like him demanded in 1788 that the delegates of the Third Estate to the Estates-General be doubled in number, so as to equal the number of delegates of the first two estates. Once gathered at Versailles they demanded that votes be taken by head, rather than by order, and when the king and aristocracy balked at that demand, they took the lead in declaring a National Assembly. That being achieved, it was not long before the deputies abolished the system of privilege that had defined Old Regime society. In a nation of citizens, estates became obsolete. The clergy would survive as a profession, but with the abolition of aristocracy in 1790 the Third Estate disappeared as well. See also PEASANTRY.
TOULON. Toulon is a city on the southeast coast of France, near the Italian border, with a population of roughly 20,000 in 1789. It was the site of an important naval arsenal under the Old Regime and during the Revolution, and in 1790 was designated as the chef-lieu of the Var department. Municipal politics in Toulon were contentious in the early years of the Revolution, marred by frequent conflicts between local Jacobins and royalists, the latter finding their principal support among naval officers. Jacobins gained control of local politics in 1792, but were forced from power in July 1793 by rebels sympathetic to the federalist revolt in nearby Marseille. When Marseille fell to republican troops in August, royalists in Toulon turned the port over to the British, a treasonous act that sent shock waves throughout the country. The French army regained control of Toulon only after a three-month siege, during which the young Napoleon Bonaparte made his first mark as a commander of artillery. Toulon was severely damaged during the siege, and lost a substantial portion of its population to flight. A severe repression followed the recapture of the city, with more than 800 rebels summarily shot and another 300 later sentenced to death. The name of the city was temporarily changed to Port-la-Montagne. The city regained its vitality as a naval port in the years thereafter, attracting a growing population of immigrant workers, and remained politically quiescent as its population was restored.
TOULOUSE. Toulouse, located in south central France at the heart of a wheat-producing region, was the eighth largest city in France in 1789. It became a center of revolutionary enthusiasm over the ensuing decade. There was minor violence between Protestants and Catholics in spring 1790, on the eve of the troubles in nearby Montauban. By 1793 Toulouse was known as something of a Jacobin stronghold, although its inhabitants objected to the radicalism of François Chabot when he visited as a representative on mission in May 1793. One month later, local authorities flirted briefly with the federalist revolt, but took no active role in it. Despite this, the Terror was relatively harsh in the city, and local Jacobins actively pursued refractory clergy during the deChristianization campaign.
Toulouse could not turn to overseas sources of grain as easily as other large cities in France, so that when peasants withheld grain from the market in protest of the maximum, its urban populace suffered considerable hardship. The winter of 1795 was particularly difficult. Toulouse continued to be a Jacobin stronghold into the Directory period. In the summer of 1798, royalists in the region made it the target of a peasant uprising, but did not succeed in taking the city. Toulouse was one of the few cities in France in which Jacobins attempted a showing of opposition to Napoleon Bonaparte following the coup of 18 Brumaire.
TOUSSAINT-LOUVERTURE, FRANÇOIS-DOMINIQUE (1743–1803). Toussaint-Louverture was born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, but seems never to have worked as a manual laborer and gained his freedom in 1776. As a free man, he remained aloof from the early slave revolts, hopeful that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen would be applied to free blacks as well as whites. Disappointed in that hope, he eventually joined in the 1791 uprising, and emerged as a military leader of considerable skill in the years thereafter. He allied himself initially with the Spanish, then the British, but after the National Convention abolished slavery in 1794, he declared his loyalty once again to France. Toussaint played one European power off against the others in pursuing his ultimate goal of independence for the island, under black rule. By late 1797 he had emerged as the effective leader of Saint-Domingue, and in 1800 introduced a constitution that named him president for life, and which granted France only a nominal sovereignty over the island. Angered at this affront, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched an army of 10,000 men in 1802, under the command of General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc. Toussaint was captured in November 1802 and transported to France, where he died in a fortress prison in the Jura the following year. French troops were forced to abandon Saint-Domingue in 1804, however, and the island, renamed Haiti, preserved its independence, a posthumous victory for Toussaint-Louverture.
TRIUMVIRATE. One can speak of at least three Triumvirates over the course of the French Revolution. The first was composed of the deputies Antoine-Pierre Barnave, Adrien Duport, and Alexandre Lameth, all active leaders in the Jacobin club and dominant figures in the Constituent Assembly. They led the campaign to restrict royal powers in the drafting of the Constitution of 1791, but grew more conservative in the aftermath of the king’s flight to Varennes.
The second Triumvirate existed more in the minds of their accusers than as a real political force. Following the September Massacres, a number of Girondins, most notably Jean-Baptiste Louvet, accused Maximilien Robespierre, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat of being a Triumvirate responsible for instigating the killings in the prisons and of aspiring to dictatorial power. There is little evidence that the three actively collaborated during this period, and they proved to be uneasy allies in the months that followed.
Finally, Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, and Georges Couthon were denounced by their enemies as a dictatorial Triumvirate on the Committee of Public Safety as a prelude to the Thermidor coup that toppled all three from power and sent them to the guillotine.
TRONCHET, FRANÇOIS-DENIS (1726–1826). Tronchet was the son of a procureur at the Parlement of Paris, and followed in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a legal career. He gained a reputation as a brilliant legal mind under the Old Regime, though not as a courtroom orator. In 1789 Tronchet was elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Paris. He opposed the declaration of a National Assembly, but went on to preside over the Constituent Assembly in March 1791. Tronchet’s principal contribution in that assembly was to legislation related to the suppression of seigneurial dues. Following the king’s flight to Varennes he spoke in opposition to judicial proceedings, and after the uprising of 10 August 1792 accepted an invitation to serve as defense counsel to Louis XVI. Tronchet styled himself a republican, but defended the king with energy and talent, retiring from public life after the king’s execution. Following the proscription of the Girondins on 31 May 1793, Tronchet went into hiding in Paris until after 9 Thermidor. Thereafter he sat as a deputy from the Seine-et-Oise in the Council of Ancients, presided over the Tribunal de Cassation, and helped to draft the Napoleonic Civil Code. In 1802 he presided over the Senate, and was later named an officer in the Legion of Honor. At his death Tronchet left behind translations of the works of both John Milton and David Hume, and over 3,000 legal briefs and opinions. In 1806 his remains were interred in the Panthéon.
TUILERIES. When Louis XVI and his family returned to Paris following the October Days in 1789, they moved into the Tuileries palace, last inhabited by the royal family nearly a century before. Over the next two years, the king and Marie Antoinette felt like prisoners in their new home, forbidden even to travel to other royal residences in the Paris basin. On 20 June 1792, a crowd of sans-culottes invaded the Tuileries Palace, forcing Louis to don a phrygian cap, but failing in this first effort to topple the monarchy. They succeeded not quite two months later, in the uprising of 10 August 1792, led by the Marseille fédérés. The palace was severely damaged in this battle, but in May 1793 the National Convention made it its meeting place, and later that summer the Committee of Public Safety installed itself as well. Royal decoration now gave way to the symbols of the Revolution. Under the Directory, the Council of Ancients met in the Tuileries Palace, and Napoleon Bonaparte took up residence there in 1800 as first consul. The palace burned to the ground in 1871, during the repression of the Paris Commune.
UPRISING OF 10 AUGUST 1792. The uprising of 10 August 1792, one of the great journées of the Revolution, toppled the monarchy and eventually led to the trial of Louis XVI. Popular sentiment in Paris turned increasingly against the king in the late spring of 1792 as the war against Austria went badly, and because the king refused to deal harshly with both the émigrés and the refractory clergy. The sans-culottes were particularly upset at the king’s veto of legislation calling for the creation of a camp of fédérés in or near Paris, for the protection of the capital, and on 20 June 1792 an unruly crowd gained entry to the Tuileries Palace and forced Louis XVI to don a phrygian cap. The king was frightened, but he did not withdraw his veto, and this insult to royal authority drew a chorus of protests from departmental administrations throughout France.
In mid-July Prussia entered the war against France, and the Legislative Assembly declared la patrie en danger, calling for an additional 50,000 volunteers for the army. As apprehensions grew in Paris, section assemblies began to meet in permanent daily sessions, and radicals in those assemblies, as well as in the popular societies, most notably the Cordeliers and the Jacobins, began to call for an insurrection. In addition, the Legislative Assembly overturned the king’s veto, and armed fédérés began to converge on the capital.
Early in August the majority of the sections delivered a petition to the Legislative Assembly calling for the king to be deposed. Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud turned away that petition, claiming that it expressed the views of only a small portion of Frenchmen. Maximilien Robespierre now called for insurrection at a meeting of the Jacobin club, and Georges Danton played a prominent role in the planning of the uprising. Unlike 20 June, the uprising of 10 August was a planned assault, led by the fédérés from Marseille and Brittany. The battle quickly turned against the royal troops, and although the king called on them to lay down their arms, nearly all of the Swiss Guards were slaughtered by the crowd. Louis XVI and his family fled the palace and put themselves under the protection of the Legislative Assembly, which eventually ordered their arrest and transfer to the Temple. Robespierre characterized 10 August as a victory of the people, but it was a victory that would be tarnished by the September Massacres less than one month later, even as elections to the National Convention were being held throughout France.
UPRISING OF 31 MAY–2 JUNE 1793. The uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793 marked the end of the struggle between Girondins and Montagnards within the National Convention. The two factions had been at odds with each other since the September Massacres the previous autumn, and that opposition expressed itself during the trial of Louis XVI and impeded the drafting of a new constitution for the young republic. The Girondins first attempted to break the stalemate by the impeachment of Jean-Paul Marat in April 1793, and then by the creation of the Commission of Twelve, called to investigate the alleged conspiracy of the Paris Commune and the sections of Paris against the National Convention.
Far from securing a victory by those actions, the Girondins were first stung by the acquittal of Marat by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and then watched helplessly as the section assemblies and the popular societies of Paris mobilized against them. An insurrectionary assembly convened at the bishop’s palace on the Ile de la Cité, numbering some 500 delegates from throughout the city, including a substantial contingent of women. That assembly called for the proscription of 22 Girondin deputies, and eventually initiated the insurrection of 31 May. The deputies of the National Convention initially resisted the pressure of the crowd, but on 2 June 1793 François Hanriot led 80,000 National Guards to surround their meeting hall, and in the end 29 deputies and three ministers were proscribed from office.
This uprising brought the ascendancy of the Montagnards within a circumscribed National Convention, paving the way for the passage of the Constitution of 1793. But it also sparked the federalist revolt in provincial France, which ultimately ushered in the Terror. Most of the proscribed Girondin deputies perished on the guillotine. While the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793 may be said to have initiated the most violent phase of the Revolution, it should be noted that the insurrection itself was remarkably peaceful.
UPRISING OF 4–5 SEPTEMBER 1793. The uprising of 4–5 September 1793 occurred in the context of rising bread prices and the news that Toulon had fallen to the British on 29 August. Calls for insurrection arose in section assemblies and were endorsed by the Paris Commune. Jacques-René Hébert and Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette played prominent leadership roles. On the first day of the uprising, large crowds gathered before the Hôtel de Ville, and on the second day marched on the National Convention to demand action against political suspects and hoarders.
These demonstrations had varied consequences. At the insistence of radicals, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois were added to the Committee of Public Safety. The National Convention finally approved the creation of the armées révolutionnaires and adopted the general maximum. Terror was declared the “order of the day,” and in mid-September the Law of Suspects was passed. The Convention also mandated that section assemblies should meet twice weekly, and that the indigent should be paid 40 sous for attending, which some historians have argued had the unintended consequence of neutralizing the sans-culotte movement. In addition, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of Jacques Roux, a step clearly aimed at bringing the enragés to heel.
VADIER, MARC-ALEXIS-GUILLAUME (1736–1828). Vadier was born in the town of Pamiers, near the Spanish border, where his father was a collector of the dîme for the local clergy. He was educated at the Jesuit collège in Pamiers, went on to study law in Toulouse, but then enlisted in the army and saw combat in the Seven Years War. He returned to Pamiers in 1758, where he became a substantial landowner and in 1770 purchased the office of conseiller at the Présidial court. In that position, Vadier seems to have clashed with both the local aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie of the area over the final 20 years of the Old Regime.
Vadier was elected to the Estates-General by the Third Estate of Pamiers in 1789. He played no prominent role in that assembly, and in 1791 returned to the Ariège as president of the district tribunal of Mirepoix. One year later he was elected from the Ariège to the National Convention, where he sat among the Montagnards and joined the Jacobin club. He voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI and against the appel au peuple. Vadier opposed the impeachment of Jean-Paul Marat, and following the proscription of the Girondin deputies returned to the Ariège to actively oppose the federalist revolt. In September 1793 he was elected to the Committee of General Security, over which he soon presided, and it was here that Vadier made his most dramatic contribution to the Revolution.
Vadier used his position on the Committee of General Security to settle scores with old enemies back home, more than 60 of whom would be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, 15 to be sentenced to death. Vadier was also among the principal antagonists of Georges Danton, initiating the decree of accusation against him and playing an active role in the courtroom proceedings. Two months later he turned against Maximilien Robespierre, jealous perhaps of the growing police powers being claimed for the Committee of Public Safety, but also adamantly opposed, as an atheist, to Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being. Vadier played a leading role in the coup of 9 Thermidor. It would not be long before Vadier found himself denounced, though he managed to escape prosecution for some time. In March 1795, however, he stood accused as a terrorist along with Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois and went into hiding. He successfully eluded authorities until June 1796, when he was arrested near Toulouse, implicated in the Conspiracy of Equals. He went to trial and was acquitted, but remained in prison until 1799. Vadier lived quietly thereafter, always under police surveillance, was exiled in 1816 as a regicide, and died in Brussels.
VALMY. On 20 September 1792, the day of the first meeting of the National Convention, the French revolutionary army scored its first major victory over the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy. The Duke of Brunswick commanded the Prussian army, while the French forces were commanded by General François-Etienne Kellerman and General Charles Dumouriez. One day later the deputies of the Convention declared the first French Republic. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, present at the battlefield, is reported to have said to the Prussian soldiers, “From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history, and you can say that you were present at its birth.”
VARENNES. Varennes is a small town near the eastern border of France, made famous by the king’s attempted flight and arrest on 20–21 June 1791. The plan of escape, devised by Axel Fersen, called for Louis XVI and his family to leave the Tuileries Palace in the dead of the night on 20 June and to travel by coach, disguised as commoners, until they reached the safety of the émigré armies just across the border into Germany. The plan went awry almost from the beginning, however. The royal family was late leaving the palace and their planned escort, alarmed by the delay, failed to meet the coach en route. When the party stopped in Sainte-Menehould to change horses, the local postmaster recognized the king. The alarm was soon sounded, and when the coach reached the nearby village of Varennes a crowd of National Guards and concerned citizens surrounded it.
Back in Paris, the deputies of the Constituent Assembly were in a quandary. Louis XVI had left behind a note expressing his displeasure with the current state of affairs, in particular denouncing the excessive influence of the Jacobin club. Fearing the consequences should it become known that the king had fled, the deputies announced to Parisians that the king had been kidnapped and dispatched Antoine-Pierre Barnave and Jérome Pétion to “rescue” the royal family. Even given this official fiction, the king was temporarily suspended from his functions.
Radicals in Paris were now openly skeptical of the king’s loyalty to the Revolution, and petitions calling for an end to the monarchy began to circulate in the capital. Moderates within the Constituent Assembly prevailed, however, and after hearing the King’s deposition, the deputies returned him to his throne on 16 July 1791. Violence erupted on the Champ de Mars the following day, when Marie-Joseph-Motier Lafayette ordered the National Guard to fire on the crowd. The popularity of the crown was now severely tarnished, at least in Paris, but in September Louis XVI accepted the Constitution of 1791 and the monarchy survived for one more year.
VARLET, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1764–1832). Varlet was born in Paris. His mother was a widow, but the family was of comfortable means, so that he could attend the collège of Harcourt and live for some time without employment, though he eventually took a position at the Poste. Varlet was an ardent follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and eagerly embraced the ideals of 1789. He joined both the Jacobin club and the Cordelier club, and with his portable podium soon became well-known in Paris as a popular orator, first in the Palais Royal and later in the Tuileries gardens. Varlet spoke out on behalf of the sans-culottes, a champion of the twin ideals of direct democracy and social equality, not only in his speeches but in numerous pamphlets as well.
In May 1793 Varlet was arrested along with Jacques-René Hébert, by order of the Commission of Twelve. Both were released within days, and Varlet was elected to the Central Revolutionary Committee that would lead and organize the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793 against the Girondin deputies. He was now associated with the enragés, and his extreme radicalism alienated the Jacobins, who expelled him from their club at the end of June. This scarcely fazed Varlet, and his intemperate words finally led to his arrest in September 1793. He remained in prison for just over a month, leaving little public record of his activities thereafter until being arrested once again after Thermidor. Released following the royalist uprising of Vendémiaire 1795, Varlet eventually rallied to Napoleon Bonaparte and left Paris for Nantes.
VENDÉE REBELLION. The most serious manifestation of counterrevolution occurred in the Vendée, a department located in western France, along the Atlantic seaboard, just to the south of Nantes. The rebellion began in March 1793, following the announcement of military recruitment to fill a levy of 300,000 men for the republican army. The Vendée was a predominantly rural area, with no major cities. The economy of the most important town, Cholet, had been seriously harmed by the textile treaty of 1786, and few of the local peasantry had benefited from the sale of biens nationaux in the early years of the Revolution. The peasants of the Vendée were intensely loyal to their priests, most of whom had been recruited locally, and most of whom refused to swear the civil oath of the clergy. Priests and local aristocrats took the lead in the rebellion, but it was largely a peasant movement.
The initial scattered uprisings quickly grew into something much larger, and the rebels formed what they called the Royal and Catholic Army. It was a force to be reckoned with. The city of Saumur fell to the rebels in early June, just as the federalist revolt was erupting in other areas of France, and by the end of the month Nantes was under siege. Republican volunteers rushed to the Vendée to combat the rebels, not only from Paris but also from cities such as Caen and Bordeaux that were themselves in revolt against the National Convention. The main rebel army was defeated in December 1793, with atrocities committed on both sides. In January 1794 General Louis-Marie Turreau unleashed his colonnes infernales to carry out a scorched-earth policy against the remnants of the rebel forces and their rural supporters. In Nantes, Jean-Baptiste Carrier oversaw the execution of approximately 3,000 people, most of them accused of having participated in the Vendée rebellion.
The severe repression may have shattered the capability of the rebels to mount a serious military challenge in the Vendée region, but it also inspired widespread resentment and perpetuated scattered resistance for years to come. A formal treaty was signed, ostensibly ending the rebellion, in February 1795, but the failed landing at Quiberon in June 1795 triggered renewed unrest. General Lazare Hoche pacified the region once again, without resorting to harsh repression, but it was not until the signing of the Concordat under Napoleon Bonaparte, in 1801, that peace returned permanently to the region. The cost of the rebellion to the Vendée was enormous, with the countryside laid waste and as much as one-third of the population killed in the fighting and the Terror that followed.
VENDÉMIAIRE. Vendémiaire is the first month in the revolutionary calendar, and 13 Vendémiaire IV (5 October 1795) is the date of the last popular uprising in Paris during the Revolution. One month before, the National Convention had submitted the Constitution of 1795 to primary assemblies for ratification, along with two decrees mandating that two-thirds of the deputies elected to the new legislative bodies, the Council of Ancients and the Council of Five Hundred, be drawn from those currently sitting in the Convention. This effort on the part of the deputies to ensure stability and continuity encountered widespread opposition among voters, who felt that the decrees represented a denial of popular sovereignty.
Nearly all of the 48 sections in Paris voted against the two decrees. It should be noted that many radicals and “ex-terrorists” had been purged from section assemblies in the capital since the Prairial riots. Thirty-two of the sections simply reported that opposition to the decrees was unanimous, without counting votes, and the Convention chose to disqualify those votes from the total. The official announcement that the decrees had been approved, issued on 1 Vendémiaire, therefore elicited a widespread howl of protest in the capital. Section Lepelletier took the lead in organizing opposition, and a majority of the sections denounced the decrees and challenged their ratification. Deputies in the National Convention grew worried not only for their own safety, but for the future of the republic, and called upon five of their members, most notably Paul Barras, to prepare a defense. Others in Paris feared a return to the Terror.
Only 15 sections, principally located in the central and western sections of Paris, responded to the call for insurrection, and the crowd on the streets on 13 Vendémiaire numbered about 8,000. They were met, as they approached the Tuileries, by some 5,000 to 6,000 republican troops, under the command of seven generals recruited by Barras. Among them was Napoleon Bonaparte, though he did not play the leading role that history has ascribed to him. Nor were the insurgents dispersed by a simple “whiff of grapeshot.” There were several hundred casualties on both sides, and the troops dispersed the crowd quite easily. The protesters were surprisingly young, drawn extensively from among the jeunesse dorée, who had been active in recent years. There were few arrests, since many fled the city immediately. The courts eventually sentenced some 49 of the leaders to death in absentia, but only two executions were carried out. This event is significant as the first occasion since 1789 that army troops had been used in Paris to suppress an uprising, and as the last occasion until 1830 that Parisians would take to the streets in political protest. It also brought Napoleon to the attention of the grateful deputies and to national prominence for the first time.
VENTÔSE DECREES. The Ventôse decrees, adopted by the National Convention on 8 and 13 Ventôse II (26 February and 3 March 1794), are generally considered the most egalitarian social legislation of the Revolution. Maximilien Robespierre reportedly initiated the legislation, and the proposals were read before the Convention by Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. The decrees essentially called for two things: sequestration of the land and other property of some 300,000 suspects, émigrés, and enemies of the people; and the distribution of that property to the indigent of France. Local authorities were to draw up the lists of potential beneficiaries, while popular commissions would oversee the actual redistribution of property.
This was considerably more radical than past policy regarding the biens nationaux, most of which had been sold at auction and rarely in plots small enough to benefit poor peasants. Indeed, anyone who had proposed in previous years anything resembling a redistribution of land ran the risk of being accused of calling for the agrarian law, or a virtual abolition of private property. The Ventôse decrees, however, were never fully implemented. Some property was confiscated, to be sure, but it was never distributed in the manner envisioned by the legislation. After the fall of Robespierre, on 9 Thermidor, the decrees became moot.
VERGNIAUD, PIERRE-VICTURNIEN (1753–1793). Vergniaud was born in Limoges, the son of a military provisioner who went bankrupt in 1770. Still, the family could afford to send Pierre to school, first to the Oratorien collège and then to the collège Duplessis in Paris. He went on to study at the Saint-Sulpice seminary, but did not take orders. After some years pursuing a literary career in Paris, with very modest success, he decided to study law in Bordeaux, where he began to practice in 1782. Although never known for his energy or diligence, his eloquence gained for him a considerable reputation by the eve of the Revolution.
Vergniaud took an active role in revolutionary politics from the outset, and was among the founders of both the National Guard and the Jacobin club in Bordeaux. He was elected to the first departmental administration of the Gironde, and was an ardent supporter of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Following the king’s flight to Varennes, he called publicly for a trial, and was rewarded for his revolutionary ardor by election to the Legislative Assembly, along with his friends Jean-François Ducos and Armand Gensonné. Vergniaud quickly established a reputation for brilliant oratory with stirring speeches denouncing first the émigrés and then refractory priests. He allied himself closely with Jacques-Pierre Brissot and supported his call for war in the spring of 1792.
As the war went badly, Vergniaud became more and more vocal in his attacks on the monarchy. He initiated the vote declaring “la patrie en danger” in July 1792, but also grew increasingly wary at the prospect of yet another revolutionary upheaval in Paris. In late July he signed, along with Gensonné and Margeurite-Elie Guadet, the ill-considered letter to the court painter, Joseph Boze, which would later be interpreted as an effort to save Louis XVI. As president of the Legislative Assembly, he turned away the petition of the Mauconseil section on 4 August calling for the king’s ouster, and then gave refuge to the king and his family in the midst of the uprising of 10 August. In the following weeks, he would be a harsh critic of the politics of the Paris Commune.
Vergniaud was reelected to the National Convention from the Gironde. He was among those deputies who proposed the declaration of the Republic on 21 September 1792, and was also among the first to drop the “veil of silence” surrounding the September Massacres and to call for the prosecution of those who had incited the violence. He spoke ominously about the danger of anarchy in the capital, and eventually abandoned the Paris Jacobins. Although Vergniaud distanced himself somewhat from the other Girondins in their bitter struggle with the Montagnard deputies, in virtually every major debate before the National Convention he assumed the role of oratorical sparring partner with Maximilien Robespierre. He sat on the constitution committee, led by Marie-Jean Condorcet, whose work the Montagnards would reject. In the trial of Louis XVI, he supported the appel au peuple, but ultimately voted for the sentence of death. Following the riots of March 1793, during which he had felt personally endangered, he denounced Jean-Paul Marat by name, though he regretted his impeachment in April. Even as the political struggle between Girondins and Montagnards heightened, however, Vergniaud remained a patron of the opera and theater, and was a particular fan of François-Joseph Talma. He opposed the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, but supported the creation of the Committee of Public Safety, and was among its first members. He also sat on the Commission of Twelve in May 1793, and this earned him a spot among the proscribed deputies following the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793.
Vergniaud was placed under house arrest in June, but unlike many of the other proscribed Girondins chose not to flee the capital. He opposed the federalist revolt in the provinces, but did publish a pamphlet condemning the actions of the victorious Montagnards. In late July he was arrested and confined first in the Luxembourg palace, before being transferred to the Conciergerie. While in prison he wrote out elaborate notes in preparation for his courtroom defense, but at the trial was effectively silenced by the prosecutor, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville. There is some evidence that Robespierre and Georges Danton would have preferred to spare Vergniaud, but he was convicted with the others, and joined them in singing the Marseillaise as they marched to the guillotine. Vergniaud would long be remembered as the greatest of the orators of the National Convention, most notably for his comment that the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured her children.
VERSAILLES. The magnificent palace at Versailles, built by Louis XIV after the rebellion of the Fronde in order to enhance the grandeur and security of the monarchy, served as the residence for French kings from 1664 until 1789. Louis XVI has been criticized by some for rarely leaving Versailles. Its significance during the Revolution is substantial. The Estates-General convened at Versailles, and it was the site of the swearing of the Tennis Court Oath, the declaration of the Constituent Assembly, and the night of 4 August 1789. In early October 1789 the market women of Paris marched to Versailles to protest rising prices and the insult to the Revolution made at a recent banquet of the queen’s guards. Louis XVI and his family returned to Paris with the women, ending the monarchy’s residence at Versailles. In September 1792 the city witnessed one of the worst episodes of provincial violence following the September Massacres, the killing of 44 prisoners en route from Orléans to Paris. Later in the Revolution some of the gardens at Versailles were seized as biens nationaux and given to peasants for cultivation.
VIEUX CORDELIER. The Vieux Cordelier was the third and final newspaper published during the Revolution by Camille Desmoulins. The title of the paper harkened back to the early days of the Revolution, to the patriots of 1789. The paper’s motto, Live free or die, was a bold defense of civil liberties at a moment when they had come under severe assault. The first issues of the Vieux Cordelier, appearing on 5 and 10 December 1793, challenged the increasingly stringent economic measures then advocated by Jacques-René Hébert and his followers. This polemical attack found favor with the Committee of Public Safety and Maximilien Robespierre, who were similarly wary of extremists on the left at that time. But the next two issues of the paper, published in January 1794, denounced the policies of the Terror as an infringement of liberty and called on the revolutionary government to offer clemency.
Desmoulins now came under attack at the Jacobin club and was expelled from the Cordelier club. Robespierre initially protected him, defending the revolutionary reputation of the friend he had first met at the collège Louis le Grand in Paris. Desmoulins took up his own defense in the last two issues of the Vieux Cordelier, published in late January and early February 1794, but continued to call for an end to the Terror. Now associated in the public eye with the Indulgents, he was abandoned in the end by Robespierre and arrested before the seventh issue of the paper could appear. Desmoulins went to the guillotine with Georges-Jacques Danton on 5 April 1794. Fragments of that seventh issue of the Vieux Cordelier were seized at the printers and published posthumously.
VINCENT, FRANÇOIS-NICOLAS (1767–1794). Vincent was born in Paris into a family of prison keepers. He worked for some time as a prosecutor’s clerk before the Revolution, essentially living from hand to mouth. He joined the Cordelier club very early, and was soon among its leading activists. In 1792 Vincent was elected to the general council of the Paris Commune, and not long thereafter obtained a position as a minor clerk in the Ministry of War. When Jean-Baptiste Bouchotte became minister of war, in April 1793, he named Vincent his secretary-general, and from that key position Vincent staffed the ministry with a number of his Cordelier comrades. Vincent never hesitated to speak critically of the Montagnard government, either at his own club or at the Jacobin club, and he used his influence at the Ministry of War to further the radical Cordelier agenda. In the fall of 1793 he proposed that the authority of representatives on mission, who reported to the Committee of Public Safety, be curtailed, on the grounds that they were interfering with agents of the Ministry of War. He now found himself allied with General Charles-Philippe Ronsin and Jacques-René Hébert, whose fate he would eventually share. Vincent was arrested in December 1793, and although he temporarily regained his freedom he would be tried and executed with Hébert and a number of other leading Cordeliers on 24 March 1794.
VIZILLE. The château at Vizille, just outside Grenoble, was the site, on 21 July 1788, of an assembly of the three estates of Dauphiné. The assembly convened to protest the disbanding of the Parlement of Grenoble, ordered by decree in May 1788, and the judicial reforms that accompanied that decree. The representatives who met at Vizille, led by Jean-Joseph Mounier, called for the creation of provincial estates and the convocation of the Estates-General. The Vizille assembly is of particular significance because its delegates accepted a doubling of the representatives of the Third Estate, and the principle of voting by head, both of which would serve as powerful precedents when the Estates-General convened 10 months later at Versailles. The château at Vizille is today home to the National Museum of the French Revolution.
VOLTAIRE, FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET (1694–1778). Voltaire was perhaps the most influential of the French philosophes of the Enlightenment. Although he styled himself a nobleman, he was born in Paris to a middle-class family. Voltaire established his reputation early in life as a playwright, and served for a time as the court historian at Versailles. He twice alienated the crown, however, and spent time in the Bastille on two occasions. Following the second of those imprisonments, in the late 1720s, he spent three years in England. Voltaire is best known for his critique of religious intolerance and the institution of the Catholic Church, but his appreciation of English institutions, including the constitutional monarchy, was also influential. He spent most of the final three decades of his life outside France, at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia from 1750 to 1753, and at his estate at Ferney, near Switzerland, from 1760 to 1778.
Voltaire’s works were widely published in France during the first years of the Revolution, and his plays often performed. In July 1791 the Constituent Assembly ordered his remains returned to France to be interred in the Panthéon, in a majestic procession and ceremony choreographed by Jacques-Louis David. He thus became a sort of patron saint of the Revolution, celebrated in particular in Jacobin clubs across the nation. Voltaire was no democrat, however. Conservatives and moderates also found support for their positions in his writings. The most direct impact of Voltaire’s writings on the Revolution may have come in the deChristianization campaign, due to his harsh critique of the Catholic establishment.
VONCK, JEAN-FRANÇOIS (1743–1792). Born into a prosperous Belgian farming family, Vonck attended a Jesuit collège in Brussels and went on to study law at the University of Louvain. He excelled in his chosen profession and was soon among the leading lawyers in Brussels. An avid reader of Enlightenment philosophy, Vonck joined with another Brussels lawyer, Henri van der Noot, to lead a resistance movement against Austrian rule. Their uprising triumphed with surprising ease, and by November 1789 Austrian forces had withdrawn from Belgium. At that point, however, the movement split, with the more progressive supporters of Vonck calling for political reform, along the lines of what was now being proposed by the Constituent Assembly at Versailles, while the more conservative supporters of van der Noot, soon known as “statists,” advocated a more moderate nationalism. Vonck enjoyed less support among the social elite of Belgium, and in May 1790 van der Noot and his allies forced him to flee to Lille. By the end of the year, Emperor Leopold had rallied Austrian troops, after securing the cooperation of Prussia, and van der Noot, too, was forced to flee the country. Vonck died in 1792, but the “Vonckists” continued to agitate for both national independence and progressive reform and in February 1793 would welcome the French revolutionary armies into their homeland.
VOTING. Voting was the principal means by which French citizens exercised their sovereignty during the Revolution, although the number of citizens eligible to vote and the manner in which they cast their ballots shifted over the decade. In 1789 all adult males 25 years of age and over whose names appeared on the tax rolls were eligible to vote in the election of delegates to the Estates-General for the Third Estate. This was very close to universal manhood suffrage. These were multi-stage, indirect elections for the Third Estate. For the other two estates, the clergy and aristocracy, elections were direct, but there were other restrictions on who might vote, so that not all clergy or nobility participated.
The Constitution of 1791 amended that situation, creating two categories of citizens: active citizens, who were eligible to vote, and passive citizens, who were not. Elections for national deputies, departmental administrations, and district administrations were indirect, with an electoral assembly making the final decisions, whereas municipal elections were direct, and therefore the purest expression of popular sovereignty. To be an elector, one had to own a more substantial amount of property than required to be an active citizen. The manner of voting varied from one part of the country to another, secret ballot in some areas, voice vote in others.
After the uprising of 10 August 1792, the Legislative Assembly abolished the distinction between active and passive citizens and lowered the minimum voting age to 21, creating a system of virtual universal manhood suffrage. Despite that broadening of the suffrage, the voting turnout in the election of deputies to the National Convention was lower than in previous national elections, and that same trend held true for municipal elections later that year. Citizens also were called upon to vote for justices of the peace, for public prosecutors, for criminal juries, and for officers in the National Guard. Voting was also practiced in popular societies and in section assemblies. In all of these venues, the manner and means of voting were hotly debated. In municipal elections in Marseille and Lyon, for example, some citizens objected strongly to the fact that local Jacobin clubs had sponsored organized slates of candidates.
The Constitution of 1793 preserved the principal of universal manhood suffrage and mandated voting by written ballot, but the constitution was never enacted, and there were no elections for public officials until 1795. By that time the National Convention had drafted a new constitution, which restored a property requirement for eligibility to vote, though not the distinction between active and passive citizens. The percentage of the population eligible to vote under the Constitution of 1795 was almost identical to that which had prevailed under the Constitution of 1791. Electoral assemblies were once again introduced at the departmental level, and the secrecy of the ballot was mandated. This system prevailed until Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, at which time a distinction was made between the election of public officials and voting in plebiscites. In regard to the former, the franchise was restricted, elections were indirect, and the opportunity to exercise that franchise infrequent. Plebiscites were also relatively rare, but were conducted under the principle of universal manhood suffrage (although the results were often announced before the votes could be counted).
WARS. Wars had a dramatic impact on the French Revolution in a number of ways. The first years of the Revolution were free of war, but the departure of émigrés, and their congregation in Coblenz and Turin, fed rumors that they were preparing an army to march against the revolutionary regime. These rumors no doubt contributed to incidents of violence in 1790 and 1791, such as those in Nancy and Lyon, as well as the Camp de Jalès, but war did not break out. As the number of émigrés increased, however, and political tensions were heightened by the king’s flight to Varennes, the pressures for war steadily grew. Marie Antoinette urged Louis XVI to declare war in the hope that her Austrian relatives would save the monarchy, and the leading Girondin deputies called for war in early 1792 out of conviction that this would force the king to reveal his true colors. Only a minority of deputies, led by Maximilien Robespierre, argued that war would be folly for the French. With so many parties eager for war for such disparate reasons, the Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792.
As Robespierre had warned, the war did not initially go well for French forces, wracked by divisions between the rank and file and the predominantly aristocratic officer corps. Soon Austrian and Prussian forces advanced onto French territory, and their march toward Paris helped trigger both the uprising of 10 August 1792 and the September Massacres that followed. Bolstered by volunteers, however, the French army scored an impressive victory at Valmy on 20 September 1792, giving the deputies of the National Convention the confidence to declare the first French Republic the next day.
The trial and execution of Louis XVI expanded the war between the monarchies of Europe and the French Republic. France declared war on Great Britain and Holland on 1 February 1793, and on Spain just over one month later. The First Coalition formed under British leadership shortly thereafter, and although divisions within the Coalition interfered with the achievement of their common goal of defeating France, the French would remain at war with some version of a European coalition almost continuously for the next 20 years. Fortune on the battlefield turned initially against the French after British entry into the war, and the treason of General Charles Dumouriez in April 1793 brought a moment of crisis not only at the front but in Paris as well. The association of the Girondin deputies with Dumouriez led to their proscription in the uprising of 31 May–2 June 1793. The young republic now faced not only war abroad, and the federalist revolt in four of the country’s most important cities, but internal war as well, as republican troops were kept from the front by the Vendée rebellion in the west.
The nation rallied, however, in the face of these challenges, and under the leadership of the Committee of Public Safety the republican armies triumphed over their enemies both at home and abroad. Rebellion and war also led to the Terror, however, and while the Jacobin government proved capable of withstanding the armies of Europe, it could not survive the internal political divisions sown by the seemingly relentless carnage wrought by the guillotine. While the Terror came to an end after 9 Thermidor, the war did not. The levée en masse introduced in 1793 soon increased the size of the army to over 800,000 troops, and the nation in arms proved to be a powerful force. The enthusiasm of the citizen army, joined to effective leadership, proved more than a match for the professional troops of Europe’s monarchies, and the war that ebbed and flowed through the 1790s was largely fought away from French soil. There were setbacks for French forces, to be sure, most notably in the Egyptian campaign, but the man who led that fiasco, Napoleon Bonaparte, recognized the enormous power of the people in arms. Through victory at war over the next 15 years, Napoleon would spread the ideals and institutions of the Revolution across most of the European continent.
WHITE TERROR. There were two waves of violent reprisals against Jacobins and ex-terrorists, the first in the spring of 1795 and the second following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815, and together they are commonly referred to as the White Terror. The first wave consisted of a period of about three months and was concentrated in the Rhône valley and the southeast of France. Lyon and Marseille, where the Terror had been harsh, were particularly hard hit. In both cities angry crowds invaded the prisons, and there were mass killings of those who had been arrested after Thermidor. The return to France of émigrés after Thermidor, and the release of prisoners who had been arrested during the Terror, contributed to that first phase of the White Terror.
Vengeance tended to motivate the killings, however, rather than a conscious counterrevolutionary impulse. The fact that the violence was greatest in the southeast, where blood feuds were a tradition, is evidence of this. One might also note a continuity between the violence of the Wars of Religion and that of the White Terror in the department of the Gard, where the bagarre de Nîmes occurred early in the Revolution. There the White Terror was an opportunity for Catholics to take revenge against Protestants. It should also be noted that the first wave of the White Terror came during a period of economic hardship, following a particularly harsh winter and the abolition of the general maximum. The killings were more often isolated events, as opposed to the mass violence in Lyon and Marseille.
In some areas it appeared that local authorities were complicit in the violence of the White Terror. Only rarely, at any rate, were the perpetrators of the violence brought to justice. The second wave of killings, after the final defeat of Napoleon, was less extensive. All told, the White Terror claimed more than 2,000 victims.
WIMPFFEN, LOUIS-FÉLIX (1744–1814). Wimpffen was the son of Jean-George de Wimpffen, chamberlain to King Stanislas of Poland. Louis-Félix pursued a military career in France, participated in the Corsican campaign in 1760, was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, and decorated as a Chevalier of Saint-Louis. He fought in the American War of Independence, at the sieges of Mahon and Gibraltar, and retired to his estate in Normandy in 1788 with the rank of field marshal. In 1789 he was elected to the Estates-General as a delegate of the Second Estate of Caen. He sat among the liberal aristocracy in the Constituent Assembly and favored a constitutional monarchy. With the outbreak of war in April 1792, Wimpffen returned to active military duty and commanded at Thionville, defending the fortress successfully against the Prussians. Despite that victory, he was denounced by local patriots for alleged contacts with émigrés, and was eventually reassigned to command the Army of the Coast of Cherbourg.
In June 1793 General Wimpffen was invited by the federalist rebels in Caen to take command of the volunteer force that they proposed to march against Paris. Wimpffen accepted the post and sent a menacing letter to the Montagnard National Convention, promising to enter the capital city at the head of 60,000 brave Normans, unless the proscribed Girondin deputies were restored to their seats. Wimpffen’s command of his troops was halfhearted, however, and they were routed on 13 July 1793 at Pacy-sur-Eure, near Evreux. The revolt quickly collapsed, and Wimpffen urged the fugitive Girondin deputies to approach England for support or refuge. They refused his advice, and Wimpffen went into hiding near his estate until after the Terror. He regained his military commission under the Directory, without active duty, and was later named a Baron of the Empire.
WOMEN. The French Revolution is seen by some as championing the rights of women, given the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen written by Olympe de Gouges, while it is seen by others as denying women access to the public sphere, given the overtly misogynistic attitudes expressed by a number of prominent Jacobins and the fact that no constitution of the revolutionary decade granted full citizenship or the right to vote to women. One might say, perhaps, that while the Revolution placed women’s rights on the political agenda, it did relatively little to further their cause.
Women were certainly active participants in the political upheaval of the Revolution. Collectively, women participated in all of the journées of the Revolution and played the decisive role in the march to Versailles during the October Days. Women formed political clubs in 1790–91, most notably the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in Paris, although these were forcibly closed by the Jacobins in 1793. Prior to that time, women were known to attend the meetings of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, and were often active in section assemblies as well. Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe played active roles in the sans-culotte and enragé movements in Paris, as did Théroigne de Méricourt, who is better known, perhaps, for her desire to lead a battalion of women into battle against the enemies of revolutionary France. Etta Palm d’Aelders made an effort to export the ideals of 1789 beyond French borders, while Germaine de Staël came from abroad to support the revolutionary cause. Women were not spared by the guillotine: notable among its victims were Charlotte Corday, Manon Roland, and Marie Antoinette.
Women did make tangible legal gains during the Revolution. Divorce was legalized in 1792, and legislation passed in 1793 and 1794 made it possible for women to inherit property. Those gains were lost, however, under the Civil Code of Napoleon Bonaparte, who on this issue shared the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that wives should be subservient to their husbands. Not until after World War II would French women be granted the political and legal rights that most European women obtained in the years following World War I.
YOUNG, ARTHUR (1741–1820). The celebrated traveler and writer was born in London, but his father was a gentry farmer in Suffolk. Arthur was an uninspired student as a youth, apprenticed in a commercial establishment, and dabbled a bit in theater. In his mid-twenties, however, he developed an interest in economics and agricultural reform, and in 1767 published his first major work, The Farmer’s Letters to the People of England. One year later he published an account of his travels in southern England.
Young spent the next decade traveling throughout Great Britain and became well-known for his travelogues. In 1785 the French economist Claude-François Lazowski suggested to Young that he travel to France, and he followed that advice, making three separate trips in 1787, 1788, and 1789. Young’s Travels in France, published in 1792, remain the best account we have of French agriculture and conditions in the countryside on the eve of the Revolution. He was a strong advocate of agricultural innovation and free trade in grain, and found the French to be lagging behind their English counterparts on both counts. Young was at Versailles in June 1789, and recounts the Tennis Court Oath and the royal session of 23 June. He left for eastern France shortly thereafter, and his final observations describe episodes of the Great Fear in those provinces. His work was translated into French in 1793, and the National Convention had 20,000 copies printed. The agents/observers sent into the provinces by Minister of the Interior Dominique-Joseph Garat in the summer of 1793 each carried a copy of Young’s book.
Young was initially quite supportive of the Revolution, and became a corresponding member of the Jacobin club. He grew disenchanted after the fall of the monarchy, however, and in 1793 published The Example of France a Warning to Britain, which went through several editions in England and was also translated into French.
YSABEAU, CLAUDE-ALEXANDRE (1754–1831). Little is known of Ysabeau’s youth or family, but he took orders as an Oratorien and served as a préfet des études in the 1780s, first at the military school of Vendôme and then at the collège of Tours. He was elected to the municipal council of Tours in 1790, swore the civil oath of the clergy, and was named a constitutional curé in Tours. In 1792 Ysabeau was elected to the National Convention from the Indre-et-Loire. He sat with the Montagnards, and voted for death in the trial of Louis XVI and against the appel au peuple.
In March 1793 Ysabeau went as a representative on mission to the departments of the Pyrenees with responsibility for recruitment and reorganization of the army. After the outbreak of the federalist revolt, he went on mission with Jean-Lambert Tallien to Bordeaux, one of the federalist centers. The two were chased out of town by young ruffians and took up residence in the nearby town of La Réole, returning to Bordeaux only in October, at the head of a republican army. In the months that followed, they established a Military Commission to judge the accused rebels, over 300 of whom were sentenced to death.
Following Thermidor, Ysabeau served on the Committee of General Security, and returned on mission to Bordeaux, where he now adopted a more moderate political stance. He was elected to the Council of Ancients under the Directory, and oversaw the creation of the Ecole Polytechnique. He went on to serve in the postal service in Rouen, a position that he retained under the Empire. In 1816 Ysabeau was exiled as a regicide and lived in Liège until 1830, returning to Paris just before his death.