| The insurrection 12 Germinal Year III | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the French Revolution | |||||
 The deportation of former members of the Comité de salut public Barère, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d’Herbois | |||||
| |||||
The insurrection of 12 Germinal Year III was a popular revolt in Paris on 1 April 1795 against the policies of the Thermidorian Convention. It was provoked by poverty and hunger resulting from the abandonment of the controlled economy after the dismantling of the Revolutionary Government during Thermidorian Reaction.
The abandonment of the controlled economy provoked a frightful economic catastrophe. Prices soared and the rate of exchange fell. The Republic was condemned to massive inflation and its currency was ruined. In Thermidor, Year III, assignats were worth less than 3 percent of their face value. Neither peasants nor merchants would accept anything but cash. The debacle was so swift that economic life seemed to come to standstill. [1]
The insurmountable obstacles raised by the premature reestablishment of economic freedom reduced the government to a state of extreme weakness. Lacking resources, it became almost incapable of administration, and the crisis generated troubles that nearly brought its collapse. The sans-culottes , who had unprotestingly permitted the Jacobins to be proscribed, began to regret the regime of the Year II, now that they themselves were without work and without bread. The Thermidorians accused the Montagnards of pushing them to revolt in desperation. [2]
On 17 March a delegation from faubourgs Saint-Marceau and Saint-Jacques complained that "We are on the verge of regretting all the sacrifices that we have made for the Revolution". Police law was passed that laid down the death penalty for the use of seditious language. Arms were distributed to the "good citizens", the faithful nucleus of the National Guard. [3]
On 12 Germinal (1 April), the session of the Convention was interrupted by a crowd which invaded the chamber with cries of "Bread! Bread!" and created a prolong uproar. Vanheck, at the head of the Cité Section, imposed silence and demanded the application of the Constitution of 1793, measures to deal with the shortage of food, and the release of the imprisoned patriots. The demonstration finally allowed themselves to be persuaded, by the Montagnards themselves, to march past the bar and evacuate the chamber. In point of fact, it is impossible to talk of an insurrection organized by the sections; two of them, indeed, in respectful address, expressed themselves to the same effect as the Thermidorians. It is therefore obvious that the movement had no leaders worthy of the name, and that the agitators, launching forth into speeches, had been unable to reconstruct the bands which in the past had insured the success of the journées. The demonstrators were unarmed; they had repulsed the jeunesse dorée easily, but when the National Guards of the western sections, led by Merlin de Thionville, appeared, they withdrew without offering any resistance. However, the city was seriously disturbed; the Panthéon and Cité sections declared themselves in permanent session; when Auguis and Pénières went to their headquarters, the former was arrested and wounded; a shot was fired at the latter. On the thirteenth, the agitation continued at the Quinze-Vingts. In the preceding night, the Convention had placed Paris under martial law and given command of the city to Pichegru, who happened to be there at the time, detailing Merlin de Thionville and Barras to assist him. [4]
The main consequence of the insurrection was to accelerate still further the political reaction. The Assembly immediately voted the deportation of Collot, Billaud, and Barère to Guiana. Eight prominent Montagnards were arrested including Amar, Leonard Bourdon, Cambon, René Levasseur, Maignet, Lecointre and Thuriot, who had been early leaders of the Thermidorian Reaction, was an indication of the extent to which the Assembly was now bent on undoing the past. The main weight of repression fell on the sans-culottes. A state of siege was declared in Paris and many of the germinal leaders were arrested. Under pressure from the Sections, the Assembly, on 10 April, ordered the disarming, in Paris and the provinces, of all who had played a leading part in the Terror. It is estimated that in Paris alone about 1,600 sans-culottes were affected by the measure. In the provinces, the decree of 10 April was often the signal for the arrest and prosecution of former terrorists. In Lyons and the south-east it probably helped to set off the prison massacres for which it designated the victims. [5]
The National Convention was the constituent assembly of the Kingdom of France for one day and the French First Republic for its first three years during the French Revolution, following the two-year National Constituent Assembly and the one-year Legislative Assembly. Created after the great insurrection of 10 August 1792, it was the first French government organized as a republic, abandoning the monarchy altogether. The Convention sat as a single-chamber assembly from 20 September 1792 to 26 October 1795.
The Mountain was a political group during the French Revolution. Its members, called the Montagnards, sat on the highest benches in the National Convention. The term, first used during a session of the Legislative Assembly, came into general use in 1793. By the summer of 1793, that pair of opposed minority groups divided the National Convention. That year, the Montagnards were influential in what is commonly known as the Reign of Terror.
The sans-culottes were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to "aristocrat", seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by Jean-Bernard Gauthier de Murnan in a derogatory sense, speaking about a "sans-culottes army". The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792.
In the historiography of the French Revolution, the Thermidorian Reaction is the common term for the period between the ousting of Maximilien Robespierre on 9 Thermidor II, or 27 July 1794, and the inauguration of the French Directory on 2 November 1795.
Jean-Lambert Tallien was a French politician of the revolutionary period. Though initially an active agent of the Reign of Terror, he eventually clashed with its leader, Maximilien Robespierre, and is best known as one of the key figures of the Thermidorian Reaction that led to the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror.
This glossary of the French Revolution generally does not explicate names of individual people or their political associations; those can be found in List of people associated with the French Revolution.
The Paris Commune during the French Revolution was the government of Paris from 1789 until 1795. Established in the Hôtel de Ville just after the storming of the Bastille, it consisted of 144 delegates elected by the 60 divisions of the city. Before its formal establishment, there had been much popular discontent on the streets of Paris over who represented the true Commune, and who had the right to rule the Parisian people. The first mayor was Jean Sylvain Bailly, a relatively moderate Feuillant who supported constitutional monarchy. He was succeeded in November 1791 by Pétion de Villeneuve after Bailly's unpopular use of the National Guard to disperse a riotous assembly in the Champ de Mars.
Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, sometimes nicknamed the Archangel of Terror, was a French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, a Jacobin club leader, and a major figure of the French Revolution. As the youngest member elected to the National Convention, Saint-Just belonged to the Mountain faction. A steadfast supporter and close friend of Robespierre, he was swept away in his downfall during 9th Thermidor.
The insurrection of 10 August 1792 was a defining event of the French Revolution, when armed revolutionaries in Paris, increasingly in conflict with the French monarchy, stormed the Tuileries Palace. The conflict led France to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic.
Jean-Nicolas Pache was a French politician, a Jacobin who served as Minister of War from October 1792 and Mayor of Paris from February 1793 to May 1794.
The Enragés, commonly known as the Ultra-radicals, were a small number of firebrands known for defending the lower class and expressing the demands of the radical sans-culottes during the French Revolution. They played an active role in the 31 May – 2 June 1793 Paris uprisings that forced the expulsion of the Girondins from the National Convention, allowing the Montagnards to assume full control. The Enragés gained their name for their angry rhetoric appealing to the National Convention to take more measures that would benefit the poor. Jacques Roux, Jean-François Varlet, Jean Théophile Victor Leclerc and Claire Lacombe, the primary leaders of the Enragés, were strident critics of the National Convention for failing to carry out the promises of the French Revolution.
François Hanriot was a French Sans-culotte leader, street orator, and commander of the National Guard during the French Revolution. He played a vital role in the Insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793 and subsequently the fall of the Girondins. On 27 July 1794 he tried to release Maximilien Robespierre, who was arrested by the Convention. He was executed on the next day – together with Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon – by the rules of the law of 22 Prairial, only verifying his identity at the trial.
The term Muscadin, meaning "wearing musk perfume", came to refer to mobs of young men, relatively well-off and dressed in a dandyish manner, who were the street fighters of the Thermidorian Reaction in Paris in the French Revolution (1789-1799). After the coup against Robespierre and the Jacobins of 9 Thermidor Year II, they took on the remaining Jacobins and sans-culottes, and largely succeeded in suppressing them over the next year or two. In prints they are often seen carrying large wooden clubs, which they liked to call "constitutions". They were supposedly organized by the politician and journalist Louis-Marie Stanislas Fréron, and eventually numbered 2,000-3,000. They, in fact, seem to have mostly consisted of the lower middle classes, the sons of "minor officials and small shopkeepers", and were quietly encouraged by the shaky new government, who had good reason to fear Jacobin mobs, and wider unrest as the hard winter of 1794-5 saw increasing hunger among the Parisian working class. The Muscadins are considered to be part of the First White Terror in response to the preceding Reign of Terror of the Jacobins.
Legislative elections were held in France between 12 and 21 October 1795 to elect one-third of the members of the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients, the lower and upper houses of the legislature. The elections were held in accordance with the Constitution of the Year III and the first under the Directory regime.
The White Terror was a period during the French Revolution in 1795 when a wave of violent attacks swept across much of France. The victims of this violence were people identified as being associated with the Reign of Terror – followers of Robespierre and Marat, and members of local Jacobin clubs. The violence was perpetrated primarily by those whose relatives or associates had been victims of the Great Terror, or whose lives and livelihoods had been threatened by the government and its supporters before the Thermidorean Reaction. Principally, these were, in Paris, the Muscadins, and in the countryside, monarchists, supporters of the Girondins, those who opposed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and those otherwise hostile to the Jacobin political agenda.
The insurrection of 1 Prairial Year III was a popular revolt in Paris on 20 May 1795 against the policies of the Thermidorian Convention. It was one of the last popular revolts of the French Revolution. After their defeat in Prairial, the sans-culottes ceased to play any effective part until the next round of revolutions in the early nineteenth century. To a lesser extent, these movements are also important in that they mark the final attempt of the remnants of the Mountain and the Jacobins to recapture their political ascendancy in the Convention and the Paris Sections; this time, though they gave some political direction to the popular movement which arose in the first place in protest against worsening economic conditions, their intervention was timorous and halfhearted and doomed the movement to failure.
The insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, during the French Revolution, started after the Paris commune demanded that 22 Girondin deputies and members of the Commission of Twelve should be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Jean-Paul Marat led the attack on the representatives in the National Convention, who in January had voted against the execution of the King and since then had paralyzed the convention. It ended after thousands of armed citizens surrounded the convention to force it to deliver the deputies denounced by the Commune. The insurrection resulted in the fall of 29 Girondins and two ministers under pressure of the sans-culottes, Jacobins, and Montagnards.
Pierre Louis Bentabole was a French revolutionary and statesman, born in Landau Haut Rhin on 4 June 1756 and died in Paris on 22 April 1798. As a lawyer, he presided and practiced in the districts Hagenau and Saverne; he was appointed as the deputy of the Bas-Rhin to the National Convention on 4 September 1792; he voted to execute Louis XVI during his service. On 6 October 1794, he was appointed to the Committee of Public Safety.
