13 Vendemiaire was a French Royalist uprising in Paris that occurred on 5 October 1795 amid the French Revolution. Soldiers loyal to the French Republic crushed the Royalist riot through military force, including the use of grapeshot, and the suppression of the revolt advanced Republican general Napoleon Bonaparte's career.
Background[]
The attempted insurrections of 12 Germinal and 1 Prairial ended the sans-culottes as an independent political force, while, out in the departments, the White Terror was suppressing all the old Jacobin municipal leaders. By the summer of 1795, the political left had hit rock bottom. As a result, the long-nascent political right began to believe that their time had finally come. Monarchists sought to fill the power vacuum caused by the suppression of the left, but the Thermidorians were uninterested in allowing the Royalists to step out of the shadows. In June-July 1795, a British-backed Royalist emigrant invasion of France, the Quiberon expedition, met with disaster on the beachhead, and 750 Royalist prisoners (including 430 nobles) were executed.
Though the renewed fighting in the west was contained, it put the National Convention on notice. The continuation of the White Terror, together with the growing confidence of the right-wing press, caused the Thermidorians to refocus their political repression on the right. The Thermidorian Constitution of the Year III intended to remind the French people of their duty to obey the law and serve their country in times of need, as well as to get the revolution back on the right path. The constitution's "Law of Two-Thirds," which entrenched the power of the sitting Thermidorians, angered the beaten-down leftists in Paris' eastern sections and the rising conservatives in the western sections.
The conservatives were the most inflamed by the Law of Two-Thirds. Since the Thermidorian Reaction, their presses had flourished, their Muscadin youths had been encouraged to roam freely, and the White Terror was proceeding in the departments virtually unchecked. For the right-wing (including the closeted monarchists), the next step appeared to be sweeping the legislature at the next election, but the Law of Two-Thirds prevented that from happening. In order to check the rising power of the Royalists, the Thermidorians released several imprisoned leftists and encouraged them to prepare for a fight against the Royalists. They also transferred regular army units into Paris, causing people to fear that the Convention would impose the constitution by force. On 23 September 1795, the Convention announced that the constitution and the Law of Two-Thirds had been overwhelmingly ratified, and it threw out the results from several Parisian sections to make it appear as if the Law of Two-Thirds was even more popular.
Uprising[]
The angry meetings, organizing, and collecting of arms in the Royalist western sections began on 4 October after news arrived of the suppression of a Royalist uprising in Dreux. Seven western sections declared themselves in insurrection in sympathy with the Royalist uprising in Dreux and in response to the Comte d'Artois' landing at the Ile d'Yeu. Paul Barras took command of the 6,000 regular army soldiers preparing to crush the insurrection. On the night of 4 October, a detachment of the regular army moved to the center of the insurrectionary sections and secured promises from the local leaders that they would stand down and disarm. However, the Royalists betrayed that promise, and, on the morning of 5 October, 25,000 Parisians grabbed their weapons and started gathering for a march on the Convention. The insurrectionaries massed south of the Seine, but their adversary Napoleon Bonaparte defended strategic bridge crossings with artillery garrisons. When the mob surged north to cross the Seine, they hit several cannon-lined chokepoints. A standoff lasted until 4:30 PM, when Bonaparte ordered the artillery to fire. A six-hour battle ensued, and the insurgents never made it across the river. The effect of the grapeshot and the volleys from the Republican forces caused the Royalist attack to waver, and Joachim Murat's squadron of chasseurs a cheval counterattacked. The insurgents eventually ran out of ammunition and were forced to retreat; at the close of the battle, 300 Royalists lay dead. Bonaparte was given command of the Armee d'Italie as a reward for his suppression of the uprising, and 13 Vendemiaire was the last major popular insurrection in Paris during the revolutionary era. The eastern sections had already been disarmed and their political institutions crushed, and the Convention did the same to all the Paris sections before the French Directory was established.
Gallery[]
