THIS book depends entirely on works in print, if only because when it was written, in 1939 and 1940, access to the French archives was difficult or impossible for foreign scholars. Fortunately these printed materials are abundant for the French Revolution and can be found in large research libraries outside of France. They can be grouped in three categories: (1) imprints dating from the Revolution itself, such as the periodical press, books, pamphlets, and printed versions of speeches in the National Convention; (2) compilations published in later years of papers in the Archives Nationales or other depositories; and (3) monographs, biographies, and specialized articles incorporating the researches of scholars through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and often containing materials from the 1790s.
What follows is a review of these categories so far as they pertain to the Committee of Public Safety of the Year II, or roughly the year from July 1793 to July 1794. Included are many items not available when this book was written. For more detail on materials in print before 1940 see my “Bibliographical Article: Fifty Years of the Committee of Public Safety,” in Journal of Modern History 13 (1941), pp. 375-397.
First, however, for a more general view of the Revolution the reader may be referred to recent surveys written in English by D.M.G. Sutherland, Oxford 1986; John M. Roberts, Oxford 1978; N. Hampson, London 1975; and to translations into English from the French of Albert Soboul, London 1974, and of François Furet and Daniel Richet, London and New York 1970. Of works devoted specifically to the Committee of Public Safety there has been only a brief sketch in the French pocket series, “Que sais-je?”, by Marc Bouloiseau, Le comité de salut public, 1793-1795, Paris 1968. But see also Bouloiseau’s book of 1972, translated as The Jacobin Republic, 1792-1794, Cambridge and New York 1983. Note, too, M. J. Sydenham, The First French Republic, London 1974.
Items in the first of the three categories as defined above are too numerous to be listed. The Revolution saw a great outburst of political journalism. Various such journals, such as Hébert’s Père Duchesne, as well as books and pamphlets of the time, are mentioned by name in the foregoing pages. The most frequently used journal is the Moniteur universel, a daily newspaper that reported debates in the National Convention and at the Paris Jacobin Club. In its original edition it was of large folio size, but it was later reprinted in a reduced and convenient format, Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, 31 vols., Paris 1847-1850, with an excellent index of names, places and subjects in Volume 31. For the present book much use has also been made of E. B. Courtois’s report to the Convention in 1795, the Papiers trouvés chez Robespierre et ses complices, Paris an III, reissued and enlarged in three volumes, Paris 1828.
The illustrations in this book are wood engravings made by an unidentified nineteenth-century artist using eighteenth-century portraits as his models, and were published by A. Challamel and D. Lacroix, La Révolution française: Album du centenaire, Paris 1889. They were chosen because they give a uniform presentation of members of the Committee of Public Safety. The verse translations on page 317 were made by A. J. Bingham and are reprinted here with his permission. Those on page 325 are by the present author.
The second category consists of multi-volumed compilations, some of which were initiated a century ago, were then suspended in the 1930s and 1940s, and have recently been completed or nearly completed. Chief among these is the Archives parlementaires, which reprints the proceedings of the Convention along with other materials such as petitions and reports received by it. See Archives parlementaires, 1st series, 95 vols., Paris 1862 to date. Volume 95, the most recent (1987), reaches only to August 1794. Each volume has its own index, and there are cumulative indexes in Volumes 71 and 82.
The most indispensable work for the present book, edited by Alphonse Aulard and his successors, is Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public avec la correspondance des représentants en mission, 28 vols., Paris 1889-1951. There are also three index volumes. For the controversy concerning Aulard’s methods in editing this work see my article in the Journal of Modern History, cited above. Aulard also edited the speeches and proceedings of the Paris Jacobin Club, La Société des Jacobins: Recueil de documents, 6 vols., Paris 1889-1897, with an index in Volume 6. These six volumes have been reprinted by AMS Press, New York 1973. Two of the many publications by Pierre Caron are of great importance: Paris pendant la Terreur: rapports des agents secrets du ministre de l’intérieur, 6 vols., plus a seventh volume of index, Paris 1910-1978; and La Commission des Subsistances de l’an II: procès-verbaux et actes, 2 vols., Paris 1924-1925. On matters of education and the arts much can be learned from James Guillaume, Procès-verbaux du Comité de l’Instruction publique de la Convention Nationale, 6 vols., plus 2 volumes of index, Paris 1891-1957. On the mobilization and the war, see E. Charavay, Correspondence générale de Carnot, avec des notes historiques et biographiques, Paris 1892-1907.
In the third category we turn first to biographical studies of the twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety in the Year II. On Robespierre there has been much writing in French, and hardly less so in English. To the older standard work of J. M. Thompson, Robespierre, 2 vols., London 1935 (reprinted 1968) may be added Norman Hampson, Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre, London 1974; George Rudé, Portrait of Robespierre, Revolutionary Democrat, London 1975; and David P. Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, New York 1985. Robespierre’s own “works,” mainly his journalism and speeches, have been many times reprinted; the most complete and critical edition, under the auspices of the Société des études robespierristes, is the Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols., Paris 1938 to date. Saint-Just has also attracted much attention in France, as in J. P. Gross, Saint-Just, sa politique et ses missions, Paris 1976; but there is less recent work in English, for which E. N. Curtis, Saint-Just, Colleague of Robespierre, New York 1935, can still be cited. There is a new one-volume edition of his letters, speeches, poems and political writings: Saint-Just Oeuvres complètes, Paris 1984.
For Carnot there is a great biography by Marcel Reinhard, Lazare Carnot, 2 vols., Paris 1952. See also Leo Gershoy, Bertrand Barère, Reluctant Terrorist, Princeton 1962, and G. Bouchard, Un organisateur de la victoire, Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, membre du Comité de salut public, Paris 1946. For all the others we must depend on work done before the First World War: F. Mège, ed., Correspondance de Georges Couthon, Paris 1872, and Le Puy-de-Dome en 1793 et le proconsulat de Cuthon, Paris 1877; A. Bégis, ed., Mémoires de Billaud-Varenne, Paris 1893, which contains information on Collot d’Herbois; A. Montier, Robert Lindet, Paris 1899; L. Lévy-Schneider, Le conventionnel Jeanbon Saint-André, Paris 1901 (a remarkable work); P. Bliard, Le conventionnel Prieur de la Marne en mission dans l’Ouest, Paris 1906; and E. Dard, Hérault de Séchelles, Paris 1907.
Regionally, in addition to Paris, the present book gives attention to Couthon’s mission to the Puy-de-Dome and Lyon, Saint-André’s to Brittany and the Vendée, and Saint-Just’s to Alsace. Relevant, therefore, are Colin Lucas, The Structure of the Terror: The Example of Javogues and the Loire, Paris 1973, for an area adjoining the Puy-de-Dome and Lyon; E. Herriot, Lyon n’est plus, 4 vols., Paris 1937-1940, detailing the Terror at Lyon in Volume 4; N. Hampson, La marine de l’an II: mobilisation de la flotte de l’Océan, Paris 1959, which in dealing with the navy reinforces the biography of Saint-André cited above; and R. Reuss, La grande fuite de décembre 1793 et la situation politique et religieuse de Bas-Rhin, Strasbourg 1924. For the impact in many parts of France of visitations by the Paris militants there is a vast work of Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies: The Armées Revolutionnaires, Instrument of the Terror in the Departments, April 1793 to Floréal of the Year II, New Haven 1987, a monumental thesis by a British historian originally written in French for the doctorat ès lettres. For the insurrections in western France see D.M.G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770-1796, Oxford 1982. Mention should also be made of the recent book by R. Sécher, Le génocide franco-français: la Vendée-Vengée, Paris 1986, which takes a maximalist view of the deaths and devastation caused by the Revolution, and is critically reviewed in the Annales historiques de la Révolution française, No. 268 (1987). pp. 224-226.
For Paris attention has fallen mainly on the sans-culottes, the organized activists from both the popular and middle classes. Here the great work is Albert Soboul, Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II: mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793-9 thermidor an II, Paris 1958, of which there have been two abridged English translations. For even more local and realistic detail see Morris Slavin, The French Revolution in Miniature; section Droits-de-l’homme, 1789-1795, Princeton 1984; and Haim Burstin, Le faubourg Saint-Marcel à l’époque révolutionnaire, Paris 1983. The work of Richard Cobb on the armées revolutionnaires, cited above, is also relevant here. Note, too, R. B. Rose, The Enragés, Socialists of the French Revolution?, New York 1965.
On the armies, including their training, tactics, mobilization and supply, see above all Jean-Paul Bertaud, whose book of 1979 appeared in a translation by the present writer under the title of The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen Soldiers to Instrument of Power, Princeton 1989. Two of the field armies have been intensively studied: the Army of the North by John A. Lynn, The Bayonets of the Republic: Motivation and Tactics in the Army of Revolutionary France, 1797-1794, Urbana and Chicago, 1984; and Peter Wetzlar, War and Subsistence: The Sambre and Meuse Army in 1794, New York 1985. Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution: The Role and Development of the Line Army, Oxford 1978, unfortunately for the present purpose runs only to the spring of 1793. On the navy see Hampson, La marine de l’an II, cited above. On production of munitions the old work of Camille Richard, Le comité de salut public et les fabrications de guerre, Paris 1922, is still important. On general strategy see Steven Ross, Quest for Victory: French Military Strategy, South Brunswick, N.J., 1973.
Many other special studies relate to themes in the present book, for example, Mona Ozouf’s work on the civic celebrations, translated as Festivals and the French Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., 1988; Serge Bianchi, La révolution culturelle de l’an II: élites et peuple, 1789-1799, Paris 1982; and Michel Vovelle, Religion et révolution: la déchristianisation de l’an II, Paris 1976. In America there are Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution, New Haven 1989, and Michael Kennedy, who has published two volumes on the Jacobin clubs in the French Revolution, Princeton 1982 and 1988, dealing with hundreds of clubs throughout France, is at work on a third volume to include the period treated in the present book. See also Crane Brinton, The Jacobins: An Essay in the New History, New York 1930, stressing the middle-class character of that famous society; and Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror, Cambridge, Mass., 1935, a statistical study of executions by revolutionary courts, showing the class status of the victims, the grounds of accusation, and the variations in severity in time and place.
It may be useful also to call attention to Samuel F. Scott, ed., Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, 2 vols., Westport, Conn., 1984-1985; and R. J. Caldwell, The Era of the French Revolution: A Bibliography of the History of Western Civilization, 1789-7799, 2 vols., New York 1985, which lists about 42,000 items by subject categories plus an alphabetical index.
At the higher level of general interpretation the old controversies between Aulard and Taine, or Aulard and Mathiez, or more recently between Marxists and anti-Marxists, have somewhat abated. The present author continues to believe that George Lefebvre, who died in 1959, and was mildly Marxist, is unsurpassed for wide and sympathetic insight into all aspects of the French Revolution. See his Révolution française, Paris 1951, translated into two volumes, New York 1962 and 1964. Indeed, it was an earlier version of this book (Paris 1930) that suggested to me the idea of writing on the twelve men who made up the “great” Committee of Public Safety. For a more recent dispute see François Furet, Penser la Révolution française, Paris 1978, translated as Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge, England, 1981, and Albert Soboul, Comprendre la Révolution: Problèmes politiques de la Révolution française, 1789-1797, Paris 1981, translated as Understanding the French Revolution, New York 1988. While I have often agreed with both Furet and Soboul, I have my doubts on the kind of historical necessity that they see in the Revolution, which for Soboul is a Marxist type of dialectic or class conflict involving a transition from feudalism to capitalism, and for Furet is the persistence of a frame of mind or psychology first expressed by Rousseau, involving concepts of virtue, the general will, the people, and the nation. Furet prefers to understand the Revolution in terms of consequences or of long trends both preceding and following the event, and so to subordinate the conscious intentions and language of the Revolutionaries to underlying or structural considerations. I would think that man is a goal-seeking animal, whose stated purposes and intentions are worthy of a humanistic attention, and also of a searching judgment. Hence comes the abundance of direct quotations in this book, showing what the Revolutionaries actually said (or are said to have said), all of which, for whatever it may be worth, are taken verbatim from sources such as are listed above.