The French Revolution was a period of social and political upheaval in France that lasted from the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 to the Coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. The revolution saw the Third Estate - the middle and lower classes - overthrow the Kingdom of France in 1789 and replace it with a constitutional monarchy, later storming the Tuileries Palace in 1792 and creating a republic when King Louis XVI of France attempted to flee to Flanders. King Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette were beheaded by guillotine in 1793, as were several other monarchists or "counter-revolutionaries" during the "Reign of Terror", executed by Maximilien de Robespierre. In 1794, after thousands of random people had been executed by the insane Robespierre and the radical "Jacobin Club", the people rose up in the "Thermidorian Reaction" and had Robespierre and his Jacobins executed, ending the Reign of Terror. From 1794 to 1799, France would be ruled by a directorate and a consulate, not by a single person.
France's new republic would be invaded by the Austrian Empire and Prussia in 1792, with the European monarchies fearing that revolutions would occur in their own countries. However, the French succeeded in defeating the Austrians and taking over the Austrian Netherlands in 1793, and French nationalists declared war on Great Britain, Spain, and the United Provinces that same year. The French Revolutionary Wars would last until 1801, and they would see France conquer almost all of Europe west of the Rhine River, create the new "Batavian Republic" vassal state in the Netherlands, and conquer northern Italy from Austria. The French general Napoleon Bonaparte made a name for himself, and he became so popular that he was able to seize power in Paris in the "Coup of 18 Brumaire" in November of 1799. It would not be long before he proclaimed himself "Emperor", and the revolutionary democracy in France would come to an end.
The French Revolution, which had itself been inspired by the American Revolutionary War six years earlier, was one of the most important periods in history. It led to the rise of democracy as a major political ideology, led to women gaining more rights, led to the abolition of the slave trade (France outlawed slavery itself in 1791), and opened a chapter in European history that would come to be known as the "Napoleonic Wars", which themselves led to the decolonization of the Americas, the spread of French culture, and the rise of the Napoleonic military doctrine (regiments were now organized into divisions, corps, and armies) across the world.
1781 - After the end of the American Revolutionary War, France is left bankrupt, having loaned much of its treasury to the Americans and having exhausted its war chest on a losing war in the East Indies.
8 August 1788 - The royal treasury is declared to be empty, and the Estates-General is called into session on 5 May 1789 to agree on new taxes. The Third Estate (lower and middle classes) of France suffer from famine and high taxes, as well as continuing to abide by the feudal system.
25 August 1788 - Jacques Necker becomes Minister of Finance, leading to the Third Estate celebrating. He decides to double the representation of the Third Estate in the Estates-General, to the chagrin of the nobles (Second Estate) and clergy (First Estate).
January 1789 - Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes publishes What is the Third Estate?, saying that the Third Estate is "everything" in terms of society, "nothing" in terms of representation, and that it seeks to be "something".
5 May 1789 - The Estates-General convenes in Versailles, and the First and Second estates are forced to renounce their special tax privileges, while they refuse to meet with the Third Estate's representatives, who are late due to electoral issues.
10 June 1789 - Sieyes suggests that the Third Estate deputies should hold their own meeting, and nine clergy deputies join the Third Estate.
17 June 1789 - The Third Estate deputies declare themselves the "National Assembly", protesting against the lack of representation for the Third Estate as compared to the First and Second Estates.
20 June 1789 - King Louis XVI locks the Third Estate out of their meeting hall to prevent them from holding an assembly, so they gather in a jeu de palme court and swear by the "Tennis Court Oath" that they will not disband until France has a new constitution.
22-25 June 1789 - 50 sympathetic nobles and several clergymen, including Louis Philippe II of Orleans, decide to join the National Assembly due to their liberal views.
27 June 1789 - King Louis decides to allow for the National Assembly to convene, instructing the nobility and the clergy to meet with the Third Estate and to recognize the new assembly. He also orders his Swiss and German mercenaries to return to Paris.
6 July 1789 - The National Assembly forms a thirty-man committee to write a new constitution.
11 July 1789 - King Louis dismisses Jacques Necker as Finance Minister, and protesters and the Gardes Francaises engage in skirmishes with some of the King's German cavalrymen near the Tuileries Palace as the Lazariste monastery is looted and customs barriers are burned.
13 July 1789 - The National Assembly declares that it is in permanent session, forming a governing committee and an armed militia at the Hotel de Ville. Tensions rise as the revolution is about to begin.
14 July 1789 - A large armed crowd initiates the Storming of the Bastille, seeking to gain access to the large gunpowder stores within the fortress. The crowd kills garrison commander Bernard-Rene de Launay after a fight that leaves 98 Parisian mobo members dead, and Launay's head, along with those of six executed guards, are impaled on pikes and paraded through the streets in a gruesome celebration.
16 July 1789 - Jacques Necker is reappointed as Finance Minister by King Louis, and the newly-elected Paris assembly votes to destroy the Bastille. Several other large cities such as Lyon and Rennes also form committees and local militias.
17 July 1789 - King Louis visits Paris and is welcomed at the Hotel de Ville by Bailly and Lafayette as many nobles begin to flee the country.
18 July 1789 - Radical author Camille Desmoulins calls for another revolution to establish a republic instead of a monarchy.
22 July 1789 - An armed mob abducts and lynches Parisian intendant (royal representative) Louis Benigne Francois Bertier de Sauvigny from a lamp post after accusing him of stealing grain; they also behead his father-in-law Joseph Foullon de Doue for stealing money from the poor.
4 August 1789 - The King appoints reformist deputies to the National Assembly, and they vote to abolish the privileges and feudal rights of the nobility.
23 August 1789 - Freedom of religion is legalized.
30 August 1789 - Camille Desmoulins leads a failed uprising at the Palais-Royal with the goal of stopping the National Assembly from granting the king veto powers.
11 September 1789 - The King is granted veto rights.
16 September 1789 - Radical writer Jean-Paul Marat publishes the first edition of L'Ami du Peuple, his radical newspaper that promises social and political revolution.
1 October 1789 - Marat spreads fake news that the King's guards trampled on the French revolutionary tricolor flag at a banquet in Versailles, leading to outrage.
5-6 October 1789 - Thousands of poor women (many of them armed with fish knives) and Paris National Guard troops under Lafayette take part in the Women's March on Versailles to protest the insult to the tricolor flag. The King and his family are forced to return to Paris.
10 October 1789 - Lafayette becomes commander of all royal troops in Paris, and Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposes the guillotine method of public execution.
19 October 1789 - The National Assembly holds its first meeting in Paris, and it declares martial law two days later.
24 December 1789 - Protestants are allowed to hold public office.
22 January 1790 - Marat escapes arrest by Paris municipal police after encouraging attacks against the government through his paper, with several sans-culottes (revolutionary laborers) guarding him as he flees to London.
13 February 1790 - Religious vows and contemplative religious orders are outlawed.
23 February 1790 - Parish priests are made to read the decrees of the National Assembly.
26 February 1790 - France's historic provinces are broken up into 83 departments, each with their own tax collection, civil and criminal jurisdictions, and even Catholic dioceses; elected assemblies would be elected at every level to ensure that every active citizen had a say in lawmaking and the capability to carry out the law uniformly and equally. This destroys the rights and privileges of specific provinces, undermining the prestige of the thirteen Parlement seats and elevating rural backwaters into local political, economic, and cultural hubs, equalizing the importance of each city to their local regions. Judges, mayors, assemblymen, and even priests will be elected, overwhelming local voters with the responsibility of civic participation, and leading to mass voter abstention and, ultimately, blanket non-participation later in the Revolution. Both existing nobles and new candidates will run for, and be elected to, local offices.
28 February 1790 - Army officers are no longer required to be from the nobility.
12 March 1790 - Municipalities are authorized to sell church property.
29 March 1790 - Pope Pius VI condemns the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
5 April-3 May 1790 - Pro-Catholic and anti-revolutionary riots begin in opposition to the revolutionary government's anti-clericalism.
17 April 1790 - The radical Cordeliers political club meets for the first time.
30 April 1790 - The Chevalier de Beausset, commander of Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille, is murdered as rioters take over three forts in the city.
18 May 1790 - Marat returns to Paris to continue publishing L'Ami du Peuple.
22 May 1790 - The Assembly gains the power to decide issues of war and peace, but not without the proposition and sanction of the king.
19 June 1790 - The hereditary nobility are stripped of their titles.
26 June 1790 - Delegates from Great Britain, the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, and the United Provinces meet at Reichenbach (Dzerzoniow, Poland) to discuss a military alliance against France. Prussia and Austria sort out their territorial disputes in the east in order to focus on the west, while Britain grows suspicious of Prussian expansionism, drawing out the process of forming an anti-French coalition.
12 July 1790 - The Civil Constitution of the Clergy attempts to transform the Catholic church into a subsidiary of the French government, but instead creates tensions between Catholics and the government.
14 July 1790 - On the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the Fete de la Federation holiday is celebrated in Paris, with Lafayette swearing to protect the constitution, the assembly, and the king.
26 July 1790 - Marat demands the execution of 600 aristocrats to protect the revolution.
28 July 1790 - An anti-Austrian revolution, inspired by the French Revolution, breaks out in the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium). France refuses to grant Austria military access to the region.
31 July 1790 - The National Assembly decides to take legal action against Marat and Desmoulins for their radicalism.
16 August 1790 - Justices of the peace replace nobles' courts, and discipline is re-established in the army.
4 September 1790 - The National Assembly fires Necker and takes charge of the economy.
21 October 1790 - The revolutionary tricolor replaces the white-and-gold fleur de lys flag.
4 November 1790 - Uprising against French government breaks out on Mauritius.
25 November 1790 - Slave uprising on Saint-Domingue (Haiti) against French government.
27 November 1790 - All clergymen are required to swear allegiance to the French government after thirty bishops sign a letter refusing to go along with religious reforms without the Pope's express approval. Forced to choose between their patriotic convictions and their faith, almost every noble ecclesiastic and bishop apart from radicals like Talleyrand refuse to take the oath, as do moderate parish priests, whose congregants often side with them in choosing God over the anti-clerical radicals. Only half of the clergy would take the oath, leading to half of the clergy being dismissed; this creates a rift between the Catholic Church and the revolutionary government.
3 December 1790 - Louis XVI writes to King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, requesting military intervention against the revolutionaries.
1 January 1791 - Mirabeau becomes President of the National Assembly.
3 January 1791 - A majority of clerical members of the National Assembly refuse to take an oath to the nation, leading to friction between Catholics and the revolutionaries.
24 February 1791 - Constitutional bishops replace the former church hierarchy.
28 February 1791 - In the "Day of Daggers", several noblemen heading to the Tuileries Palace with daggers with the goal of protecting King Louis XVI from rioters are turned away by National Guard troops under Lafayette. However, Lafayette also angers the radicals by preventing them from destroying a prison where it was rumored that a secret tunnel from the Tuileries Palace would allow the King to escape through the prison. The King and the prison are both protected, but Lafayette's popularity is destroyed. Rumors grow that the King is planning to flee Paris.
2 March 1791 - Traditional trade guilds are abolished.
25 March 1791 - Fifteen days after the Pope condemns the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the Papal States and France break diplomatic relations.
2 April 1791 - Mirabeau suddenly dies, weakening the moderate faction of the National Assembly.
3 April 1791 - The Pantheon mausoleum for illustrious French citizens replaces the Church of Sainte Genevieve, and Mirabeau is laid to rest there.
16 May 1791 - Current National Assembly members are forbidden from taking part in the next assembly.
30 May 1791 - Voltaire's ashes are moved to the Pantheon.
15 June 1791 - Priests are forbidden from wearing ecclesiastical costumes outside churches.
20-21 June 1791 - The royal family slips out of the Tuileries Palace in royal servants' clothes, attempting to flee to the Austrian Netherlands. Their flight to Varennes, in which the royals attempt to flee to a royal garrison at Montmedy for escort out of the country (with the Queen's governess pretending to be a Russian baroness) ends on 21 June 1791 when the postmaster of Montmedy recognizes the Queen from his time in the cavalry and recognizes the king's distinctive nose from an assignat note. The army forces the royals to return to Paris, where the King's functions are suspended by the assembly. Both Paris and the border provinces begin to fear that Austria will invade any day, and the borders are closed, while the National Assembly and Jacobin Club declare a permanent session.
5 July 1791 - Leopold II of Austria asks for the royal houses of Europe to help his brother-in-law Louis XVI.
9 July 1791 - Emigres are threatened with the forfeiting of their holdings in France if they do not return within two months.
17 July 1791 - The city of Paris raises a red flag, meaning a declaration of martial law, as members of the ultra-radical Cordeliers club march on the Champ de Mars with a petition demanding the king's removal after the moderate Assembly promotes the thinly-veiled fiction that the King had been abducted during the Flight to Varennes. Lafayette and the National Guard gun down 50 protesters in the Champ de Mars massacre.
18 July 1791 - The National Assembly forbids citizens to incite riots, encourage illegal actions, and to write for seditious publications; Marat and Georges Danton go into exile.
27 August 1791 - In the Declaration of Pillnitz, Austria and Prussia threaten to intervene in France to strengthen the monarchic government. This agreement enables Prussia to leave the British orbit (as Britain proved an unreliable ally) and align towards Austria.
14 September 1791 - King Louis is forced to accept the French Constitution of 1791, which creates the Kingdom of the French constitutional monarchy, abolishes the nobility, and ensures that everyone is equally represented before the law.
27 September 1791 - All men, regardless of color, are freed in France itself, and Jews are granted citizenship.
29 September 1791 - National Guard positions are reserved for citizens who pay a certain level of taxes, excluding the working class in favor of the bourgeoisie.
1 October 1791 - The Legislative Assembly replaces the National Assembly. Almost no clerics or nobles are elected to the Legislative Assembly; of the 745 delegates, only a handful are drawn from the old First and Second Estates. Robespierre's "self-denying decree" also prevents old Assemblymen from being re-elected, leading to the rise of a new generation of revolutionary leaders. Many of the delegates come from the countryside, and have at least two years of experience in revolutionary politics in their home departments; many are also former National Guardsmen or municipal politicians. Only 10% of "active citizens" voted, and the new Legislative Assembly members are primarily well-off property owners and lawyers, and many have a vested interest in solidifying the new order. Only around 130 immediately join the Jacobins, while 250-350 join the Feuillants and 300-400 joined no club at all, forming a persuadable middle which would eventually be won over by the Jacobins.
16 October 1791 - Royalists begin riots against the Avignon Commune, killing a commune official; revolutionary mobs respond by massacring anti-government prisoners.
9 November 1791 - Emigres are ordered to return to France by 1 January 1792, lest they be sentenced to death and their property forfeited. King Louis asks for his brothers to return to France, despite vetoing the proposition.
29 November 1791 - After Jacques Pierre Brissot and his allies convince the Legislative Assembly that declaring war on the German princes harboring the Royalist emigres would help expose traitors at home (including secret reactionaries, nonjuring priests, and even the royal family), the Assembly sends a delegation to the King to demand that the King issue an ultimatum to the German princes, demanding that they expel the princes or face war. The King agrees, supporting war with the hope that Austria would respond militarily, crush the overmatched French army, march unopposed on Paris, and free the royal family from the revolutionaries.
3 December 1791 - King Louis writes a secret letter to King Friedrich Wilhelm II, demanding Prussian intervention in France as his brothers refuse to return to France.
14 December 1791 - The King announces that the ultimatum has been issued: the German princes must disperse the emigres by 15 January 1792, or it would be war. Lafayette is given command of the Army of the Centre, Rochambeau is given command of the Army of the North, and Nicolas Luckner is given command of the Army of the Rhine.
21 December 1791 - While the German princes accepted the ultimatum, the Austrians issued a counter-ultimatum warning the French that, if they attacked the German princes, Austria would attack France. The Austrian threat seemingly confirms Brissot's conspiracy theories about Austria plotting an invasion of France, restoring the revolutionaries' hopes of a war to expose the traitors within France, and leading to the Legislative Assembly listening to what Brissot had to say. The Assembly eagerly pushed for war with Austria, and King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette also support a direct war with Austria with the hopes of being saved. Anti-war politician and Feuillant leader Barnave retires to Dauphine. Austrophobia, support for exposing the counter-revolutionaries within France, and potential economic benefits aid in the process of France's warmongering.
28 December 1791 - The Assembly orders for the creation of a mass volunteer army to defend France's borders.
1792
23 January 1792 - As a result of the Haitian Revolution, sugar and coffee shortages occur in Paris. Food riots break out as shops are looted by rioters.
25 January 1792 - France declares that the Treaty of 1756 was broken beyond repair due to Austrian aggression, and the King is ordered to warn the Austrians that, if they did not stand down by 1 March, France would declare war. The King tells the Assembly that he had already warned the Austrians to back down, and is waiting for their response.
7 February 1792 - Austria and Prussia sign a military convention to invade France and defend the monarchy after treating King Louis' ultimatum with defiance. Within the week, Prussia develops a campaign strategy and sends representatives to Vienna to coordinate an attack, with the most pessimistic estimates anticipating a two-month war.
9 February 1792 - The property of the emigres is officially confiscated.
7 March 1792 - Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick is named to command an Austro-Prussian invasion of France.
20 March 1792 - The National Assembly declares war on the Holy Roman Empire, starting the French Revolutionary Wars. The declaration of war does not arrive in Austria until 30 April.
25 April 1792 - La Marseillaise, the national anthem of France, is sung for the first time in Strasbourg.
28 April 1792 - Rochambeau's army invades the Austrian Netherlands on the same day as Austria's declaration of war on France.
29 April 1792 - The advance guard of the French invasion of Flanders, led by Irish commander Theobald Dillon, is defeated in a skirmish with Austrian forces at the Battle of Marquain. The experienced French cavalry flee at the sight of Austrian artillery, causing the inexperienced French volunteers to follow them. Dillon is forced to flee to Lille, where his troops, claiming that Dillon was a "traitor" and "aristocrat" who had conspired with the Austrians to lose his own army, lynch him from a lamp post.
5 May 1792 - 31 battalions are raised to fight against the Austrians and Prussians.
6 May 1792 - The King's German mercenary cavalry desert to the Coalition forces.
27 May 1792 - Priests who have not signed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy are ordered to be deported.
8 June 1792 - An army of 20,000 volunteers is ordered to be raised in Paris.
20 June 1792 - Demonstrators invade the Tuileries Palace after the King vetoes the deportation of non-juring priests and the gathering of 20,000 National Guardsmen in Paris; their stated goal is to plant a liberty tree at the palace to commemorate the third anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath. The mob demands the Legislative Assembly investigate the King's alleged role in sabotaging the French war effort. King Louis wears a red liberty cap and drinks to the health of the nation to condescend to the rioters.
21 June 1792 - Armed gatherings in Paris are banned.
28 June 1792 - Lafayette denounces the actions of radical Jacobins in the Assembly after briefly leaving his army, and an effigy of him is burned on 30 June after he leaves Paris and returns to his army. Lafayette secretly reaches out to the Austrians, seeking a truce while his army restores order in Paris to save the King from mob violence. However, Lafayette finds himself without allies and quietly returns to the front rather than leading his army into Paris.
14 July 1792 - A third Fete de la Federation is held to celebrate Bastille Day. Radicalized National Guard companies (federees) from the countryside, who had fought counter-revolutionary plots on the front, are invited to attend the feast, and the festivities demanded patriotic action.
25 July 1792 - The government authorizes permanent sessions of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, among other political clubs. That same day, the Duke of Brunswick warns that the French people would face exemplary and eternally memorable revenge if the royal family was harmed.
30 July 1792 - "Passive citizens" (peasants and laborers) are allowed, and encouraged, to join the National Guard. That same day, Marsellaise National Guardsmen arrive in Paris, bringing with them their patriotic song La Marseillaise, and they pledge allegiance to Georges Danton's "Coordinating Committee" of Cordeliers, Jacobins, and sans-culottes who meet at the Hotel de Ville to plot the overthrow of the monarchy.
3 August 1792 - 47 of Paris' 48 sections demand the removal of the king.
4 August 1792 - Paris Section #80 proclaims an insurrection on 10 August if the Assembly does not remove the king, leading to armed nobles and the Swiss Guards being reinforced at the Tuileries Palace.
9 August 1792 - Deputy City Prosecutor Georges Danton proclaims the insurrectionary commune, becoming the legal government of Paris the next day. They take over the Hotel de Ville from the old Paris Commune government, and they increase the number of commune deputies to 288.
The carnage at the Tuileries Palace
10 August 1792 - 20,000 Parisian mob members and National Guard volunteers storm the Tuileries Palace in the 10 August insurrection, massacring the Swiss Guards as the king is arrested by the Legislative Assembly. The Assembly orders the creation of the National Convention.
11 August 1792 - Royalist newspapers and publications are banned by the revolutionary government, with Danton becoming Minister of Justice.
14 August 1792 - Lafayette fails to convince his army to march on Paris to rescue the royal family.
17 August 1792 - Maximilien Robespierre and the Paris Commune create a revolutionary tribunal and summon a National Convention to replace the Legislative Assembly.
19 August 1792 - Lafayette abandons his army and goes into exile, and the Austrian, Prussian, and French emigre army of Ferdinand of Brunswick invades northern France.
22 August 1792 - The Convention decrees that people should be formally addressed as Citoyen or Citoyenne (both meaning "citizen") instead of Monsieur or Madame/Mademoiselle ("Mister" and "Missus/Miss"). On that same day, royalist uprisings break out in the Vendee.
2 September 1792 - Verdun surrenders to the Austrians and Prussians.
2-7 September 1792 - Up to 1,395 prisoners are murdered by Parisian mobs in the September Massacres as the Coalition armies approach Paris, with Marat encouraging the massacres with the goal of killing all royalist sympathizers in the city to prevent a pro-Coalition revolt. 17% were priests, 6% were Swiss Guards, and 5% political prisoners.
10 September 1792 - All church objects made of gold or silver are requisitioned by the government.
19 September 1792 - The Louvre Museum is created with art taken from royal collections.
20 September 1792 - In its last session, the National Assembly legalizes civil marriage and divorce; the 749-seat National Convention is held that same day, and the 113 Jacobins in the convention pick the highest benches, leading to them being nicknamed "The Mountain". That same day, the Prussians and Austrians are defeated at the Battle of Valmy, a French victory that leads to patriotic fervor skyrocketing.
22 September 1792 - The constitutional monarchy is abolished and replaced by the French First Republic.
29 September 1792 - French troops occupy the Savoyard port of Nice.
3 October 1792 - French troops occupy Basel in Switzerland and proclaim an independent republic.
23 October 1792 - The French capture Frankfurt-am-Main.
27 October 1792 - Charles-Francois Dumouriez, the victor of Valmy, invades the Austrian Netherlands with his army.
14 November 1792 - Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands, falls to France.
19 November 1792 - The National Convention declares that it has the right to intervene in any country in which people "desire to recover their freedom."
27 November 1792 - Nice and Savoy are annexed by France.
28 November 1792 - The French conquer Liege.
3 December 1792 - Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins, demands the execution of King Louis XVI.
6 December 1792 - Each deputy of the National Convention is instructed to publicly and individually declare his vote concerning the execution. Trial begins on 10 December.
15 January 1793 - After a vote of 707 to 0, the National Convention declares that Louis XVI had conspired against public liberty.
17 January 1793 - After twenty-one hours of voting, the Convention votes to execute Louis XVI 361-360, with Louis-Michel Le Peletier being the deciding vote for the pro-execution camp.
21 January 1793 - King Louis XVI is sent to the guillotine for execution. Antoine Joseph Santerre orders for the guards to play a drumroll to drown out Louis' final words to the crowd, and the king is beheaded by the guillotine in front of the people of Paris.
24 January 1793 - France breaks diplomatic relations with Great Britain.
1 February 1793 - France declares war on Britain and the Netherlands.
10 March 1793 - The socialistEnrages, led by former priest Jacques Roux, launch a failed uprising against the National Convention.
18 March 1793 - The Convention implements the death penalty ofr supporters of radical economic programs, targeting the Enrages. The next day, all Vendean rebels are sentenced to death.
27 March-5 April 1793 - Dumouriez denounces revolutionary anarchy and refuses to return to Paris, arresting the commissars of the Minister of War and of the Convention and sending them to his Austrian opponents. On 3 April 1793, he is declared outside of the law by the Convention, and he defects to the Austrians on 5 April.
3 April 1793 - Louis Philippe II of Orleans is arrested, despite supporting the execution of his cousin, the king.
5 April 1793 - Marat is elected head of the Jacobins.
6 April 1793 - The Committee of Public Safety is established to be the executive body of the government.
12 April 1793 - The National Convention votes to arrest Marat for inciting violence and murder, but he goes into hiding.
24 April 1793 - Marat is acquitted of all charges before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and there are riotous celebrations by his supporters.
4 May 1793 - Price controls on grain are implemented.
24 May 1793 - The moderate Girondins persuade the Jacobins to have enrages leaders Jacques Hebert and Jean Varlet arrested, only to be released on 27 May due to mob agitation.
In the Insurrection of 31 May-2 June 1793, the armed Enragessans-culottes under Francois Hanriot storm the hall of the National Convention and demand that it disband, and they force the convention to vote for the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies. The Paris Commune agrees to the Enrages' radical reforms, but the mob disperses while besieging the National Convention.
2 June 1793 - The mobilized companies of the Parisian National Guard, under the command of Hanriot, barge into the National Convention and demand action against the conspiracy the Enrages supposedly discovered. Hanriot refuses Danton's request to stand down and orders cannons aimed at the doors, causing 100 delegates to attempt to leave the hall as a group. Hanriot refuses to stand aside, and the Convention votes to indict 29 Girondin deputies and a few non-deputy ministers and commit them to house arrest. The streets of Paris assert that they are the true masters of revolutionary France, leading to immediate rebellious outrage in the departments, with other major provincial cities such as Bordeaux (the major city of the Gironde) joining Lyon and Marseille in counter-revolution.
7 June 1793 - Bordeaux declares itself in insurrection against the National Convention, sending delegations to other cities to form a shadow National Convention and raise an armed force of 80,000 troops to march on Paris. Caen and Rennes in the north and Toulon in the south join the "Federalist revolts" against radical Paris.
10 June 1793 - With the Girondins out of power, the Jacobins take over the Committee of Public Safety.
24 June 1793 - The French Constitution of 1793 is adopted, but it is almost immediately set aside, giving emergency powers to the Committee of Public Safety.
26 June-4 July 1793 - The Enrages are denounced by Robespierre and the Convention, and Marat violently denounces its members.
Marat dead in his bath
13 July 1793 - Girondin sympathizer Charlotte Corday murders Marat in his bathtub, saying that she killed him to save the lives of 100,000 people; Marat sought to kill all of the Girondins. On 17 July, she is guillotined for Marat's murder.
27 July 1793 - Robespierre is elected to the Committee of Public Safety and implements the death penalty for hoarders of scarce goods.
1 August 1793 - The Convention orders a scorched earth policy against departments in rebellion against the government and adopts the metric system.
22 August 1793 - Robespierre becomes President of the Convention.
23 August 1793 - All able-bodied and unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 25 are drafted into the French Revolutionary Army.
27 August 1793 - Royalists turn over the port of Toulon to the Royal Navy of Britain.
4 September 1793 - Angered by the Royalists' betrayal of Toulon, Sans-culottes take over the National Convention in Paris, demanding the formation of a 60,000-strong revolutionary army and the arrest of counter-revolutionaries.
17 September 1793 - The Law of Suspects is implemented, leading to the start of the Reign of Terror. People can be arrested for being suspected of harboring counter-revolutionary or anti-Jacobin views.
21 September 1793 - All women are required to wear tricolor cockades.
29 September 1793 - Goods, services, and salaries are fixed by the government.
3 October 1793 - 136 moderate deputies are excluded from the Convention.
5 October 1793 - The French Revolutionary Calendar replaces the Christian calendar, renaming the twelve months after seasons and creating ten-day weeks to eliminate the day of Sunday. This is one of many steps taken to dechristianize France.
12 October 1793 - In retaliation for Lyon's rebellion against the National Convention, the Convention decrees that the city is to be destroyed and rebuilt as "Ville-Affranchie".
16 October 1793 - The French win a major victory at the Battle of Wattignies. On that same day, Queen Marie Antoinette is escorted out of the Temple prison and executed by guillotine, being taken to her death on a prisoner's cart instead of a carriage.
20 October 1793 - The Enrages are ordered to be suppressed.
28 October 1793 - Religious instruction by clerics is outlawed.
30 October 1793 - The 21 Girondin deputies of the Convention are sentenced to death, and they are executed the next day.
3 November 1793 - Women's rights activist Olympe de Gouges is guillotined.
7 November 1793 - Louis Philippe II, the famous "Philippe Egalite", is guillotined.
8 November 1793 - Famous Girondin Madame Roland is guillotined.
10 November 1793 - The Cathedral of Notre Dame is transformed into a "Temple of Reason".
12 November 1793 - Former Paris mayor Jean Sylvain Bailly is executed for his role in the Champ de Mars massacre of 1791, being executed at the site of the massacre.
17 November 1793 - Supporters of the moderate Danton are arrested.
23 November 1793 - All churches and places of worship in Paris are closed.
25 November 1793 - Mirabeau's remains are removed from the Pantheon and replaced with those of Marat.
Napoleon at the Siege of Toulon
19 December 1793 - Napoleon Bonaparte leads an army to recapture the port of Toulon from the British, his first major victory. The capture of Toulon puts an end to Federalist resistance to the revolutionary government.
4 March 1794 - Jean-Baptiste Carrier calls for an insurrection by the Cordeliers against the Convention.
13 March 1794 - Carrier and several other Cordeliers are arrested for their anti-government views.
20 March 1794 - War hero Lazare Hoche is arrested by the government, to be released in August.
24 March 1794 - The leaders of the Hebertists, including Jacques Hebert, are executed by guillotine.
28 March 1794 - The Marquis de Condorcet is found dead in his cell after being arrested.
30 March 1794 - Danton, Desmoulins, and their supporters are arrested, ostensibly for their alleged roles in the extortion of the liquidating East India Company.
4 April 1794 - After Danton insults the government during a trial, the Convention declares that anyone who insults the justice system is excluded from speaking at trials.
Danton and his friends on the execution cart.
5 April 1794 - Danton and Desmoulins are both executed.
15 April 1794 - The police are centralized under the Committee of Public Safety.
19 April 1794 - An army of 62,000 Prussian troops are funded by Britain to continue the war with France.
8 May 1794 - Chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry" and the man who discovered oxygen and hydrogen, is guillotined.
10 May 1794 - Princess Elisabeth of France, Louis XVI's sister, is guillotined.
4 June 1794 - Robespierre is elected President of the Convention.
8 June 1794 - At the Festival of the Supreme Being, many deputies are annoyed by Robespierre's arrogant behavior, which they saw as him pretending to be a god.
10 June 1794 - The Law of 22 Prairial is instituted, which states that witnesses no longer have to testify, speeding up trials and allowing for the Convention to arrest its own members.
1 July 1794 - Robespierre tells the Jacobins that several politicians are plotting against him, and he begins to compile a list of people who oppose him.
28 July 1794 - Troops loyal to the Convention under Paul Barras storm the Hotel de Ville and arrest Robespierre and his followers in the "Thermidorian Reaction". That evening, Robespierre and 21 of his supporters are guillotined.
29 July 1794 - 109 Robespierre supporters are guillotined.
5 August 1794 - With Robespierre overthrown, all prisoners held under the Law of Suspects are released.
30 August 1794 - With the French capture of Conde-sur-l'Escaut, all of France is freed from occupation.
1 October 1794 - Confrontation between supporters and opponents of the Reign of Terror.
3 October 1794 - Arresters of the leaders of the sans-culottes by the Convention.
12 November 1794 - The Jacobins' meetings are suspended.
16 December 1794 - Carrier is executed for murdering 10,000 prisoners in the Vendee.
19 January 1795 - The French capture Amsterdam from the United Provinces.
8 February 1795 - Marat's remains are removed from the Pantheon.
14 February 1795 - The First White Terror begins as opponents of the Jacobins begin to massacre the extremists. Over the next few months, Jacobins are murdered in prisons and across the country by anti-Jacobin rebels, including the muscadins.
17 February 1795 - Vendeen rebels are pardoned, and religious freedom is restored.
21 February 1795 - Separation of church and state is established.
21 March 1795 - Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes persuades the Convention to hand down the death sentence to people who try to overthrow the government.
5 April 1795 - France and Prussia make peace, and France annexes the "left bank" of the Rhine River.
7 May 1795 - Former Chief Prosecutor Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville and all fourteen Revolutionary Tribunal jurors are executed by guillotine for their role in the Terror.
20 May 1795 - The Jacobin Revolt of 1 Prairial Year III breaks out, and the Convention crushes the uprising and imprisons the deputies behind the uprising. After deputy Jean-Bertrand Feraud is murdered by the sans-culottes, the insurgents are besieged at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and are forced to surrender. The failed coup leads to the sans-culottes losing all of their power.
8 June 1795 - The uncrowned King Louis XVII of France dies in the Temple prison at the age of 10.
23 June-21 July 1795 - An army of French emigres is landed at Quiberon by the British, and they are besieged and defeated by French general Lazare Hoche
17 July 1795 - A French army under Bon-Adrien Jeannot de Moncey captures the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz in northern Spain, followed by Bilbao two days later.
22 July 1795 - At Basel, Spain and France make peace, leaving just Austria and Britain in the coalition against France.
15 August 1795 - The franc becomes the monetary unit of France.
10 April 1796 - Napoleon Bonaparte, now commander of the Armee d'Italie, begins his Italian Campaign, during which he will drive the Austrians out of Italy and march on Vienna via Klagenfurt.
2 May 1796 - Babeuf's followers and the last of the Jacobins form an alliance against the Thermidorians.
10 May 1796 - Napoleon wins the Battle of Lodi, making him a hero.
15 May 1796 - Sardinia makes peace with France, ceding Savoy and Nice to France.
19 May 1796 - After liberating Milan, Napoleon proclaims Italian independence.
20 May 1796 - The truce on the Rhineland ends, leading to a resumption of hostilities.
7 January 1797 - Jozsef Alvinczi leads a new Austrian army into Italy to fight Bonaparte's army.
14 January 1797 - Bonaparte defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Rivoli.
9 February 1797 - The French occupy Ancona, forcing the Pope to negotiate with him.
14 February 1797 - The British defeat the Spanish Navy at Cape St. Vincent, off the coast of Portugal.
19 February 1797 - The northern Papal States become a part of the Cispadane Republic.
2 March 1797 - In response to Britain and the United States' anti-French corsair treaty of 20 February 1796, the Directory authorizes the capture of American ships, starting the Quasi-War.
18 April 1797 - Austria and France sign a preliminary treaty that forfeits the Austrian Netherlands to France and divides the Republic of Venice between the two countries.
17 October 1797 - The Treaty of Campo Formio ends Austria and France's war, with France retrieving Belgium and the right bank of the Rhine up to Cologne, while the Austrians gain Venice.
27 August 1798 - Jean Joseph Amable Humbert and an army of 2,000 French troops and Irish rebels rout 6,000 British militia under Gerard Lake at Castlebar, and an Irish republic is declared.
5 September 1798 - All French men between the ages of 22 and 25 are drafted for compulsory military service.
19 June 1799 - The French garrison of Naples surrenders.
5 July 1799 - Neo-Jacobins Barthelemy Catherine Joubert and Championnet get commands, with Joubert leading the Armee d'Italie and Championnet leading the Army of the Alps.
14 July 1799 - Sieyes criticizes Jourdan and the neo-Jacobins after they call for "bringing back the pikes".
25 July 1799 - The Ottomans are defeated at the Battle of Abukir.
6 August 1799 - Royalist uprisings in Toulouse and Bordeaux are put down by the army.
13 August 1799 - Sieyes orders the suppression of the Jacobins in Paris.
15 August 1799 - French are defeated at the Battle of Novi, and Joubert is killed.
23 August 1799 - British general Sydney Smith sends several newspapers to Napoleon informing him of the political turmoil in Paris, and Napoleon decides to return to France as Kleber takes over the army in Egypt.
29 August 1799 - Pope Pius dies in French captivity at Valence.
13 September 1799 - Jourdan asks for the Council of Five Hundred to declare a state of emergency.
14 September 1799 - The Council of Five Hundred refuses to declare a state of emergency, and Jacobin Minister of War Bernadotte is forced to resign for planning a coup d'etat.
15 September 1799 - Georges Cadoudal plans a royalist uprising in Brittany.
25-26 September 1799 - The Russians are defeated in another battle at Zurich.
29 September 1799 - The Russians withdraw across the Alps.
6 October 1799 - The French defeat a failed Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland.
14 October 1799 - Moreau refuses Sieyes' request to lead a coup against the Jacobins in the government.
16 October 1799 - Napoleon returns to Paris, and he meets the Directory a day later.
23 October 1799 - Czar Paul I of Russia orders the Russian withdrawal from war with France. That same day, Lucien Bonaparte becomes President of the Council of Five Hundred.
1 November 1799 - Political rivals Bonaparte and Sieyes find common ground in opposition to the Directory and decide to overthrow it. Two days later, police head Joseph Fouche agrees to turn a blind eye towards a coup.
7 November 1799 - Napoleon refuses to join Jourdan's Jacobin coup against the councils.
9 November 1799 - French troops under Napoleon Bonaparte launch the Coup of 18 Brumaire, and he becomes commander-in-chief of the army in Paris. Sieyes and Ducos, who were complicit in the coup, offered their resignation, while Talleyrand persuaded Barras to do so as well. Jacobin directors Louis-Jerome Gohier and Jean-Francois-Auguste Moulin were arrested by soldiers loyal to Moreau, who sided with Bonaparte during his coup.
10 November 1799 - Napoleon speaks to the Council of Ancients and explains to them the need for a new government, and the Jacobin deputies insult, protest, and shout down on Bonaparte. Lucien Bonaparte runs outside and claims that the deputies had attempted to kill Napoleon, leading to soldiers rushing into the building and chasing the deputies out with bayonets.
11-22 November 1799 - Napoleon forms a provisional government with Berthier as his Minister of War, Talleyrand as Foreign Minister, Fouche as police chief, and Jean Jacques Regis de Cambaceres as Minister of Justice.
1 December 1799 - Napoleon rejects Sieyes' idea for a constitution in favor of his own idea.
14 June 1800 - Napoleon wins a decisive victory against the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo, although he loses his general Louis Charles Antoine Desaix. That same day, Jean-Baptiste Kleber is assassinated by an Egyptian student in Cairo.
4 September 1800 - The French garrison at Valletta in Malta surrenders to the British, starting 164 years of British rule over the island.
30 September 1800 - France and the United States make peace.
9 February 1801 - The Treaty of Luneville ends the war between France and Austria, bringing an end to the War of the Second Coalition.
21 March 1801 - The British take Abukir in Egypt from the French forces still occupying the city, but their general Ralph Abercromby is mortally wounded.
2 April 1801 - The British destroy a Danish fleet off Copenhagen, forcing Denmark to withdraw from France's armed neutrality league.
27 June 1801 - The British take Cairo from the French.
19 February 1803 - The Swiss Confederation is created by Napoleon to replace the Helvetic Republic, and it gained six cantons; on 9 March, Aargau becomes a canton.
30 April 1803 - Napoleon sells France's possessions in mainland North America to the United States in the "Louisiana Purchase".
May 1803 - Napoleon begins preparations for an invasion of England.
18 May 1803 - The United Kingdom declares war on France after France's refusal to withdraw from Dutch territory, starting the Napoleonic Wars.
1 January 1804 - Haiti becomes the first black republic after history's only successful slave revolt, and its independence is recognized by France.
21 March 1804 - The Napoleonic Code is adopted as French civil law.
On 18 May 1804, after the ratification of the Constitution of the Year XII, Napoleon Bonaparte is named hereditary Emperor of the First French Empire by the French Senate. On 2 December, he is formally crowned Emperor, and France becomes a monarchy after just twelve years of being a republic. With Napoleon's coronation, the Revolution is at an end, and the Napoleonic Wars have just begun.
Factions
First phase: Estates-General to the Women's March on Versailles
The first phase of the French Revolution began with the summoning of the Estates-General and ended with the Women's March on Versailles; the key issues of the day were drafting a constitution, and the veto power of the King.
Left-wing
The Radicals were a radical faction of early Revolutionary politics, led by Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, Adrien Duport (a liberal magistrate who led the Paris Parlement in its fight against the ministry), Alexandre-Théodore-Victor de Lameth (a vocal leader for liberal progress, and a veteran of the American Revolutionary War), and Antoine Barnave (a radicalized member of the Dauphine delegation), the last three of whom were nicknamed "the Triumvirate". The Radicals supported the de-establishment of the Catholic Church, as well as a democratic single chamber which would serve as the government of France, with the King executing its will. The Radicals also believed that the King should have no veto power. The Radicals ultimately supported a suspensive veto for King Louis XVI as a compromise, passing it by a vote of 673-325. After the Monarchiens strengthened the King's veto power, the Radicals considered quitting the National Convention altogether. The veto debate motivated Jean-Paul Marat to start writing and publishing Le Ami du Peuple in September 1789, calling for the purging of the National Convention of conservatives and the lynching of aristocrats. He found a willing audience in the autumn of 1789 due to widespread hunger, stress, and fear, and he spread rumors about the aristocrats attempting to starve out the peasants and undo the revolution.
Center
The Society of Thirty was a loose grouping of liberal nobles formed in 1788 and led by Adrien Duport, and including the Marquis de Lafayette, Honore Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau, the Marquis de Condorcet, Charles de Talleyrand, and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes. Condorcet described the society as a "conspiracy of decent men", and it aimed to lead the Third Estate into political prominence through pamphlet campaigns and the distribution of model petitions for guilds, municipalities, and clubs to pressure the Estates General of 1789 to allow the doubling of the Third Estate's representation and counting them by head. The movement initially sought an alliance between the Third Estate and the King in opposition to the staunch reactionism of the nobility. The Society also sponsored Sieyes' What is the Third Estate? pamphlet, written in January 1789, proposing that the Third Estate was not an order, but a nation itself, while the other two orders were parasites.
Right-wing
The Monarchiens were a constitutional royalist faction led by Jean Joseph Mounier, who supported reform, a rational constitution, the traditional order, a strong central government in the face of provincial unrest, constitutional government, the rule of law, and respect for the rights of citizens. They included conservative delegates from Dauphine who were horrified by the growing unrest, attacks on noble estates, and the rebellion in Paris, and desired stability and order, who opposed the liberal delegates from Brittany (who supported the political revolution, even in spite of their opposition to mob action). The movement grew in popularity during the crisis which followed the 4 August 1789 abolition of feudalism. The Monarchiens concurred on their political values, leading to the formation of a unified political bloc. They dominated the leadership positions of the National Assembly while the liberalBretons failed to find unity. Mounier supported a British system with a lower house, an upper house, and privileges for the King (such as an absolute and unlimited veto). Mounier resigned from the constitutional assembly after the full veto motion and the bicameral legislature proposal were defeated, but the Monarchiens were able to arrange the King to receive a permanent veto by ensuring that the overriding of a veto would take years. Mounier would then be elected President of the Constitutional Assembly, dominated by the Monarchiens.
The Clergy was another powerful moderate conservative faction at the start of the French Revolution. The parish priests, who had supported the Third Estate at the Estates General due to their shared distrust of the power of the high church, drifted into moderate conservatism due to the unrest in Paris, the destruction of the Abbey Saint-Lazare, and the abolition of tithes by the radicals on 4 August 1789 (rather than their equitable distribution, as the clergy favored).
The Arch-Conservatives were a reactionary-conservative faction, led by Jean-Jacques Duval d'Eprémesnil, who sought to undo the changes wrought by the Revolution, and formed a working alliance with the Monarchiens in the National Assembly. The Conservatives were wary of the radicals' increasing militancy.
Second phase
The second phase, marked by the formation of organized political factions, was marked by debates over the meaning of citizenship and the role of the Catholic Church in society. Old provincial belongings were rendered obsolete by recent political developments, and were instead delineated by the clustering of like-minded individuals in certain neighborhoods of Paris.
Left-wing
The Jacobin Club was the radical faction of the second phase of the Revolution, initially consisting of the radical Breton club, who took refuge at the Dominican convent of Saint-Jacques. The radicals sought group accommodations in the city center of Paris, close to the action of the Revolution; they took over the left side of the National Convention hall, becoming known as the "left-wing". The Radicals opposed the distinction between active and passive citizens, favoring a more democratic definition of citizenship. In October 1789, the conservatives and centrists determined that 25-year-old, propertied citizens counted as active citizens, creating divisions within the Radical camp. The Radicals initially supported the nationalization of Church lands, but, on 3 November 1789, Mirabeau reworded Talleyrand's nationalization motion and promised that Church property would be put at the disposal of the nation, while still administered by the clergy as stewards of the church's wealth. The motion passed, with the Assembly claiming ownership over the church's property. A month later, the church sold off 400 million livres in Church property to improve the nation's finances, and they also sold bonds in 200-400 livre notes to pay off the kingdom's creditors, who could then use them to acquire national property. Priests promptly took to the pulpit to criticize the Radicals' policies on church property. The Jacobins invited anyone who was dedicated to upholding constitutional government, supporting political equality for all, and being ready to combat counter-revolutionary plots. The Jacobins held three meetings a week, essentially forming a National Assembly in miniature; Jacobin debates became a form of public entertainment. The Jacobins also created a steering committee to determine party policy, and a committee of correspondence to organize chapters outside of the capital, making them more representative of the nation than the national government itself, with 7,000 chapters and 500,000 members across France. Maximilien Robespierre rose to the leadership of the movement. On 13 February 1790, the Jacobin-dominated Assembly voted to stop recognizing monastic vows, encouraging (or forcing) monks and nuns to leave their orders, while the properties of the religious orders was nationalized. Even as the Conservatives resigned en masse and left the Left in power, the Left began to fracture as soon as it triumphed. The Jacobins fractured in 1790 as many moderate leftists were prepared to accept the King's willingness to reign as a constitutional monarch. The right-wing of the Jacobins split to form the Society of 1789, which supported a constitutional monarchy; the radical Jacobins and Society of 1789 were roughly evenly matched after their schism. The July 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy granted clergymen a state salary and regular priests saw their income increase as bishops' income decreased. The Assembly also banned absentee bishops and prevented courtiers' sons from being appointed bishops' assistants, earning them the support of the first Estate; what was controversial, however, was the election of priests and bishops by electoral bodies which could include Protestants, atheists, and Jews. The radicals developed policy proposals which would take France down the road to national regeneration, while the ultra-radical working-class Parisians began to organize politically and seek to turn the world of the Ancien Regime upside-down. By August 1790, the Jacobins had 1,200 members in Paris and 150 affiliate clubs across France (attracting middle-class intellectuals), and, while they did not dominate the National Assembly due to the splinter of the liberal nobles, the Jacobins began to call for universal education, equality before the law, the end to the distinction between "active" and "passive" citizens, and even republicanism. Jacobin correspondence clubs recruited junior army officers into the Revolution, and senior officers in the French Army soon became too afraid to issue orders which might lead to disobedience, or might emigrate. The Jacobins and Cordeliers supported the mutineers of the 1790 "Nancy affair" against Lafayette's army, and came to view the Society of 1789 as downright reactionary. The Feuillants left the Jacobins after the Champ de Mars massacre, and the Jacobins rose in popularity as the Feuillants depoliticized themselves and the Jacobins held massively-attended meetings and hosted charismatic speakers. After July 1792, the Jacobins abandoned their support for constitutional monarchy, and Robespierre and his party flanked the Jacobins on the left and came to oppose the Constitution of 1791.
The Cordeliers were a hyper-radical faction of the Jacobins, led by Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins, and Georges Danton, who built a political force to oppose the elitist forces running the National Assembly after they limited citizenship to propertied 25-year-olds. The men and women of the Cordeliers, who had played a major role in the Storming of the Bastille, were incensed at being labeled as "passive citizens", and they railed against the Society of 1789's moderatism and elitism. The Cordeliers prevented Marat's arrest for his violent diatribes against Lafayette. The Paris Commune erased the Cordelie from the map as an autonomous unit by redrawing the political map of Paris. In April 1790, the Cordelier Club was created to defend the universal rights proclaimed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and they held an egalitarian ideology; they required less than two livres as club dues, attracting the "dregs" of society. The working-class sans-culottes were mobilized as a major political force. After the Flight to Varennes, the Cordeliers declare that liberty and royalty are incompatible, a view which gains tracation. Danton became enemies with the Paris Commune and its leader, Bailly, as he declared that no Commune decree would be enforceable unless the Cordelier Assembly ratified it. By the spring of 1791, clashes between mouthy laborers on one side and haughty guardsmen on the other became routine on the streets of Paris, and the clashes picked up after the Paris Commune unveiled its restrictions on mass mobilization in 1791 and after the Flight to Varennes. After July 1792, Danton began working to overthrow the monarchy and encouraged commoners to ignore the divisions between active and passive citizens. The poorer assemblies were soon teeming with sans-culottes, namely workers, artisans, apprentices, and shopkeepers, all of whom were ready to overthrow the government. On 27 July 1792, a coordinating committee began meeting at the Hotel de Ville to coordinate the actions of the allied political clubs (such as the Jacobins), federees (radical National Guardsmen), and Cordeliers as they plotted the monarchy's overthrow; better-off parts of Paris refused to send representatives. While Danton and his cohort turned to governing the Committee of Public Safety in 1793, the Cordeliers Club's leadership fell into the hands of even more radical agitators, among them Jacques Roux, leader of the Enrages. Danton came to seek revolutionary unity and mutual understanding, and his views mdoerated while he was out of Paris; he argued that the government should be terrible so that the people wouldn't have to be, although he was referring to Royalists and parish priests, and not to rival revolutionaries. In July 1793, the Cordeliers began to decline after Danton and his allies lost re-election to the Committee of Public Safety due to their moderate voices.
The Indulgents, also known as the Dantonists, were a moderate faction of the Jacobin Club led by Georges Danton, and consisting of Danton's allies from the Cordeliers; they "indulged" in moderation, according to Hebert, and Hebert waged war on moderation from the summer of 1793 at the start of the Reign of Terror. Danton became the leader of the Indulgents in late 1793, supporting the dialing down of the Terror now that the Coalition and Royalist armies were in retreat. His Indulgents were opposed to Hebert's violently atheistic "Ultras". In early December 1793, Camille Desmoulins launched Le Vieux Cordelier to reclaim spiritual ownership of the Cordelier name from Hebert (by then the club's president) and fight back against Hebert's rabid atheism. Robespierre initially leaned towards the Indulgents, but Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine and his associates' attempted extortion of the liquidating East India Company alienated Robespierre from the corrupt faction. Robespierre believed that the faction had been compromised by corruption, especially after Danton stood up for d'Eglantine on d'Eglantine's arrest in January 1794. Suspecting that Danton's support for d'Eglantine came from something more sinister, and angered that Desmoulins used his paper to criticize the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre believed that the Indulgents were conspiring against him. During Robespierre's month of illness in early 1794, the Indulgents planned an insurrection against the repressive Committee of Public Safety. After the purge of the Ultras in April 1794, the Committee of the Public Safety turned its attention to Danton and his moderates for their involvement in the East India Company scandal, and a number of Convention delegates and assorted spectators were found to have committed fraud on a massive scale. The Revolutionary Tribunal put the Indulgents on trial, and Robespierre, albeit conflicted about going after Danton and Desmoulins, grew suspicious of their old allies due to d'Eglantine's corruption and Danton's defense of d'Eglantine. The Committee of Public Safety arrested the Indulgents and found them guilty of defrauding the nation and conspiring to restore the monarchy, and, on 5 April 1794, the leaders of the Indulgents were executed in what Saint-Just promised was the end of the political massacres.
The Hebertists, also known as the Ultras, were an ultra-radical and staunchly anti-clerical and anti-Christian faction of the French Revolution, led by Jean-Jacques Hebert, a member of the Paris Commune government and the Jacobin Club (later taking over the Cordeliers as its president). Formed in 1791 and dissolved in 1794, the Hebertists supported the total dechristianization of France, earning Hebert huge popularity among the sans-culottes. Hebert also supported the September Massacres, using his paper to publicly defend the necessity of the slaughter. Hebert was a far-left radical, but he was at odds with the Enrages leaders and vied for them over control of the sans-culottes. Hebert also rivaled Jean-Paul Marat for the leadership of the sans-culottes, publishing in Marat's shadow. After Marat's assassination, Hebert was mostly successful in cornering the market on revolutionary populism, becoming the most influential left-wing journalist on Paris. He then turend his virulent pen as much against the Enrages as moderates in the National Convention, and he orchestrated a plot to push the Enrages off the stage and onto the execution scaffold. The Hebertists co-opted the Enrages' demands for a revolutionary army to seize bread allegedly being hoarded by the rich, for government-provided subsistence for the sans-culottes, and other radical demands. The Hebertists commanded the Committee of General Security, which used the Law of Suspects to crack down on the far-left. The Hebertists had Varlet and Roux arrested, enabling the Convention to co-opt the sans-culotte. Hebert also oversaw the start of the Reign of Terror in the summer of 1793, questioning why Marie Antoinette was still alive when she was known to have sided with the Austrians, and questioned why the Girondins were still alive even after they had provoked the Federalist revolts. Robespierre later claimed that the Hebertists' dechristianization policies had the sinister ulterior motive of purposely alienating the religious French in order to create resistance to the Revolution and aid a "foreign plot". Robespierre also argued that the excesses of the anti-pious would do more harm than good, and that atheism went again his Mountain's "Cult of Reason". In December 1793, Desmoulins launched Le Vieux Cordelier to reclaim the Cordelier legacy from Hebert, who had taken over the Cordeliers after Danton and his Indulgents joined the Convention. As continued commodity shortages led to street clashes throughout February 1794, Hebert and his Ultras planned a new insurrection against the Committee of Public Safety, but he found that the well of sans-culotte wrath was empty, having been sucked dry by the decrees passed in the wake of the 5 September 1793 insurrection. As the general maximum, Law of Suspects, punishment for hoarding, streamlined revolutionary tribunal, appointment of trusted men to the Committee of Public Safety, and Laws of Ventose (taking property confiscated from suspects and emigres and redistributing it to the poor, as well as paying poor people for attending provincial assemblies) had already been passed, the Parisian streets had already been bought off by the Montagnars, and they failed to see the urgency of a revolt. On 4 March 1794, the Hebertists organized a new paper and organized a demonstration on 6 March 1794, marching to the Hotel de Ville. However, no other Paris section joined the demonstration, which fizzled out quickly. On 13 March, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just denounced the radicals in the Convention as agents of a vast foreign plot to discredit the revolution, and, a day later, the Ultra leadership was arrested, collectively tried from 21 to 24 March 1793 for insurrection, instigating famine, and plotting another prison massacre. The Ultras were led directly to the scaffold, drawing the largest crowd of any execution in the history of the Revolution. Three days later, the Revolutionary Army was dissolved, and the Committee purged the Paris Commune's General Assembly of its rivals, including Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, one of the instigators of dechristianization; he was executed on 13 April 1794, putting the Paris Commune under the thumb of the Committee of Public Safety.
The Girondins were a republican, abolitionist, and pro-war faction of the Jacobin Club led by Jacques Pierre Brissot. Their base of power was the Gironde department in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France, and they were known as staunch warmongers at the dawn of the Revolutionary Wars. Many Girondins met at Madame Roland's cafe, and Madame Roland ensured that her husband was appointed Interior Minister after the tear-down of the Feuillant ministry in late 1791. The Girondins established their own ministry, and Charles-Francois Dumouriez - who allied with the Girondins due to their shared support for war - became War Minister, although he held royalist sympathies. Dumouriez's wearing of a Phrygian cap - the cap worn by slaves freed under the Roman Empire - to meeting with the Jacobin Club to plan the war led to the Phrygian cap becoming a symbol of revolution. After the disastrous Battle of Marquain, where the unseasoned French army invading the Austrian Netherlands fled at the first sign of trouble and murdered their commander Theobald Dillon, Brissot created a conspiracy theory that asserted that the royal family, the generals in the field, and aristocratic reactionaries (whom he called the "Austrian Conspiracy") were conspiring to lose the war, and the Legislative Assembly believed his convenient theory rather than admit that they had miscalculated France's capability of winning the order. After Rochambeau, Luckner, and Lafayette sent letters to the French government to request peace with Austria rather than fight a disastrous war, Brissot's conspiracy theories were apparently proven, leading to the Assembly turning its attention to root out its enemies by surveilling foreigners and deporting any non-juring priests who had been denounced by a certain number of citizens. After July 1792, the Jacobins openly supported republicanism and flanked the Girondins to the left; the Girondins sought to protect the Constitution of 1791 and the constitutional monarchy rather than abolish the royal ministries that they staffed. At the beginning of the National Convention, the Girondins controlled almost all of the ministerial posts, held a plurality of seats, and attracted most of the newer deputies in Paris. The Girondins reluctantly moved into the Feuillants' seats in the right wing of the Tuileries Palace, and they accused Robespierre of instigating the September Massacres, linking Robespierre to Marat. The Girondins later opposed the King's immediate execution. They also disagreed with the Montagnards in that they believed that the French revolutionaries would be able to liberate oppressed peoples across Europe and be received warmly; they oversaw the education of people in "liberated" territories in revolutionary principles. The soldiers destroyed churches, seized property, destroyed community institutions, and looted the countryside, alienating local populations (especially the Belgians) from the French. By 1793, the Girondins had set themselves up as enemies of Paris, claiming that the Parisians posed a threat to the Convention, called on the provincials to protect them from the Parisians, called on the Convention to move out of Paris, and used every trick in an attempt to get King Louis XVI off the hook. Nationwide resistance to the draft and an uprising in the Vendee made it appear as if the provincials had taken up the Girondin call to revolt against Paris, leading to mobs of sans-culottes breaking Girondin newspaper presses on 9 March 1793 and demanding the expulsion of 22 Girondin deputies from the Convention on 10 March. Inside the Convention, the Girondins claimed that Robespierre and the Mountain were conspiring to have them killed by a mob, but Robespierre rebutted them by openly denouncing the demonstrators for illegally attempting to interfere with the sovereignty of the convention. The Girondins vigorously opposed price controls for grain, angering the Parisian street mobs. After the 30 May-2 June 1793 insurrection and the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies, the Girondins rebelled in Bordeaux, Toulon, Caen, and Rennes in the "Federalist revolts". They were purged at the behest of the Hebertists at the start of the Reign of Terror in 1793, and almost their entire leadership was guillotined or committed suicide.
The Mountain was the radical faction of the Jacobin Club, consisting of Robespierre, his Parisian radicals, and 130 Jacobin-aligned delegates who sat on the highest seats of the menage in the Tuileries Palace, on the far-left. The 130 Montagnards opposed the 200 Girondins at their inception in 1792, and, while the Girondins were pro-war, the Montagnards were anti-war. The Girondins blamed the Montagnards for the September Massacres and for serving as the Paris Commune's thugs against the National Convention. The Montagnards later called for the King's execution for treason, and they called for arbitrary justice, while the Girondins called for due process. While the Girondins believed in the imposition of revolutionary principles through military force, Robespierre believed that revolutionary ideals could never be spread through violence. Hardline Jacobin rule in Marseille led to a federalist counter-revolution in the city in 1793, and the Jacobin municipal government of Lyon's misrule over the bread-starved city and the Paris Jacobins' tyranny provoked another rebellion in France's other major city outside of Paris. The Mountain would later support maximum prices for grain, and they won the support of the sans-culottes against the Girondins, who opposed the "first maximum". Robespierre supported the 26 May 1793 call for Paris to rise up against the corrupt and irredeemable Girondins, resulting in the temporary dismissal of the Girondin-dominated Commission of Twelve. The Mountain co-opted the Enrages' policies, such as organizing bands of sans-culottes into a revolutionary army, establishing maximum grain prices, and drafting a new constitution, the Constitution of 1793, which was far more egalitarian and democratic than any previous document in human history. After Marat's assassination, the Jacobins portrayed Marat as a hero, even replacing crucifixes in converted churches with busts of Marat. By late 1793, the Montagnards supported the "Cult of Reason" against both Catholicism and the Hebertists' radical atheism. Danton argued that, with the counter-revolutionaries in retreat on all fronts, the Reign of Terror should be dialled back; he became known as one of the "Indulgents". Robespierre oversaw the autocratization of the French Republic to clear the way for a future constitutional government, and his Law of 14 Frumaire established a dictatorial committee in charge of France, while disbanding the 40,000-strong sans-culotte "revolutionary armies" in the provinces. In March-April 1794, the Montagnards cracked down on the Hebertists after they planned an insurrection against the Montagnard-dominated Committee of Public Safety, having its leaders executed. The Montagnards also purged the Paris Commune of its most radical elements. In April 1794, the Montagnards also purged the Indulgents, leaving the Montagnards in supreme power. Once in this position, Robespierre led the spirit of the Jacobins away from Montesquieu's idea of a nation of laws and towards Jean-Jacques Rousseau's belief in the general will. He believed that virtue was natural to the people, and that intriguers and despots corrupted this virtue. In emphasizing virtue, Robespierre believed that terror was prompt, severe, and inflexible justice, through which virtue could be achieve. Additionally, Robespierre believed in the despotism of liberty against tyranny, justifying "the steel that glistens in the hands of the heores of liberty". Essentially, the Montagnards sought to form a vanguard of warriors to clear out everything standing between the people and their natural virtue, which would create a republic of equality and liberty. To ensure the continuation of the virtuous regeneration, Robespierre purged the assembly of the Paris Commune of people deemed insufficiently loyal, arresting the more prominent men and appointing new, more reliable delegates. He also moved to purge the Committee of General Security (which retained jurisdiction over domestic policing and the pursuit of counter-revolutionaries), which it had supplanted in March 1793, and whose leaders tended to be Ultras, anti-Christian, and pro-Terror. The Bureau of General Policing was created within the committee to take over its responsibilities, and many of the leaders of the Committee of General Security would go on to become some of the prime movers behind the Thermidorian Reaction. Robespierre symbolically did away with atheism by burning an effigy of wisdom at the Feast of the Supreme Being, and the burnt effigy gave way to a statue of wisdom, symbolizing the prevalence of Robespierre's Enlightenment-influenced "Cult of the Supreme Being". Afterwards, he moved to address overcrowding in Paris prisons through the "Great Terror", and Saint-Just introduced the Law of 22 Prairial, which further streamlined the revolutionary tribunal process by banning counsel for defendants, banning witnesses, and making it virtually impossible for a defendant to defend themselves. Additionally, "slandering patriotism", "spreading false news", and "seeking to inspire disagreement" were criminalized, and citizens were required to report these crimes from their neighbors lest they be arrested, leading to widespread paranoia. The newly-formed tribunal set about clearing out the damned; from June to July 1794, two-thirds of Paris' "Reign of Terror" victims would be executed. However, the Committee of General Security grew angry at being excluded from the process of lawmaking, creating a rift with Robespierre. The most prominent of the recalled representatives-on-mission, namely Joseph Fouche, Jean-Lambert Tallien, and Paul Barras; the men associated with the purged Ultras (the Committee of General Security and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois and Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, the two Ultra members of the Committee of Public Safety) and Danton's allies; and the technocrats led by Carnot formed a conspiracy. Robespierre's decision to bring up conspiracies without naming any of the accused deeply unsettled the members of the Convention, who feared that any of them might be accused of involvement and executed. After Collot d'Herbois and Billaud-Varenne demanded that Robespierre name names or remain quiet, Robespierre had the two men expelled from the Jacobin Club. After the two men witnessed Saint-Just writing a speech (which they mistakenly believed would be a mass denunciation of Robespierre's opponents), they decided to conspire with Robespierre's other opponents to strike first. On 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year Two), Tallien denounced Saint-Just at the Convention, and Robespierre's enemies took over the Convention; Collot d'Herbois prevented Robespierre from taking the podium. The Convention moved that Robespierre and his friends be arrested, leading to Robespierre, Saint-Just, Augustin Robespierre, Francois Hanriot, and Philippe-Francois-Joseph Le Bas being arrested. The sections of Paris rallied at the Hotel de Ville to cow the national government into submission, but only 13 of the 47 sections sent armed companies to the Hotel de Ville, while the other sections switched sides to the Thermidorians. The Paris Commune secured the release of the prisoners, but the Convention outlawed the escapees, meaning that they could be summarily executed. The Convention raised a street army from the central and western sections of Paris, who had not heeded the Commune's tocsin bells, so Hanriot withdrew to the Hotel de Ville to protect Robespierre and his allies and confront the Thermidorians. Many of the Commune soldiers deserted once it became clear that they would lose the confrontation with Barras, and Barras' men found the hotel almost undefended. Le Bas committed suicide, Augustin Robespierre and Georges Couthon were found injured, Hanriot fell out of a window into an open sewer and was discovered after three hours, and Maximilien Robespierre blew off half of his jaw in a failed suicide attempt. Saint-Just surrendered without an escape attempt or resistance. The agents of the Convention went on to round up the other Robespierrists, and 22 men were loaded onto carts and taken to the Place de la Revolution (the guillotine having been moved back to its original site), where a half-conscious Hanriot, Couthon (who was strapped to a plank), a dignified and mute Saint-Just, and Maximilien Robespierre (whose jaw hung loose from his earlier suicide attempt) were executed. 83 more Robespierrists, mostly members of the Paris Commune General Assembly, were arrested and executed in the bloodiest purge of the Revolution.
The Enrages were a proto-socialist and ultra-radical faction of the French Revolution which emerged in 1792 and dissolved in 1794. Paris was not spared the economic troubles which helped send Marseille and Lyon into insurrection in 1793 (the disappearance of bread, coffee, and sugar from the market), and angry sans-culottes moved beyond serving as shock troops for the Revolution, developing an independent political programme which put them at odds both with the moderate Girondins and the radical Montagnards, their former allies and leaders. The Enrages were led by the radical parish priest Jacques Roux, who lived in one of the poorest sections of Paris and grew radicalized. He demanded the death penalty for hoarders. Jean-Francois Varlet called for radical economic and social reform, Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc called for mass purgings of the government and army of anyone suspected of not being entirely committed to the Revolution, and the female soldier Claire Lacombe formed the "Society of Revolutionary Republican Women" in March 1793 and argued that liberty and equality applied to women as well. This new breed of agitators was called the "Enrages", meaning "the angry ones", and, while they were as haphazardly organized by the other parties of the Revolution, they shared a brand of aggressive egalitarianism that led to them being labelled as proto-socialists or proto-anarchists. They sought to abolish private property, saw Enlightenment as lacking the emphasis on the right to exist, supported the redistribution of wealth, and supported the execution of traitors, foot-draggers, and Royalists to ensure the success of the Revolution. Even the thoroughly left-wing Jacobin Club was listed on the Enrages' list of people insufficiently supportive of the Revolution. Varlet was arrested by the Girondins, and, after his release, he set about creating a new insurrectionary commune representing 33 of the city's 48 sections. The new commune set itself up in opposition both to the National Convention and the Paris Commune, seeing the old Commune as insufficiently patriotic. On 31 May 1793, the new commune launched an armed uprising, and National Guard deputy commander Francois Hanriot supported the insurrection, deploying the National Guard in favor of the insurrection and aiding in the deposition of the Commune, expelling all Girondins from the Convention, abolishing the Committee of Twelve, purging all government agencies, creating a revolutionary army composed of the sans-culottes, fixed bread prices, expanded aid to the poor and families of soldiers, and voting rights only for sans-culottes. The Commune was allowed to continue its existence after agreeing to these demands, and the mob marched down to the Convention, where they confronted the defiant Girondins and the other members. The insurrection was ill-timed, however, as the strength of the mob diminished as men and women drifted home. The Enrages were cracked down upon by the similar Hebertists, affiliated with the Jacobins, under the Law of Suspects, and the Enrages' distributionist economics were co-opted by the Montagnards.
Center
The Patriotic Society of 1789 was the centrist and pro-constitutional monarchy faction of second-phase revolutionary politics, formed by liberal nobles who met informally after the move to Paris. The society was initially a social club, and prominent among its members were Sieyes, the Marquis de Condorcet, and other former members of the Society of Thirty; it split off from the Jacobin Club. The liberal nobles saw the Jacobins as the next threat to the new, enlightened order. The liberal nobles sought to restrict membership of the Jacobin Club to delegates to the National Assembly rather than open membership, as Robespierre sought. The society was created in March 1790, and Lafayette also withdrew from the Jacobin Club to join the Society of 1789, partly due to his rivalry with Lameth. By April 1790, the Society of 1789 had dues, rules of order, and a basic agenda, and they sought to ensure the survival of a constitutional monarchy based on principals outlined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Mirabeau, Talleyrand, Bailly, and Jacques Pierre Brissot (later the leader of the Girondins) also joined the Society. Most of its members held dual membership with the Jacobin Club before they were forced to pick a side. The Society backed Sieyes for the presidency of the National Assembly, and both Mirabeau and Talleyrand walked out of the Jacobin Club, never to return; others quickly followed, leaving the initiative with the Society of 1789. The Society also offered associate membership status to members who could not afford their membership, and they soon had 160 members, almost the same number as the Jacobins. The liberal nobles went on to voluntarily surrender their nobility and privileges after the radicals voted to suppress hereditary rights on 19 June 1790. The party supported the celebration of the first anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille to put the Revolution in the past. Representatives from every National Guard company in France were to be invited to the celebration, leading to the Jacobins fearing that the "active citizen"-filled National Guard would launch a coup on behalf of Lafayette. The people of Paris worked together to set up the Fete de la Federation, and the National Guardsmen were allowed to camp at the Tuileries Palace before marching to the Champ de Mars, where they were joined by the National Assembly delegates in the rain before holding a massive celebration. By the summer of 1790, the Society of 1789 controlled the leadership of the National Guard, 6 of the 8 members of the National Assembly's constitutional committee, almost all of the presidents of the National Assembly, and the Mayor of Paris, and many of them shouldered their way into royal ministries by proxy; the party was ascendant. The 1789er-controlled military's ruthless suppression of the mutiny in Nancy during the "Nancy affair" led to the radicals viewing the 1789ers as reactionaries. In 1791, the 1789er-dominated National Assembly banned collective petitioning and worker associations, declaring labor strikes to be illegal. They merged into the Feuillants to ditch their reactionary affiliation.
The Feuillants were a splintergroup of the Jacobin Club who supported constitutional monarchy and strong prerogatives for the King, and opposed war with the European monarchies. They were founded by the "Triumvirate" of Duport, Baranve, and Lameth on 18 July 1791 as a merger of the monarchist Jacobins, Monarchiens, and Society of 1789. Barnave's shift towards conservatism was caused by his growing sympathy for the royal family after escorting the family back to Paris from their Flight to Varennes, and he began a secret correspondence with Queen Marie Antoinette and fought to preserve or extend the royals' power. The Feuillants opposed the radicals' sustained assault on the monarchy, believed that the Constitution of 1791 was the final settlement of the French Revolution, and fought against the increasingly militant radicals just as they had fought against the conservative aristocrats. The club was formed from a mass walkout after the Champ de Mars massacre, and the most prominent Jacobins joined them, enabling Robespierre to solidify his own influence within the remnants of the Jacobins. The Feuillants were, at their core, a club for constitutional monarchists, and they were joined by old members of the Society of 1789, who had grown weary of their old club's reactionary reputation. The Feuillants sought to be the ascendant, agenda-setting party for the future, and they sent out communiques to provincial Jacobin clubs to seek their defections. However, the Feuillants became the only faction with any interest in the center as French politics grew polarized. Only 70 of the hundreds of Jacobin clubs responded positively towards Feuillant overtures, and many of them drifted back towards Robespierre. In July 1791, the Feuillants helped pass several laws restricting democratic street politics, such as suppressing the free press, strengthening libel laws, and forcing political clubs to register with the police. They also strengthened property requirements for electors whilst decreasing requirements for National Assembly members, decreasing the electability of the radicals. However, the Feuillants also cracked down on the freedom to organize political clubs, banning clubs from sending out delegations. The Feuillants abided by their own rule, abstaining from becoming a mass movement and instead transforming into a social club, while the Jacobins organized furiously, leading to the radicals gaining the upper hand. Austrian saber-rattling after the Declaration of Pillnitz would sabotage the Feuillants. After the transition to the Legislative Assembly, the Feuillants expected to remain dominant, winning more deputies than the Jacobins. However, the forced retirement of all former National Assembly members led to the elimination of the Feuillant leadership. The Feuillants' high subscription rates, the barring of the public from their meetings, and their refusal to draft political strategies deliberately depoliticized them, making the charismatic Jacobin Club seem more appealing. By the end of 1791, the Feuillants were in terminal decline, although they managed to secure royal ministries for their allies. The Feuillants' failure to prevent the Assembly and the monarchy from going on the warpath against Austria in December 1791 led to Barnave retiring to Dauphine in disgrace. After the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792, 841 Feuillants were arrested and charged with treason.
The Plain was the centrist faction of French politics, consisting of unaffiliated deputies who sat in the middle ground between the Montagnards and the Girondins; they were formed in September 1791 and became the largest faction in the National Convention formed in 1792. They served as the persuadable center of French politics during the early 1790s. During the Reign of Terror in 1794, Robespierre attacked Lazare Carnot, but Carnot was undaunted, and would ultimately survive the Reign of Terror and Robespierre's attempted purge of the Committee of General Security.
Right-wing
The Conservatives (Royalists) were the right-wing faction of French politics. As a result of the reorganization of the left, the right also reorganized and became increasingly conservative. The arch-conservative aristocrats had previously been the junior partners in Mounier's moderate-conservative coalition, but, after the move to Paris and Mounier's resignation, the roles reversed. After the National Assemblby voted to make Catholicism favored in the new constitution as part of a compromise, angered conservatives began to resign and boycott the Assembly in protest. On 19 April 1790, 292 Conservatives signed a petition against the Assembly's actions, sending copies across France to stir up resentment in the rural provinces. The Conservative exodus enabled the Left to nationalize Church lands and legalize their assignat bonds as currency. After the King pledged to accept constitutional government, Conservative morale and arguments collapsed. A small minority of aristocrats fantasized about undoing the revolution, but the King's acceptance of the revolution rendered them powerless. The Conservatives opposed the Radicals' attempt to suppress hereditary rights during an evening session of the Assembly, and they were stripped of their honor and identity by the abolition of noble titles, driving most of them to emigrate after the 19 June 1790 vote. The most reactionary of the emigre nobles actively worked to overthrow the new, revolutionary order. Many emigres led by the Count of Artois (the future Charles X) formed a de facto court-in-exile in Turin, from which they attempted to stir up discontent in France and secure the aid of other European monarchies in crushing the revolution. In the spring of 1790, Royalist agents stirred up discontent in southern France, near their base in Turin, and where increasing Protestant participation in politics angered local Catholics. In December 1790, the planned uprising fizzled out after the counter-revolutionary agents and their plans were captured in Lyon.
The Impartials were the moderate-conservative faction of the conservative camp, consisting of Mounier's fellow moderate conservatives. The Impartials attempted to organize a middle-of-the-road movement, and they believed that the country needed a strong King and a strong Church to consolidate what had just happened, leaving them with little support from both the far-left and far-right. The Impartials looked to the liberal nobles surrounding the Marquis de Lafayette for support, but their staunch pro-Catholicism prevented any alliance. The Impartials had only 70 members, and, among them, only 20 were committed.
The Augustinians were the far-right faction of the conservative camp, consisting of 200 disaffected nobles and clergymen opposed to anti-clericalism. The Augustinians were uninterested in printing manifestos or publishing the minutes of their meetings, instead operating in the shadows, giving rise to fears of counter-revolutionary plots. The Augustinians, named for the abbey where they were based, were forced to move several times due to local opposition to their presence, and they ultimately used their members' homes for their meetings. Just before Christmas of 1789, the Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras was accused of being the point man for the Count of Provence's plot to free the royal family from Paris, and Lafayette, Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Jacques Necker were all allegedly slated for assassination before the Count of Provence's troops would surround Paris. Favras was arrested on 24 December 1789, and the Count of Provence came to the Paris Commune to assure them of his innocence. Favras was hanged as a common criminal after a trial with scanty evidence; a January 1790 failed attempt to free Favras led to any doubts about Favras' guilt disappearing. Fears about the shadowy royalist plots played a major role in turning the revolutionaries down the bloody road to the "Reign of Terror".
Third phase
The third phase was ushered in by the Thermidorian Reaction of July 1794, and it was marked by cynical attempts by the French Directory to salvage the progress of the Revolution, undo the Terror, and retain power. The Directory era ended with the September 1797 Coup of 18 Fructidor, and was followed by the "Second Directory".
Left-wing
The Neo-Jacobins were the moderate radical remnants of the Jacobin Club, led by Jean-Baptiste Carrier. The Neo-Jacobins were targeted by the Thermidorians' Muscadin street thugs on the streets if they were suspected of having participated in the Terror, and, on 16 October 1794, the Thermidorians ordered all popular clubs to publish their membership and stop coordinating with each other; this gave the Muscadins an effective "enemies list" to work from. Additionally, the nationwide network of Jacobin clubs was broken up, and the leftists were driven back into each other's arms. In November 1794, the Jacobins applauded a speech by Billaud-Varenne which warned that the Convention was getting ready to destroy the Jacobin Club. A horde of Muscadins marched from the Hotel de Ville to the Club des Jacobins and destroyed every window in the building; two days later, they pushed their way into the building and beat up every man and woman they could lay their hands on. The Convention decided that the Jacobin Club's very existence was an incitement to public disorder, and, on 11 November 1794, the Convention ordered the Jacobin Club to close. However, many of the former members of the Jacobin Club continued to consort with each other with the objective of retaking power, but they were politically homeless, and the Jacobin Club was dead. In the wake of the royalist 13 Vendemiaire insurrection in October 1795, the French Directory hoped to make common cause with the old Jacobins, inviting them to come out of the shadows with a general amnesty. A few Jacobins were allowed to hold lower-level municipal offices and meet with each other without fear of harassment, but many of them were uninterested in reconciling with the new regime, and sought to topple it and return to power. On 16 November 1795, these core ex-Jacobins formed a new club, the "Union of Friends of the Republic", also known as the Pantheon Club. This club attracted men who had been involved in the great dictatorial committees, such as the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security. Barere and Vadier were among the leaders of this club, and they hoped to bring the Directory back towards leftism; they opposed the anti-democratic spirit of the Constitution of Year III and the greedy speculators who bought up the land. The Pantheon Club soon attracted over 1,000 members, though steep entry dues restricted its membership to well-off members. The Pantheon Club shunned Babeuf as a dangerous radical whom they did not need in their midst, but a few members of the club were unhappy with the complacency and moderation they saw around them, and a secret club within the Pantheon Club began to meet with Babeuf, creating the "Conspiracy of Equals". This smaller group began to recruit members of the larger club, and, by the end of 1795, The Tribune of the People was being regularly read at the Pantheon Club and met with enthusiastic applause. On 26 February 1796, the Thermidorians ordered the closure of the Pantheon Club and a few royalist clubs in a re-repression of Jacobinism, and the low-level Jacobin officials were also booted. This persuaded the Jacobins that there could be no reconciliation with the regime, and they recommitted themselves to the conspiracy. However, the conspiracy was crushed by Lazare Carnot on 10 May 1796. In September 1796, the remaining rump of left-wing Jacobins attempted to incite a mutiny of the garrison at Grenelle (near the Champ de Mars), free Babeuf, and seize power. The Paris garrison grew angry that, while the armies at the front were bathing in riches and glory (especially Napoleon's Armee d'Italie), they sat bored and underpaid in the capital. However, the soldiers were not ready to overthrow the government on behalf of the leftists. On 9 September 1796, 300-400 Jacobins marched on the Grenelle garrison, where they expected to trigger a general uprising, but their ranks were rife with informants, and, when they arrived, they were greeted by a regiment of fully-loyal troops. The conspiracy collapsed within minutes, and, while most of the Jacobins escaped, 130 Jacobins were captured and 30 were executed a month later by firing squad.
The Equals were a proto-communist movement of former Jacobins who, led by Francois-Noel Babeuf, advocated for an egalitarian and socialist republic and denounced the wealthy elites of France. In January 1795, the kernel of another popular movement was formed by the beleaguered leftists, populists, sans-culottes, and ex-Jacobins; the obscure lawyer Francois-Noel Babeuf launched a newspaper, The Tribune of the People, which was quickly shut down by government censors, and Babeuf was arrested. By March 1795, the situation had deteriorated in the eastern districts of Paris such that the working-class began to push back strongly against Thermidorian repression. The sans-culotte and their ex-Jacobin allies lacked both the organizational infrastructure to move its forces and charismatic leaders to lead their cause; the systematic dismantling of the sectional assemblies, the suppression of the popular societies, and the subjugation of the Paris Commune's General Assembly deprived the left of a place to organize and scheme. While the Equals lacked top-tier leaders, the starving and freezing Parisians were motivated to join a popular movement which would challenge the Thermidorian Convention from the outside. The Convention pushed out the terrorist wing of the Thermidorian Reaction, namely the ultra-radicals. The early 1795 purge of the left-wing of the Thermidorians and the rehabilitation of their rivals riled up the eastern sections of Paris, as did ration cuts. On 17 March 1795, radical women marched on the Convention to demand action by the government, but a phalanx of Muscadins led by Freron jeered at the women and threatened them with violence before the women were allowed to enter the Convention and present their petition. The Convention's response was powerless, as France lacked enough flour; all of its mills flooded when the rivers unfroze. On 21 March 1795, the Convention made it illegal to march on the convention with the intention to issue seditious threats. From 27 to 28 March, Paris experienced bread riots, but the radical leaders failed to convince people to march on the convention. With the rallying cry "Bread and the Constitution of 1793", and seeking a democratic utopia for France (with a new, non-reactionary legislature), 10,000 radical Parisians surged out of the eastern sections on 1 April 1795 (12 Germinal, Year Three), overwhelmed the Muscadins, and entered the Convention hall. However, they lacked a charismatic spokesman and coordination, and, as they did not have any concrete demands, their energetic show of force dissipated into milling about. National Guard companies from the western sections, backed up by reinforced Muscadin youth, assembled outside of the hall, and the Montagnards persuaded the mob to leave peacefully. On 2 April 1795, the Convention wound up the trial of the four leftists and ordered their deportation to French Guiana. Billaud-Varenne survived his deportation to Guiana and emigrated to New York City and then to Haiti, Collot d'Herbois died of yellow fever in 1796, and Barere escaped prison. On 10 April 1795, the National Convention sent General Jean-Charles Pichegru to lead police, National Guardsmen, and Muscadins to swarm the eastern districts and force the locals to identify anyone who had a role in the Reign of Terror, leading to 1,600 arrests. The result of the raids was to neutralize the sans-culottes as an organized or organizable force, but they were not completely broken. As the living conditions remained dismal for the inhabitants of eastern Paris, the martial law crackdowns, in spite of their devastating effects on the radicals, failed to put down the radicals. The radicals once again held public assemblies and resolved to do a better job at their next insurreciton, planning to be armed, bring more men, and develop concrete demands. On 19 May 1795, an anonymous circular was issued calling on the people of Paris to assemble the next day to obtain bread and recover their rights. On 20 May 1795 (1 Prairial, Year Three), mobs started gathering, with women going to the workshops and forcing men to drop their tools and march with them against the Convention. The insurrectionaries were beaten back by armed guards in the Convention, but companies of National Guardsmen from the eastern sections joined the mob in pushing its way into the Convention. A Thermidorian deputy was shot dead and beheaded while trying to stop the mob, and, when the mob entered the hall, they were greeted by a severed head. The hall identified the last remaining Mountain delegates and forced the Mountain to deliver the mob's demands: a plan to deliver food to the starving capital, a plan to reintroduce the Constitution of 1793 and hold the requisite elections for a new legislature, to release those imprisoned in the crackdowns, and reintroduce a Paris Commune general assembly. A few Montagnard deputies stepped forward to read out the measures, but a counter-force gathered outside the hall, and, at midnight, this force pushed its way into the hall to evict the insurrectionaries. The mob was pushed out without a shot being fired, but, overnight, the insurrectionaries regrouped for a second attempt. Their allied National Guard units rolled out the artillery, and 20,000 radicals surrounded the Convention the next day. However, an army of 40,000 National Guards from the western section, Muscadins, and regular army soldiers confronted the 20,000 radicals in the largest ever confrontation in Paris during the Revolution. Neither side wanted to make the first move, as most of the regular army troops were just sans-culotte troops in army uniforms; a company of their gunners went over to the insurrectionaries. However, the insurrectionaries grew daunted by the outnumbered forces loyal to the Convention, and some Convention delegates came out to hear the radicals' petition. The petitioners made their demands for bread and the constitution, and the insurrectionary mob dispersed, while the Convention forces stood down. However, the Convention launched a punitive attack on the rebellious sections the next day, facing hastily erected barricades. The Muscadins pushed their way past the barricades and attacked the radicals, but they were forced to retreat, not being backed by the troops. The beleaguered insurrectionary sections then surrendered, and the men who had killed the deputy in the hall and the gunners who had defected were handed over. 3,000 men and women were arrested, every potential weapon confiscated, and the less well-off banned from National Guard service, returning it to its state as an "active citizen" militia. 36 leaders of the insurrection, among them the Mountain deputies who had introduced the demands, were arrested and sentenced to death. Jacobin deputy and the founder of the Republican calendar, Gilbert Romme, committed suicide alongside three other condemned delegates as they were being led from the courtroom, becoming the "Martyrs of Prairial". The insurrections of Germinal and Prairial marked the end of the line for the sans-culottes, who were beaten into submission. After the Royalist 13 Vendemiaire uprising of October 1795, all of Paris' sections joined the eastern sections in being disarmed and stripped of their autonomy. Many populist radicals were released following the French Directory's general amnesty; among these radicals was Babeuf. Babeuf wasted no time in getting back to work, printing the first issue of The Tribune of the People on 6 November 1795. He took on the moniker "Gracchus" and expounded his ideas on how to fix the economic mess which benefited so few and hurt so many. His proposals included total land nationalization, collective farming, and equal distribution of the produce of the land. Babeuf championed peasants in the countryside, and he held disdain for playing to the urban mobs, whom he saw as immoral and a drain. He also believed that the people were ignorant and would betray their leaders at the first chance, and he thus invented the concept of a small cadre of conspirators overthrowing the government and imposing revolution from the top-down (the concept of a vanguard party). The Directory failed to rearrest Babeuf, who continued to print The Tribune of the People. Babeuf's rhetoric gradually took hold of the Pantheon Club, which joined in his "Conspiracy of Equals". After the Thermidorians closed the Pantheon Club, the Jacobins fully supported Babeuf, who attacked the Thermidorian government through the press. On 30 March 1796, after the Directory raised the price of rations, the Equals formed an insurrectionary committee. There were not enough hardcore members to pull off the conspiracy, so Babeuf formed an alliance with the re-repressed "Gentleman Jacobins" and modified his aims to attract the Jacobins; they decided that they should champion the Constitution of 1793 in order to win greater support. The conspiracy sent out agents to drum up support, and agents were also sent to the army garrisons and the new police legion of Paris, seeking to recruit professional men under arms to pull off the lightning coup. The regular soldiers camped at the Champ de Mars garrison were opposed, but the 7,000-strong police legion offered some positive interest. However, the police did not offer enough interest to pull the coup off, and the conspirators did not have enough money to bribe the people they needed to bribe in order to produce a mutiny. By late April, the people of Paris had become excited with Babeuf's calls for more affordable food, and the government sensed that there was trouble in the air. Director Lazare Carnot resolved to crush the uprising in its infancy, and, on 16 April, the Directory declared that advocating a return to the monarchy or the Constitution of 1793 was a capital offense. Carnot transferred police power to the regular army and ordered the police legion to the front lines to serve as a military brigade, causing three battalions to mutiny and declare for Babeuf. They were effortlessly suppressed and disarmed, and one of the conspiracy members, either a man with cold feet or a government informant, told the government about the planned insurrection on 11 May and its leaders. On 10 May, the authorities swooped down and arrested everyone, catching everyone by surprise. The Conspiracy of Equals was completely broken, but some of his accomplices would go on to spread the ideals and strategies for which he stood, inspiring revolutions such as the July Revolution in 1830, the French Revolution of 1848, and even the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Center
The Thermidorians were the moderate faction that came to power following the Thermidorian Reaction of 27 July 1794. They included former Maraisards such as Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, Jean Jacques Regis de Cambaceres, and Francois Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas, oppositionist Montagnards such as Jean-Lambert Tallien and Jean-Baptiste Carrier, and members of the Committee of Public Safety like Paul Barras, Bertrand Barere, Lazare Carnot, Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier, Jean-Pierre-Andre Amar, and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois. Their immediate goal was to save their necks from the guillotine under the Reign of Terror. Tallien and his allies began to dismantle the Committee of Public Safety from the inside, and the Convention voted to repeal the Law of 22 Prairial, reformed the Revolutionary Tribunal by forcing those complicit in the Great Terror out (replacing them with jurists who could only find suspects guilty if their counter-revolutionary intent could be proved), emptied the prisons, sent new representatives-on-mission to the provinces to empty the prison, close local revolutionary watch committees, and empty the prisons, reorganized its committees in August (stripping the Committee of Public Safety of its omnipotence over government, confining its powers to war and foreign affairs), and creating 16 new committees. Under the Thermidorians, the Convention moved to the right, and the Thermidorians allowed the publication of conservative and anti-revolutionary papers which attacked the sans-culotte extremists and their Jacobin masters, and labelled any Jacobins who sought to reinstitute censorship as "terrorists". At the same time, young, dandyish street fighters who were called the "Muscadins" sought vengeance against the sans-culottes on the streets of Paris, as many of them had previously been targeted by the Revolutionary Tribunal, were released from prisons after Thermidor, and sought revenge against the loathsome under-classes. By mid-September 1794, 2,000-3,000 Muscadins walked the streets of Paris and attacked anyone associated with the Terror, and the journalist Louis-Marie Stanislas Freron (a former radical Jacobin and Cordelier) went from cheering on the Muscadin violence to actively coordinating it. The Thermidorian used the Muscadins to beat the radicals down, and the Muscadins were happy to comply. The Thermidorians attempted to shore up their left flank by interring Marat in the Pantheon and extending the maximum on prices for another year, but, after their spies discovered that the maximum was unpopular and worthless due to the designation of assignat as a currency which could be accepted at face value, the Thermidorians returned France to the free market after abolishing the maximum on 24 December 1794. However, the harsh winter of 1794-1795 froze rivers and prevented mills from working, leading to jumps in food prices; people literally dropped dead from starvation in the streets. The Convention ramped up the printing of assignat to enable people to buy food, leading to hyperinflation and a dangerous reliance on a fiat currency. The Thermidorians used the Muscadins to deal with radical leftist trouble, and the Muscadins shut down theater shows they disapproved of, beat up people wearing red liberty caps, de-dechristianized Catholic churches, smashed the busts of Marat which had replaced crucifixes, and even targeted and attacked anyone caught singing La Marseillaise, which they saw as a Jacobin anthem. In February 1795, the Convention removed Marat from the Pantheon after just five months, punishing him for his anticlericalism. While the Thermidorians did not intend to restore the Ancien Regime-era Church, they reversed de-Christianization and, on 18 September 1794, officially suspended all payments earmarked for religious institutions, casting aside the polarizing national church and declared freedom of worship, creating a de facto church and state (formalized on 21 February 1795). However, the Vendeens continued their rebellion, and, in Brittany, the Chouans started their own rebellion of 22,000 Royalists. Lazare Hoche negotiated with the rebels, and, on 1 December 1794, the Convention offered an amnesty to any rebels who turned in their arms by 1 January 1795. Hoche offered compensation for any destroyed or seized property, freedom of religion, and exemption from the draft, but the Royalists secretly negotiated with the British to send an Anglo-Royalist expedition from London to invade France via Quiberon Bay and place the young King Louis XVII of France on the throne. In early 1795, after recalling the 75 deputies who had been imprisoned for protesting the Girondin purge, the Thermidorians decided to purge the left-wing terrorists Collot d'Herbois (the "Butcher of Lyon"), Billaud-Varenne, Barere, and Vadier. Vadier went into hiding, and, on 2 March 1757, the other three were arrested. The Convention went on to readmit more members who had been purged, outlawed, or exiled, including those accused of participating in the Federalist revolts of 1793, and they were regarded as principled defenders of the Constitution who had stood up to the Parisian radicals. After a mob of radicals stormed the National Convention on 1 April 1795, the Thermidorians condemned the four former leftist leaders to deportation, but only Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois were successfully deported, as Barere escaped and Vadier remained in hiding. On 18 April 1795, a Committee of Eleven was assembled to write a new constitution for France. The Convention also declared martial law in the capital, with Jean-Charles Pichegru being appointed to restore order; Pichegru went about his job with relish. On 10 April 1795, the National Convention passed the "Police Law" to justify the disarming, detainment, or harassment of anyone who was involved in the Reign of Terror, and Pichegru assembled the police, National Guard, and Muscadins to round up leftists in the eastern districts, arresting 1,600 radicals. The Police Law enabled persecuted Royalists, men and women who had been victimized by the Reign of Terror, and others seeking revenge to take out their vengeance on Jacobins in the provinces in the First White Terror. The Thermidorians staffed provincial governments with anti-terrorist cohorts, who went out hunting for Jacobins, imprisoned them in local jails, and left them to be murdered by angry mobs. The White Terror was strongest in the Rhone Valley, where counter-revolutionaries ambushed and killed Jacobins (such as members of the watch committees and revolutionary tribunals) on roads and lynched whole families at their homes. After the Revolt of 1 Prairial Year III was suppressed, the Thermidorians cracked down on the radicals, putting an end to the political power of the sans-culottes, and returning the National Guard to being a militia of "active citizens" only. The Thermidorians went on to create a Constitution of the Year III in an attempt to forge a constitution that would prevent the Revolution from departing from 1789 again; it included a declaration of 22 rights (liberty, equality, security, property, etc., although not including freedom of the press or religion until later), a list of 9 duties (defending society, serving society, living in submission to the laws, respecting those who are agents of them, citizens owe their military service to the country when needed), universal suffrage was replaced by a restricted franchise admitting tax-paying men over the age of 21, property requirements ensured that there would only be 30,000 electors who elected a bicameral legislature with checks and balances (the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients), the establishment of a five-man executive committee (the Directory) which controlled the military and foreign policy and had no veto power or control of the public treasury or budget, and passed the Law of Two-Thirds to ensure that two-thirds of the delegates to the new legislature would come from the National Convention. While the constitution was approved by a wide margin, the Law of Two-Thirds was highly controversial, passing by a margin of 250,000-108,000 among the electors; 19 departments and 47 of Paris' 48 sections voted against the Law of Two-Thirds, as both the radicals in the east and the conservatives in the west wanted to toss out the seated Convention members. After the Royalists voiced their anger at the lack of free and direct elections (as they had anticipated a sweeping victory in the next election), the pragmatic Thermidorians released several of the imprisoned leftist leaders and encouraged them to prepare their people for a fight against the Royalists in the event of a Royalist power play. The Thermidorians made a sport of cyclically encouraging and repressing differing political factions in order to maintain the balance of power, and they also brought regular army units into Paris, preparing to impose its Constitution of Year Three by force. On 23 September 1795, the Directory announced the overwhelming ratification of its Constitution and the Law of Two-Thirds, and the Convention provocatively threw out the results from several Paris sections in order to make the Law of Two-Thirds look less controversial. In October 1795, the Thermidorians put down the 13 Vendemiaire uprising by seven Royalist sections of western Paris, ending the last major popular insurrection in Paris during the Revolution. The Thermidorian Convention proceeded to end Paris' local assemblies, locally-controlled National Guard units, and disarm all of the Parisians, ending the days of insurrection. In early 1796, the Thermidorian Directory decided to wean the Parisians off of their rations, raising the price of the ration on 25 March 1796 while Paris was politically and physically at its weakest. On 10 May 1796, aided by a tip-off, Lazare Carnot crushed the Conspiracy of Equals, arresting its leaders and transferring the sympathetic Paris police legion to the front lines of the war to remove their threat. The Thermidorians struggled with economics, returning the economy to specie payments in February 1797 and doing away with paper money; the Thermidorians' economic mismanagement led to conservatives mobilizing to exploit this disenchantment. The 1797 elections were marked by a prevailing attitude of exhaustion and apathy, manifesting itself in a resurgence of conservatism. While the Thermidorians forced Royalists into the closet by forcing all candidates in the elections to denounce both monarchy and the Constitution of 1793, only 11 of the 234 Convention members (the most conservative of the lot) were re-elected. 182 of the newly-elected delegates were identifiably royalist and none were even left-leaning, meaning that the Thermidorian regime and the progress since 10 August 1792 had been dealt a stunning rebuttal. However, the influential Royalists' desire to make a generous peace with the Austrians as the first step for securing generous foreign support for a Restoration, and the Thermidorians' support to secure serious concessions from the Republic's enemies, led to the Thermidorians allying with the Army, whose soldiers were angered at the rumors that the Royalists would return France's captured territories to the Coalition. When, in June 1797, the conservatives voted to rehabilitate the refractionary priests, the Thermidorian-dominated Council of the Ancients vetoed it, refusing to enable the refractionary priests to return to thte open and serve as agents of the Restoration. In addition, the Minitsry of Finance became a conservative minitsry, and the minitsry cut off the Directory of its various revenue streams with the goal of starving the legislative branch of funds to prosecute the war, force them to make peace with the Austrians, break the power of the legislative arm, staff it with monarchists, and invite the King to return home. Once the Thermidorian triumvirate discovered General Pichegru's correspondence with King Louis XVIII from Bonaparte, Lazare Carnot pivoted away from his belief that the Directory should respect the beliefs of the voters. The Triumvirate ordered General Hoche to lead men from the Rhine frontier to the west by way of Paris, even though deploying troops in the capital was unconstitutional. The Directory had the troops rest in Paris as it radically reshuffled the executive ministries on 14 July 1797, appointing Hoche as Minister of War (only for Hoche to resign rather than lead an attack on the legislative councils) and choosing Talleyrand to serve as Foreign Minister (who immediately began planning for the future with Bonaparte in mind, and arranged for the Directory's demise). Within a few weeks, more regular army troops arrived in the capital, coming from the Armee d'Italie and being led by one of Bonaparte's key lieutenants; as an institution, the army generally aligned itself with the republican government. The Royalist delegates in the Council supported rebuilding the National Guard and building armed bands from Muscadins, and, at the end of August 1797, the conservatives finally persuaded the Council of Ancients to agree to rehabilitate refractory priests. On 3 September 1797 (18 Fructidor, Year Five), soldiers occupied all the key strategic positions in Paris, while the streets were plastered with anti-Royalist propaganda, the evidence of Pichegru's treason was publicly revealed, the Triumvirs issued arrest warrants for 53 council deputies and the Directors Carnot and Barthelemy, and the Directory retroactively annulled the election results in 49 departments (purging 177 deputies from the councils) in a coup from above, the Coup of 18 Fructidor, which succeeded without bloodshed.
Right-wing
The Club de Clichy, also known as the Clichyens or Constitutionalists, was a conservative and pro-constitutional monarchy faction which formed the day after the Thermidorian Reaction from former Monarchiens and Moderates (Girondins and Indulgents). The Clichyens were formerly revolutionaries in good standing until the 10 August insurrection pushed them out, and they supported the restoration of the French Constitution of 1791. While the Absolutists supported restoring the belligerent reactionary King Louis XVIII of France to the throne, the Constitutionalists looked to the junior branch of the house, the Orleanists, and supported Louis Philippe, the moderate Duke of Orleans. However, the two sides formed a political coalition to compete in the elections of the spring of 1797, hoping to restore the monarchy. The Clichyens won a majority of the seats up for grabs in 1797, and voters in annexed Belgium sent a slate of conservatives to the Council due to their opposition to anti-clericalism.
The Amis de l'Ordre ("Friends of Order") was a conservative political movement which formed in early 1797. The Friends of Order set up the Philanthropic Society political club, promoting a return to the stability and normalcy of monarchy.
The Royalists, also known as the Ultra-Royalists, was an absolutistmonarchist faction which first acquired representation in the Council of Five Hundred and Council of Ancients in 1795; they sought the full restoration of the Bourbon monarchy with all of its rights and privileges. After the Thermidorians beat the pulp out of the Left in the Revolt of 1 Prairial Year III, the Royalists were eager to take their place as the new opposition to the Thermidorians. With the right-wing ascendant in Paris, the British decided to mass supplies to arm and equip 70,000 men in the Channel Islands, while Joseph-Genevieve de Puisaye drummed up support from among the various French emigre communities in southern England. 3,000 old sword-nobles and former Army officers signed up to join the effort to restore Louis XVII to the throne through an invasion of France. Once it was discovered that Louis XVII had died, French Royalists backed the claim of the Count of Artois (Louis XVIII) to the throne. The Quiberon Bay expedition to southern Brittany ended in disaster, but, politically, the Royalists remained strong. Since the Thermidorian Reaction, their press flourished and published freely, and their Muscadin youths had been encouraged to wander the streets and hunt down leftists. For the right-wing, including the closeted monarchists, their objective was to sweep the elections for the Directory's legislature in 1795, but the Law of Two-Thirds prevented them from doing so. After the Directory's 23 September 1795 announcement that the Constitution and Law of Two-Thirds had been passed, and the arrival of news on 4 October 1795 that a spontaneous Royalist uprising 40 miles west of Paris had been suppressed by force of arms, seven of Paris' western sections declared themselves in insurrection. Barras appointed Napoleon Bonaparte to put down the insurrection on 4 October, and, on 5 October 1795 (13 Vendemiaire, Year Four), 20,000 Parisians took up weapons to restore the monarchy. However, the Royalists had to cross the Seine from the south to attack the Convention, and, while attempting to cross the bridges over the Seine, the Royalists found themselves confronted by artillery. After a long standoff, Bonaparte ordered the artillery to start firing, resulting in a six-hour battle. The insurgents never made it across the river, and the insurgents ran out of ammunition before Bonaparte did. The failure of the 13 Vendemiaire insurrection paved the way for the inauguration of the Directory, led to Bonaparte being given command of the Armee d'Italie, and the last major popular insurrection in Paris during the Revolution failed. Despite their flame-out in the west, however, the Right was confident in its position by the summer of 1796, as the Directory's crackdown on the leftists following Babeuf's conspiracy meant that the Right was being treated leniently. Right-wing papers ran without harassment, right-wingers met in the open. At the 1797 elections, the Directory used a list of officially proscribed emigres to disenfranchise the names still on the list, and the Directory also ordered that all candidates for the Council formally state their hatred for both the monarchy and the Constitution of 1793, forcing Royalists to either stand down or enter the closet. Ultimately, almost all of the newly elected candidates to the Council were Royalists, and the Royalist general Jean-Charles Pichegru was elected President of the Council, while the conservative diplomat Francois-Marie de Barthelemy replaced Etienne-Francois Letourneur on the Directory.
The Legitimate Sons was a small, absolutist clique that dreamed of overthrowing, rather than undermining, the Republic. They persuaded themselves that the reason that the Army garrison at Grenelle had proved impervious to Babeuf and his Equals' overtures was because the garrison was secretly Royalist, so, in January 1797, the Legitimate Sons approached the garrison to support a coup. However, the leading conspirators were arrested, proving to the other conservatives that the only way to progress was victory at the ballot box.
Fourth phase
The "Second Directory" was ushered in by the Coup of 18 Fructidor in September 1797, and it was marked by the Thermidorian triumvirate alternating between encouraging and repressing the left and the right in order to maintain a divided opposition and a favorable balance of power.
Left-wing
The Neo-Jacobins were the leftist faction of the Second Directory era. Previously suppressed following the Conspiracy of the Equals, they returned from the shadows after the Thermidorians purged conservatives from elected offices at all levels and appointed ardent republicans, most of whom were leftists, to replace them. Babeuf was guillotined in May 1797, ending the proto-communist movement in France. The former Jacobins putting themselves forward for election in April 1798 were of a moderate variety, and they supported enlarging the franchise to make the constitution more democratic, and dealing with the greedy speculators who flourished since Thermidor. The Directory feared the Jacobins not because of any radical views, but because the Jacobins might seek to form an opposition party. The left grew in confidence as the Thermidorians targeted Conservatives and Royalists after the Coup of Fructidor, the Directory encouraged the activity of committed republicans, and semi-official clubs of the regime called "Constitutional Circles" invited all good republicans into a coalition against the monarchists. Ahead of the 1798 elections, the Thermidorians decided to target the left in order to stay in power. In the bloodless Coup of 22 Floreal, the Thermidorians denied a quarter of the men elected by majority vote, preventing the Jacobins from winning power; of the 807 council members, the Jacobins won 175 seats and the Thermidorians around 400 seats. In 1799, 134 more neo-Jacobins were elected to the Directory, worrying the Thermidorians, whose support was collapsing. Months later, as news arrived of France's many defeats at the front, the neo-Jacobins entered into very productive talks with army generals about overthrowing the triumvirate, whom the army scapegoated for their lack of preparedness. After the Coup of 30 Prairial VII, the Jacobins were invited into power by Paul Barras and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, who brought aboard the general Jean-Francois-Auguste Moulin as a Director. The newly left-leaning councils reinstituted freedom of the press and lifted the ban on political clubs (leading to the formation of the Manege Club, which took up residence in the manege of the Tuileries Palace). In July 1799, the councils passed the Law of Hostages, enabling the families of provincial troublemakers to be arrested and held liable for any damages caused by civil unrest; this law targeted the families of emigres and other nobles. On 14 July 1799, the leftists in the Council of Five Hundred indicted the Directors Reubell, La Revelliere, Merlin de Douai, Treilhard, and the suspect general Barthelemy Louis Joseph Scherer. Sieyes and Barras found the Jacobin-dominated government to be acting too quickly, so they organized a reaction. Sieyes sought to nip any nascent leftist revolution in the bud, and, on 20 July 1799, he and Barras contrived to appoint Joseph Fouche as Minister of Police. On 13 August, Fouche decided that the 3,000-strong Manege Club was a threat to public safety, having it vacate the Manege before outlawing it a few days later. A few days later, moderates in the council tossed out the indictments of the directors, sabotaging the leftist ascendancy. In early August 1799, a 10,000-strong peasant mob rampaged around the countryside in Toulouse in reaction to the return of conscription, but the staunch Jacobins of Toulouse crushed the rebellion by the end of the month, adding further momentum to the Jacobin movement. The Anglo-Russian invasion of Holland triggered a showdown between the resurgent neo-Jacobins and the moderate Thermidorians, as the Thermidorians were horrified that the Jacobins might bring France back to the horrors of Year Two. On 13 September 1799, General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan proposed that the councils propose the country in danger, just as the country had done in July 1792; this would suspend the normal constitution and bring emergency powers into effect. The neo-Jacobins supported the law as a renewal of the old revolutionary spirit, but the moderate center was unconvinced, arguing that France now had a stable constitution which should be allowed to work. Additionally, the Thermidorians warned that the declaration that the country was in danger had led to 10 August, the September Massacres, and the Reign of Terror, and the motion was defeated 245-171 in the Council. In November 1799, the Thermidorians launched the Coup of 18 Brumaire in an attempt to force through a new constitution and halt the ascendancy of the Jacobins, leading to the permanent "recess" of both councils and the end of the Directory.
Center
The Thermidorians continued to remain in power after the Coup of 18 Fructidor (3 September 1797), having saved the Republic from the Royalists. The purged Directory and councils debated establishing a new constitution and a stronger central government, but the talks went nowhere, and the Directory decided to continue with the existing system. The Triumvirate of Paul Barras, Louis Marie de La Revelliere-Lepeaux, and Jean-Francois Reubell replaced the arrested Directors Carnot and Barthelemy with Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai (a regicide and member of both the National Assembly and National Convention; at the time Minister of Justice, with a focus on combatting the Right) and Francois de Neufchateau (a non-entity whose name was chosen to retire in May 1798). The Second Directory immediately ushered in the "Directorial Terror" to crack down on conservatism, abolishing freedom of the press a week after the coup (first targeting all right-wing publications), passed an emergency law allowing the Directory to replace officials at all levels of government (allowing them to dismiss conservatives and replace them with solid Republicans, allowing for the left to experience a resurgence), targeted emigres by giving them two weeks to vacate the country on pain of death, declared in November 1797 that all nobles were aliens and required reapplication for citizenship (although Barras and Bonaparte, both nobles, did not have to reapply, and the law was never enforced), and the triumvirate demanded that the clergy take a new civic oath swearing a hatred of monarchy, threatening refractory priests with deportation to French Guiana (reversing the conservatives' pro-clerical stances in favor of new anti-clericalism) in order to silence them. To deal with France's economic woes, including deflation, the Directory seized church property in Belgium and sold it off to raise money, and, on 30 September 1797, the state repudiated two-thirds of its debt. Additionally, the Thermidorians overhauled the tax system, sending out tax collectors (many of them from the Ancien Regime era) to collect taxes from the provinces. The anti-clerical Directory ordered an intervention in the Papal States in February 1798 after a French general was killed in an anti-French riot in Rome (as the majority of Italians were conservative and opposed French rule), and the French aided a small group of Italian radicals in declaring a Roman Republic (led by Northern Italian radicals, aided by French lawyers who drew up a new constitution modelled after Ancient Rome). The French disestablished the Church in Italy and confiscated its institutions, and shutting down church functions shut down Rome's economy; for ten months, the French looted the city at will as Rome slid into destitution. When the radical, Italiannationalist government of the Cisalpine Republic in Milan resisted French demands to fund a 25,000-man French occupying army and raise a 22,000-man Italian auxiliary army in February 1798, the French purged the Cisalpine government of men who resisted French demands and appointed men who would sign the treaty. The Thermidorians opposed the Jacobins emerging as an opposition party, as they sought a docile legislature which would serve as a rubber stamp; this led to the Coup of 22 Floreal in 1798. In 1798, the old Thermidorians would be cleared out as 437 seats would be up for grabs, and the Thermidorians intended to control the process from beginning to end. In January 1798, the Thermidorians passed a law allowing the old council to approve the new delegates before being seated, and they also gave the council the power to confirm election results while sending out agents to ensure that there were as many electoral disputes as possible. On 2 May 1798, the Council claimed that left-wing anarchists and Royalists had launched a conspiracy, and the legislative councils quickly processed the utterly-contrived electoral disputes; on 7 May, the Directory submitted a list of summary judgments on which delegates would be allowed to take their seats and which would not. On 11 May, 22 Floreal, the legislature approved the Directory's approved list, seeing all 106 Montagnards lose their seats. Many of the deputies who took their seats would be so disillusioned by the government that they would not resist the Coup of 18 Brumaire. Neufchateau was replaced on the Directory by Jean-Baptiste Treilhard, a Thermidorian diplomat. By the time that the 1799 legislative election was held, the men who showed up to the primary assemblies to vote were decidedly anti-regime, as most French families opposed a return to war due to tax increases, forced requisitioning, and the conscription of their sons, and many French ultranationalists of the Jacobin or Girondin variety were incensed that the French government was not doing a better job mobilizing to win. Of the 187 Thermidorian candidates running, 121 candidates were defeated by neo-Jacobins. The Directory attempted to once again rig the elections through inventing schisms in the primary assemblies, ranting against the "anarchist-royalist conspiracy", and inventing electoral disputes, but the legislative councils chose to confirm the election of anti-regime candidates rather than refuse to admit them. This spelled trouble for the Second Directory, as did the Army's lack of loyalty towards the regime. Reubell was also replaced on the Directory by Sieyes (who had been serving as Ambassador to Prussia) that same year. Treilhard resigned amid infighting between Barras and Sieyes and the others, and Treilhard was replaced by Louis-Jerome Gohier. On 18 June 1799 (30 Prairial), the Council of Five Hundred turned on La Revelliere and Merlin de Douai, accusing them of corruption, misappropriation of state funds, and treasonous management of the war, and they were forced to resign. Barras and Sieyes chose Pierre Roger Ducos and the Jacobin general Jean-Francois-Auguste Moulin to replace the ousted directors in what appeared to be a total victory for the left. The allegedly corrupt Triumvirate men, including Talleyrand, were purged and replaced by Jacobin sympathizers, including Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte. However, Barras and Sieyes broke with the new leftist Jacobin government due to its indictments of the ousted Directors. In late 1799, with the help of General Victor Moreau, Sieyes decided to recruit Napoleon Bonaparte for a planned coup against the neo-Jacobins. Bonaparte was separately approached by the Directory, Sieyes, and the Jacobins with invitations to lead a coup, but Talleyrand persuaded Sieyes that Bonaparte was the man, even while the aristocratic and egotistical Sieyes despised the rustic and egotistical Bonaparte. Over the course of two weeks, Bonaparte, Sieyes, Talleyrand, Napoleon's brother Lucien Bonaparte, police minister Joseph Fouche, and Directors Ducos and Barras formed a conspiracy, and the coup would see the five directors resign simultaneously, the councils would create a new provisional executive to replace the directory, and the executive would draft a new constitution. The conspirators invented an insurrection from the left to justify the coup, and the conspirators secured the services of printers to print propaganda, financing from friendly bankers, and assurances from a cadre of officers that they would support Bonaparte when the time came. On 9 November 1799 (18 Brumaire), posters appeared across Paris warning the people of a Jacobin plot to seize power. An emergency session of the legislature was held, and Lucien Bonaparte warned the legislature of a mob uprising in the making and recommended that the council quit Paris and relocate to Saint-Cloud, to which the delegates agreed. The Council of Ancients was surprised that the Five Hundred had approved the move, and that they had transferred command of all Paris area soldiers to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had previously saved the government from a Royalist insurrection. As the councils evacuated Paris, Talleyrand brought a prewritten resignation letter to Barras and had Barras resign along with the two other directors who had joined the conspiracy; Moulin and Gohier were left as an impotent rump. Moreau then arrested the two remaining directors and forced them to resign. When the councils convened in Saint-Cloud the next day, little evidence had emerged of a Jacobin uprising, and Napoleon blundered into the councils with the belief that the councils would agree to form a provisional government. Napoleon proceeded to enter the chamber with soldiers and ordered the councils to approve constitutional revisions; both councils gave him a hostage reception, calling him a tyrant and calling for him to be outlawed. Lucien Bonaparte followed his brother out of the council and spun a wild lie to the soldiers that a company of ultra-radical delegates had attempted to assassinate Napoleon with daggers, leading to Joachim Murat leading Napoleon's loyal soldiers into the chamber and clearing the halls. The conspirators rounded up enough delegates to form a quorum and call for a six-week recess while constitutional changes were discussed. Three consuls - Bonaparte, Sieyes, and Ducos - were empowered to work on changes to the constitution, and the temporary recess turned out to be permanent. When the councils went home on 10 November 1799, they were never recalled, and the French Consulate was created by the new constitution. Bonaparte and Sieyes agreed that too much democracy was not a good thing, and the new constitution created an apparatus where a commune voted 10% of its members to a departmental assembly, who would vote 10% of their members to a national assembly, 100 members of the assembly would be chosen by a Senate to serve in a tribunate (where bills were debated), and 300 men would be appointed to a legislative assembly (who would vote on bills). The right to introduce a bill would be left to a small Council of State. This would keep the people as far away from lawmaking as possible.
Right-wing
The Club de Clichy were the pro-constitutional monarchy faction within the conservative camp. The Clichyens continued to remain a more powerful faction than the absolutists, and, while they lost all 105 of their seats in the 1798 legislative election, the Clichyens won 30% of the vote and 150/500 seats in the National Assembly in 1799.
The Ultra Royalists were the pro-absolute monarchy faction within the conservative camp. The Conservatives were purged from elected offices across the country after the Coup of 18 Fructidor, and their presses were censored by the Thermidorian triumvirate. They won no seats in 1798, but, in 1799, they would win 16% of the vote and 80/500 seats in the National Assembly. By the summer of 1799, as France's armies suffered major defeats in Germany and Italy and it seemed likely that France would once again be invaded, Royalist agitators aiming to bring the Republic to its knees egged on domestic unrest.
Gallery
Republican militiamen and cavalry fighting against royalist militia
