Jacobin Clubs

JACOBIN CLUBS

JACOBIN CLUBS, activist political clubs that appeared in the cities of the United States in the years from 1793 to 1795. The first club began in Paris under the name Club Breton, in October 1789: it met in a Dominican, or Jacobin, convent in the Rue St. Honoré. The Jacobin clubs gained increasing influence in the French Revolution after France declared itself a republic in 1792. Led by Maximilien Robespierre in 1793, the clubs helped support the most radical phase of the French Revolution. The French Jacobins believed in universal equality among citizens, the freedom of the individual, and universal brotherhood. By July 1794 the Paris Jacobin club was closed after the Jacobin leaders associated with Robespierre lost power. In November 1794 the clubs were suppressed.

The first American club began in Philadelphia in 1793. Some of the members were skilled craftsmen, others were merchants and professionals, and many were prominent intellectuals. Their membership overlapped with the Democratic Society of Philadelphia. Similarly, the Jacobin Club of Charleston, South Carolina, over-lapped with the Republican Society there. The Charleston Club had connections through the prominent Huguenots in that city to other sympathizers with the French Revolution in the West Indies and in France. The Jacobin clubs in the United States sought to promote the broad aims of the French Revolution, including democracy and support for the French government against the European monarchies warring against it. Initially, their aims were popular in the cities, but after American disillusionment with the French minister Edmond Charles Genêt, the influence of the Jacobin clubs waned.

By 1795 the clubs had largely disbanded. "Jacobinism," however, had become a loaded epithet in American political rhetoric, used by Federalists to target not only radical democrats but also any follower of Thomas Jefferson, or any member of the Democratic Republican Party. The word "Jacobin" as an epithet still appeared occasionally in American conservative journals in the 1820s, a generation after the Jacobins in France had become politically moribund.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kennedy, Michael L. "A French Jacobin Club in Charleston, South Carolina, 1792–1795." South Carolina Historical Magazine 91 (1990): 4–22.

———. The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Link, Eugene Perry. Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.

Andrew W. Robertson