The Jacobin Clubs In The French Revolution

A pendant to two well-received books by the same author on the departmental clubs during the early years of the Revolution, this book is the product of thirty years of scholarly study, including archival research in Paris and in more than seventy departments in France. It focuses on the twenty-eight months from May 1793 to August 1795, a period spanning the Federalist Revolt, the Terror, and the Thermidorian Reaction. The Federalist Revolt, in which many clubs were involved, had momentous consequences for all of them and was, in the local setting, the principal cause of the Reign of Terror, a period in which more than 5,300 communes had clubs that reached the zenith of their power and influence, engaging in a myriad of political, administrative, judicial, religious, economic, social, and war-related activities. The book ends with their decline and final dissolution by a decree of the Convention in Paris.

The Jacobins were the most famous of the political clubs that fomented the French Revolution. Initially moderate, they are remembered mainly for instituting the Reign of Terror. Crane Brinton's The Jacobins was written in the 1930s, itself a decade of the violent centralization of unchecked political power. Brinton offers not an account of the actions of major figures, but an anatomy of Jacobinism, its membership, beliefs and political platform, the relations between the central Paris club and the regional groups, and how it evolved from moderation to tyranny. Brinton argues that when one considers the material facts about the Jacobins— their social environment, occupations, and wealth—one finds evidence of their prosperity to justify predicting for them quiet, uneventful, conservative, thoroughly normal lives. But when one studies the records of their proceedings, one finds them violent, cruel, and intolerant. The Jacobins present a paradox. Their political being seems inconsistent with their actual intentions. The Jacobins presented for a brief time the spectacle of men acting without apparent regard for their material interests. As the brilliant new introduction by Howard G. Schneiderman indicates, this contradiction defines the Jacobins, and perhaps most other revolutionary movements.

Who were the Jacobins and what are Jacobinism's implications for today? In a book based on national and local studies--on Marseilles, Nîmes, Lyons, and Paris--one of the leading scholars of the Revolution reconceptualizes Jacobin politics and philosophy and rescues them from recent postmodernist condescension. Patrice Higonnet documents and analyzes the radical thought and actions of leading Jacobins and their followers. He shows Jacobinism's variety and flexibility, as it emerged in the lived practices of exceptional and ordinary people in varied historical situations. He demonstrates that these proponents of individuality and individual freedom were also members of dense social networks who were driven by an overriding sense of the public good. By considering the most retrograde and the most admirable features of Jacobinism, Higonnet balances revisionist interest in ideology with a social historical emphasis on institutional change. In these pages the Terror becomes a singular tragedy rather than the whole of Jacobinism, which retains value today as an influential variety of modern politics. Higonnet argues that with the recent collapse of socialism and the general political malaise in Western democracies, Jacobinism has regained stature as a model for contemporary democrats, as well as a sober lesson on the limits of radical social legislation.

It is time for a major work of synthetic interpretation, and this is what The Jacobin Republic Under Fire offers.".