found the club of the Feuillants scoffed at by their former
friends as the club monarchique. The main cause of this
change was the admission of the public to the sittings of the
club, which began on the 14th of October 1791. The result is
described in a report of the Department of Paris on “the state
of the empire,” presented on the 12th of June 1792, at the request
of Roland, the minister of the interior, and signed by the duc
de La Rochefoucauld, which ascribes to the Jacobins all the
woes of the state. “There exists,” it runs, “in the midst of the
capital committed to our care a public pulpit of defamation,
where citizens of every age and both sexes are admitted day by
day to listen to a criminal propaganda.... This establishment,
situated in the former house of the Jacobins, calls itself a society;
but it has less the aspect of a private society than that of a public
spectacle: vast tribunes are thrown open for the audience;
all the sittings are advertised to the public for fixed days and
hours, and the speeches made are printed in a special journal and
lavishly distributed.”[1] In this society—the report continues—murder
is counselled or applauded, all authorities are calumniated
and all the organs of the law bespattered with abuse; as to its
power, it exercises “by its influence, its affiliations and its
correspondence a veritable ministerial authority, without title
and without responsibility, while leaving to the legal and
responsible authorities only the shadow of power” (Schmidt,
Tableaux i. 78, &c.).
The constituency to which the club was henceforth responsible, and from which it derived its power, was in fact the peuple bête of Paris; the sans-culottes—decayed lackeys, cosmopolitan ne’er-do-wells, and starving workpeople—who crowded its tribunes. To this audience, and not primarily to the members of the club, the speeches of the orators were addressed and by its verdict they were judged. In the earlier stages of the Revolution the mob had been satisfied with the fine platitudes of the philosophes and the vague promise of a political millennium; but as the chaos in the body politic grew, and with it the appalling material misery, it began to clamour for the blood of the “traitors” in office by whose corrupt machinations the millennium was delayed, and only those orators were listened to who pandered to its suspicions. Hence the elimination of the moderate elements from the club; hence the ascendancy of Marat, and finally of Robespierre, the secret of whose power was that they really shared the suspicions of the populace, to which they gave a voice and which they did not shrink from translating into action. After the fall of the monarchy Robespierre was in effect the Jacobin Club; for to the tribunes he was the oracle of political wisdom, and by his standard all others were judged.[2] With his fall the Jacobins too came to an end.
Not the least singular thing about the Jacobins is the very slender material basis on which their overwhelming power rested. France groaned under their tyranny, which was compared to that of the Inquisition, with its system of espionage and denunciations which no one was too illustrious or too humble to escape. Yet it was reckoned by competent observers that, at the height of the Terror, the Jacobins could not command a force of more than 3000 men in Paris. But the secret of their strength was that, in the midst of the general disorganization, they alone were organized. The police agent Dutard, in a report to the minister Garat (April 30, 1793), describing an episode in the Palais Égalité (Royal), adds: “Why did a dozen Jacobins strike terror into two or three hundred aristocrats? It is that the former have a rallying-point and that the latter have none.” When the jeunesse dorée did at last organize themselves, they had little difficulty in flogging the Jacobins out of the cafés into comparative silence. Long before this the Girondin government had been urged to meet organization by organization, force by force; and it is clear from the daily reports of the police agents that even a moderate display of energy would have saved the National Convention from the humiliation of being dominated by a club, and the French Revolution from the blot of the Terror. But though the Girondins were fully conscious of the evil, they were too timid, or too convinced of the ultimate triumph of their own persuasive eloquence, to act. In the session of the 30th of April 1793 a proposal was made to move the Convention to Versailles out of reach of the Jacobins, and Buzot declared that it was “impossible to remain in Paris” so long as “this abominable haunt” should exist; but the motion was not carried, and the Girondins remained to become the victims of the Jacobins.
Meanwhile other political clubs could only survive so long as they were content to be the shadows of the powerful organization of the Rue St Honoré. The Feuillants had been suppressed on the 18th of August 1792. The turn of the Cordeliers came so soon as its leaders showed signs of revolting against Jacobin supremacy, and no more startling proof of this ascendancy could be found than the ease with which Hébert and his fellows were condemned and the readiness with which the Cordeliers, after a feeble attempt at protest, acquiesced in the verdict. It is idle to speculate on what might have happened had this ascendancy been overthrown by the action of a strong government. No strong government existed, nor, in the actual conditions of the country, could exist on the lines laid down by the constitution. France was menaced by civil war within, and by a coalition of hostile powers without; the discipline of the Terror was perhaps necessary if she was to be welded into a united force capable of resisting this double peril; and the revolutionary leaders saw in the Jacobin organization the only instrument by which this discipline could be made effective. This is the apology usually put forward for the Jacobins by republican writers of later times; they were, it is said (and of some of them it is certainly true), no mere doctrinaires and visionary sectaries, but practical and far-seeing politicians, who realized that “desperate ills need desperate remedies,” and, by having the courage of their convictions, saved the gains of the Revolution for France.
The Jacobin Club was closed after the fall of Robespierre on the 9th of Thermidor of the year III., and some of its members were executed. An attempt was made to re-open the club, which was joined by many of the enemies of the Thermidorians, but on the 21st of Brumaire, year III. (Nov. 11, 1794), it was definitively closed. Its members and their sympathizers were scattered among the cafés, where a ruthless war of sticks and chairs was waged against them by the young “aristocrats” known as the jeunesse dorée. Nevertheless the “Jacobins” survived, in a somewhat subterranean fashion, emerging again in the club of the Panthéon, founded on the 25th of November 1795, and suppressed in the following February (see Babeuf, François Noel). The last attempt to reorganize them was the foundation of the Réunion d’amis de l’égalité et de la liberté, in July 1799, which had its headquarters in the Salle du Manège of the Tuileries, and was thus known as the Club du Manège. It was patronized by Barras, and some two hundred and fifty members of the two councils of the legislature were enrolled as members, including many notable ex-Jacobins. It published a newspaper called the Journal des Libres, proclaimed the apotheosis of Robespierre and Babeuf, and attacked the Directory as a royauté pentarchique. But public opinion was now preponderatingly moderate or royalist, and the club was violently attacked in the press and in the streets, the suspicions of the government were aroused; it had to change its meeting-place from the Tuileries to the church of the Jacobins (Temple of Peace) in the Rue du Bac, and in August it was suppressed, after barely a month’s existence. Its members revenged themselves on the Directory by supporting Napoleon Bonaparte.
Long before the suppression of the Jacobin Club the name of “Jacobins” had been popularly applied to all promulgators of extreme revolutionary opinions. In this sense the word passed beyond the borders of France and long survived the Revolution. Canning’s paper, The Anti-Jacobin, directed against the English Radicals, consecrated its use in England; and in the
- ↑ i.e. Journal des débats et de la correspondance de la Société, &c. For the various newspapers published under the auspices of the Jacobins see Aulard i. p. cx., &c.
- ↑ In the published reports only the speeches of members are given, not the interruptions from the tribunes. But see the report (May 18, 1793) of Dutard to Garat on a meeting of the Jacobins (Schmidt, Tableaux ii. 242).
