May Coup d’état of Floréal (11th; 22 floréal). Treilhard joins Directory (16th). Egyptian expedition leaves (19th). Uprising in Ireland (21st).
10 June(22 prairial) Fall of Malta.
1 July (13 messidor) Bonaparte lands in Egypt.
Aug. Battle of the Nile (1st; 14 thermidor). Humbert lands in Ireland (22nd).
Sept. Jourdan Law on conscription (5th; 19 fructidor). Turkish declaration of war; Surrender of Humbert at Ballinamuck (9th). Year VII begins (22nd).
12 Oct.(21 vendémiaire) Peasants’ War in Belgium begins.
25 Nov.(5 frimaire) Neapolitans take Rome.
1799
Jan. French take Naples (23rd; 4 pluviôse). Parthenopean Republic proclaimed (26th).
Mar. Austria declares war (12th; 22 ventôse). Battle of Stokach (25th).
Apr. Elections of Year VII. Pope brought to France (10th). Suvorov takes Milan (28th).
9 May (20 floréal) Reubell retires from Directory.
June Sieyès assumes power as a Director (9th; 21 prairial). Coup d’état of 30 Prairial (18th). Forced loan (27th).
July Manège Club founded (6th; 18 messidor). Law of Hostages (12th).
Aug. Royalist uprising around Toulouse (5th; 18 thermidor). Manège Club closed (13th). Joubert killed at Novi (15th). Bonaparte leaves Egypt (22nd). Anglo-Russian force lands in Holland (27th).
Sept. Rejection of Jourdan’s ‘Country in Danger’ motion (13th; 27 fructidor). Year VIII begins (23rd).
Oct. Bonaparte lands in France (9th; 17 vendémiaire). Bonaparte reaches Paris (16th). Anglo-Russian invaders evacuate Holland (18th).
Nov. Bonaparte overthrows the Directory (9th–10th; 18–19 brumaire). Law of Hostages repealed (13th).
25 Dec. Constitution of Year VIII comes into force.
1800
13 Jan.(23 nivôse) Bank of France established.
Feb. Referendum results published (7th; 18 pluviôse). Prefects established (17th).
15–23 May(25 floréal) Bonaparte crosses the Alps.
14 June(25 prairial) Battle of Marengo.
2 July(13 messidor) Bonaparte returns to Paris.
23 Sept. Year IX begins.
Dec. Battle of Hohenlinden (3rd; 12 frimaire). Attempted assassination of Bonaparte (24th; 3 nivôse).
1801
5 Jan. (15 nivôse) Proscription of Jacobins.
Feb. Peace of Lunéville (9th; 20 pluviôse). British peace overtures (21st).
23 Mar. Assassination of Paul I.
2 Apr. Battle of Copenhagen.
16 July(17 messidor) Concordat signed.
23 Sept. Year X begins.
1802
27 Mar. Peace of Amiens.
Apr. Purge of Tribunate and Legislative Body (1st; 10 germinal). Organic Articles added to Concordat (8th). Promulgation of Concordat (18th).
Appendix 2
The Revolutionary Calendar
Introduced in October 1793 and dating from 22 September, the anniversary of the declaration of the Republic, the calendar remained in official use until 1806. The names of its months, invented by Fabre d’Eglantine, were intended to evoke the seasons, but defy easy translation. Scornful British contemporaries, however, rendered them: Slippy, Nippy, Drippy; Freezy, Wheezy, Sneezy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Heaty, Wheaty, Sweety. Twelve thirty-day months left five days over. These days were originally called sansculottides, but under the Directory were relabelled complementary days. A concordance between the revolutionary and Gregorian calendars appears on the following pages.
Appendix 3
The Revolution and its Historians
The First Two Centuries
It has never been possible to be neutral about the French Revolution. For contemporaries, the reasons were obvious enough. Ambitions were released, radical changes introduced, which attacked or threatened multifarious interests in ways where no compromise was possible. And so the essential positions and arguments for and against this sudden and sweeping attempt to transform an entire state, society, and culture had already been clearly staked out by 1791—when Robespierre still seemed a priggish bore, the guillotine a macabre joke, and the Terror as yet unimaginable. But the subsequent experience of the violent overthrow of the monarchy, the September Massacres, and above all the bloodshed of the Year II, complicated all perceptions and has scarred the reputation of the Revolution ever since. Government by massacre outran the worst expectations of enemies and opponents, and tested to the limit the commitment of friends and defenders. So from 1794 onwards, there were three rather than two basic positions. For the Revolution’s enemies, the Terror, except perhaps for its scale and reach, came as no surprise. They had been predicting chaos and carnage from the start. But sympathisers were now divided. The social and political radicalism proclaimed in the Year II seemed to some a prolongation and fulfilment of the democratic promise of 1789. And so determined were the Revolution’s domestic and foreign enemies to destroy it, that only Terror could defeat them. However regrettable, therefore, Terror was an essential defence of the Revolution’s achievements, and integral to it. Others, however, were dismayed that the reforming impulse of 1789 had degenerated into bloody tyranny. For them, the Revolution had been blown off course in and after 1791, and its essence lay in the first two years of comprehensive and desirable reform, before Terror had been thought of. Surely reform could have been achieved without such violence? The three attitudes can be characterized in various ways. They can be called, using contemporary terms, aristocratic (or counter-revolutionary), Jacobin, and moderate. Later terminology would call them reactionary, radical, and liberal; or simply right, left, or centre. Over two hundred years later they still largely underpin attitudes and controversies among the Revolution’s historians.
All the main elements of right-wing interpretation can be found as far back as Burke. From this viewpoint, the old regime was still stable, and fundamentally viable. It followed that this regime must have been subverted from outside. The culprit was the Enlightenment, which, by persistent and irresponsible criticism, undermined faith in religion, monarchy, and the established social order. A more extreme version, fully elaborated by Barruel after the Terror, saw the Enlightenment as a secret and carefully laid plot to promote atheism and anarchy, its main agents being freemasons. Violence and massacre were inherent in a movement unleashed by the enemies of order, for nothing so ambitious could have been carried through peacefully.
The early history of these perspectives can be followed in P. H. Beik, The French Revolution seen from the Right (Philadelphia, 1956, reprinted 1970) and D. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York, 2001). Understandably popular in Catholic circles throughout the nineteenth century, the hostile tradition was given wider resonance during the century’s last quarter by a non-religious writer of the first rank, Hippolyte Taine. Les Origines de la France contemporaine (6 vols., Paris 1876–93), lacking a Catholic agenda but at the same time suffused with horror at bloody popular excesses seemingly repeated during the Paris Commune of 1871, reached a wider audience than many previous polemics. It proved so influential that the leading contemporary historian in the Jacobin tradition, Alphonse Aulard, devoted a whole book (1907) to attacking its scholarly standards—though only after Taine was dead. He was defended in turn (1909) by a young Catholic archivist, Augustin Cochin, who published almost nothing else before being killed in 1916. But in a series of posthumous essays, Cochin resurrected the idea of continuity between pre-revolutionary intellectual societies (including the freemasons) and Jacobinism. In an atmosphere of panic at the successes (and excesses) of the Russian Revolution, Taine’s and Cochin’s analyses were woven into a new right-wing synthesis by Pierre Gaxotte (1928, translated into English as The French Revolution, 1930), an adherent of the Action Française party which dreamed of a royalist restoration. Violence and terror, Gaxotte proclaimed, were inhe
rent in the Revolution from the beginning, and the whole episode had been plotted and planned in the pre-revolutionary intellectual societies. Such views became orthodoxy during the Vichy years (1940–4); but the fall of that ignominious regime discredited them for almost half a century.
Unlike the founders of counter-revolutionary historiography, who largely observed the course of the Revolution from abroad, the original Jacobins were too busy making history to write it. Most of those who survived to compose their memoirs sought to exculpate themselves from involvement in a terror they always blamed on somebody else—usually Robespierre. The most unrepentant former Jacobin was perhaps Buonarroti, whose Conspiracy for Equality (Brussels, 1828, English translation by Bronterre O’Brien, 1836) chronicled the Babeuf plot of 1796 as an attempt to restore and go beyond the lost egalitarian promise of the Year II. But a continuous tradition of left-wing historiography only began in 1847, on the eve of another revolution. That year saw the publication of the first volumes of Jules Michelet’s and Louis Blanc’s histories of the Revolution. Both celebrated the heroic role of the people in the overthrow of an oppressive old order and the establishment of a regime of republican equality. There were no mobs in these histories: popular intervention was a force for progress, motivated by age-old yearnings for justice and fraternity. Nor were the people responsible in any way for the Terror. Michelet blamed it on Robespierre; and the socialist Blanc, impressed by the social idealism of the Incorruptible, depicted terror as the instrument of the self-seeking Hébertists. Both also saw it to some extent as the product of circumstances which nobody could have foreseen or controlled. In no sense was it essential to the Revolution’s work or development.
This was to be a standard reflex of historians embarrassed by the bloodshed which accompanied the desirable social welfare experiments, or ‘anticipations’, seen in the Year II. Even conservative republicans uncommitted to socialism found the killings which marked the first two years of the First Republic hard to reconcile with the progress they thought republicanism stood for. This was the attitude of Aulard, first professor of the History of the Revolution at the Sorbonne at a time when the Third Republic was seeking to buttress its legitimacy with evocations of the First. The French Revolution: A Political History (1901, English translation, 1910) argued that the historic mission of the Revolution was to create a democratic republic. When the monarchs of Europe coalesced to prevent this, the nation was forced into war, and terror and revolutionary government were expedients of national defence, which came to an end when the survival of the republic was assured. Robespierre, to his discredit, had sought to prolong them beyond necessity. Aulard’s hero was Danton, who had opposed their prolongation, and paid for it with his own life.
Aulard devoted the best part of a chapter to whether the Year II brought anticipations of socialism. He concluded not. Appearances to the contrary were simply another aspect of the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘temporary’ national emergency. Other writers were not so sure. The year 1901 also saw the appearance of the first volume of a Socialist history of the Revolution by the politician Jean Jaurès. Socialism was by now heavily freighted with Marxism, even though Marx himself had written little about the Revolution directly. Jaurès wished to integrate Marxist perceptions more thoroughly into its history. Thus he declared that ‘The French Revolution indirectly prepared for the coming of the proletariat. It brought about the two essential conditions for socialism: democracy and capitalism. But fundamentally, it was the political arrival of the bourgeois class’ (1929 edn., i. 19). Accordingly it was not enough to write simple political histories, like Aulard’s. The events of the Revolution were reflections of deeper economic and social developments, which thus far had scarcely been studied as they deserved. Jaurès now used his parliamentary influence to secure public funding for the publication of documents illustrating the economic and social history of the Revolution. And although politics reclaimed him (he had only begun to write his history while temporarily without a seat in the legislature) by the 1920s the approach he had established would achieve dominance in the French historiography of the Revolution. It would retain it for almost sixty years as what Albert Soboul, its last great upholder, would call the ‘classic’ interpretation.
Yet it owed much of its triumph to an event Jaurès did not live to see and would have deplored if he had: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia. Carried out by Marxists who openly claimed the heritage of Robespierre and the Jacobins of the Year II, the Russian Revolution inspired several generations of western sympathizers, and in France all those who thought that the business left unfinished in 1794 might still be brought to a glorious and workable conclusion. First to be enthused among historians was Albert Mathiez. Trained by Aulard, he was much more inspired by Jaurès. By 1908 he had already broken dramatically with his master and begun to establish a rival and more radical school of revolutionary scholarship and interpretation, the Society for Robespierrist Studies. It still exists, and its journal, the Annales Historiques de la Révolution française, remains the leading French periodical in the field. Mathiez’s quarrel with Aulard was mainly played out through attacks on the historical reputation of Danton, whom he depicted as corrupt, self-serving, and possibly even treasonous. In contrast, Mathiez set out to restore the reputation of Robespierre. Not since Buonarroti had anyone dared to mount an outright defence of a figure who, however idealistic and incorruptible, was inseparably associated with terror. The early experiences of the Russian revolutionaries, however, showed that terror might be necessary if reactionaries were not to triumph. In this light, Mathiez had no problem in justifying its use. ‘Revolutionary France would not have accepted the Terror if it had not been convinced that victory was impossible without the suspension of liberties’ and ‘Robespierre and his party perished very largely for having wished to make Terror instrumental in a new upheaval in property.’ Hopes of social and democratic revolution came to an end with that downfall, and Mathiez’s great history of the Revolution (1922–7, English translation, 1928) ended abruptly on 9 Thermidor. After that, there was nothing but a long wave of ‘reaction’.
When Mathiez died suddenly, at only 58, in 1932, there were no successors to his polemical and pugnacious style. Left-wing historians now tended to concentrate on detailed economic and social analyses. Most prominent was Mathiez’s exact contemporary, Georges Lefebvre, and he lived on until 1959. After making his reputation with studies of the peasantry, for the 150th anniversary celebrations in 1939 Lefebvre produced an elegant and succinct survey of the Revolution’s origins, Quatre Vingt Neuf (English translation, The Coming of the French Revolution [Princeton, NJ, 1946]), which was built around the now orthodox proposition that ‘economic power, ability, and a sense of the future were passing into the hands of the bourgeoisie…: the Revolution of 1789 re-established harmony between fact and law’. As to the Terror, in a general history published in 1930 (English translation, 2 vols., 1962–4), Lefebvre declared that ‘in spite of elements which extended it rashly or polluted it, it remained until the triumph of the Revolution what it had been from the first moment: a punitive reaction linked indissolubly to the defensive impetus against the “aristocratic plot”’.
The scholarly hegemony of this left-wing approach was abruptly curtailed under Vichy. But after the Liberation, with the right completely discredited and large numbers of young intellectuals joining the Communist party, it re-emerged stronger than ever. While the massive researches of Ernest Labrousse (La Crise de l’économie française à la fin de l’ancien régime et au début de la Révolution [Paris, 1944]) rooted the Revolution firmly in an economic context, a new generation was represented by Albert Soboul, who in Les Sansculottes Parisiens en l’An II (Paris, 1958; English translation, 1964) concentrated scholarly analysis on the so-called ‘popular movement’ which had driven revolutionary radicalization along. But his general overview was unaffected. ‘The French Revolution’, he proclaimed in a new survey published in 1962 (English translation, 1989) cit
ing Marx and Engels in support, ‘constitutes…the crowning moment of a long economic and social evolution which has made the bourgeoisie the mistress of the world. This truth may pass nowadays for a commonplace…’
The triumph of the bourgeoisie was not, however, simply a Marxist idea. Indeed, it is likely that Marx took it from the first general histories of the Revolution to be written, under the Restoration. These were the histories by François Mignet (1824) and Adolphe Thiers (1823–7). The context of their appearance can be followed in S. Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians of the French Restoration (New York, 1958). These historians established the main outlines of the liberal approach to the Revolution. They found revolution justified by the abuses and inequities of the Old Regime. The enrichment, expansion, and education of the bourgeoisie had made its members impatient with the role of an absolute monarch and the social domination of a hereditary nobility. They had sought to establish a constitutional monarchy, embodying representative institutions and a range of equal and guaranteed political and civil rights; but the whole enterprise had been diverted in and after 1791 by the intervention of popular forces with no interest in stability or public order. Liberal historians admired and emphasized the importance of courageous men who had tried to stabilize the Revolution in vain, men such as Mirabeau, and even Danton. They shrank in horror from bloodthirsty populists like Marat, and of course the heartless dictator and defender of terror, Robespierre, not to mention the even more terrifying Saint-Just. The essential problem for historians writing from this perspective has always been why and when a revolution that began so well ‘went wrong’.
Most historians writing on the Revolution in English have shared this problematic. Their nineteenth-century debates are fully analysed in H. Ben-Israel, English Historians and the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968). Nevertheless the dominant Anglophone perception of the Revolution throughout the nineteenth century was probably that of Thomas Carlyle (1835) mediated by his admirer Charles Dickens through A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Surprisingly, Burke’s blanket condemnation found few echoes in the land where he wrote it. In most British eyes lack of parliamentary government and free speech were enough in themselves to have justified the overthrow of absolute monarchy—though never the violence that followed, understandable though Carlyle at least found it in the light of previous popular misery and degradation. But before the mid-twentieth century few British or American historians spent much time in France or its archives. Their work was largely based on distilling French authors who appeared sympathetic to the British example of peaceful evolution towards liberal institutions. The one they took most to their hearts, however (and Americans, too, since his first important book was on transatlantic democracy), stood apart from the mainstream of French liberalism: Alexis de Tocqueville.
The Oxford History of the French Revolution Page 63