Jacobinism

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Jacobinism

The Jacobins, founded in 1789 by the Breton deputies to the National Assembly, were the most famous and powerful of the political clubs or societies of the French Revolution. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. They derived their popular name from the house on the Rue St. Jacques where they met in Paris. The bloodiest excesses of the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) can be attributed to their influence and activities. Jacobinism came to denote rabble-rousing radicalism.

Some of the most famous figures of the revolution, most notably Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), were members of this society. Many of its leaders served in prominent posts in the Directory of Public Safety that, following the overthrow of the monarchy, ruled France from 1793 to 1794. At first, only deputies, liberal aristocrats, and well-off bourgeois could afford to belong. However, after the reduction of its subscription rates, its ranks were open to the less well off: writers, small shopkeepers, and artisans. The expansion of its membership brought in members with more radical antimonarchical and anticlerical views.

Political clubs grew in popularity as the church and guilds declined. Hundreds of organizations similar to the Jacobin clubs were established from the 1780s to the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1804–1815) when they were abolished. They performed many of the functions of a modern political party or party caucus where citizens could meet to discuss public issues, devise strategies, hear speakers, and send delegations to the National Assembly to lobby or threaten.

The mother club in Paris spawned a network of approximately 5,500 Jacobin “cells” in the provinces. These clubs served a variety of roles and functions. They were foremost agents for propaganda-disseminating newspapers, pamphlets, and circulars. As quasi-official units of government, the clubs promoted civic improvement. They held rallies and revolutionary festivals to arouse revolutionary passion and honor the heroes of the revolution. They also raised funds to assist the widows and orphans of victims of revolutionary wars and helped members find jobs. In addition, the clubs operated a spy network to keep an eye on local authorities and émigrés, refractory priests, and other suspected persons. During the Reign of Terror the Jacobins were especially vigilant denouncing persons and purging administrators suspected of antirevolutionary sympathies. Similar to the Communist Party under Vladimir Ilitch Lenin, they were the ideological and organizational heart of the revolution. Their highly centralized organization was held together by their implacable faith in equality and the revolution.

The Jacobins championed republican government, the rule of the people, the abolition of the hereditary aristocracy, popular education, separation of church and state, and universal manhood suffrage. Convinced that the unequal distribution of private goods would lead to political inequality, Robespierre favored fixed limits on the accumulation of wealth. Envisioning a nation of small property owners, however, he opposed the demand of the more radical Enragés for the nationalization of all property. The Jacobins, in their bourgeois phase, believed in laissez-faire economic policies and a qualified right to private property that would exclude émigrés and priests.

All people were created equal, they believed, because they are naturally good and virtuous. Tradition, custom, and religion were condemned as impediments to the attainment of universal equality. Social inequality would be eliminated by the spread of education and enlightened reason. Confident of their personal virtue, the Jacobins condemned their opponents as not only wrong but also evil. Moreover, this “band of the elect” felt obligated to root out political heresies and blasphemies.

As historian Crane Brinton (1961) points out, the Jacobins were mostly prosperous middle-class people who became religious fanatics. After the ascendancy of Robespierre, Jacobinism was transformed into a kind of quasi-religious cult. Robespierre saw himself as the prophet of a new civic religion. He envisioned a spiritual republic, a Republic of Virtue, rooted in “holy Equality and the sacred Rights of Man.” Under his leadership a totalitarian dictatorship was created through the Committee of Public Safety. His religion of virtue would bring a new moral world and the regeneration of humanity. This creed also provided a moral justification for the Terror. Purity became a political fetish. Anyone who did not enthusiastically embrace the new faith was suspected of harboring antirevolutionary opinions and summarily condemned to the guillotine.

The end for the Jacobins came swiftly. As Robespierre’s power grew, his popularity waned. The members of the National Convention, fearing that a new purge would be directed at them, declared him and his associates to be outlaws on July 27, 1794, and had them guillotined the following day. With the fall of Robespierre came the fall of the Jacobins.

The spirit of Jacobin ideas continued in a somewhat altered form in the Directory and later in the Revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. Some of the ideas of the Jacobins persist as a radical opposition to European and North American civilization. They gained a small victory in the Americas when their slogans of “liberty and equality” inspired the 1791 slave revolt in the French West India colony of San Domingo. Called “black Jacobins” by the black Marxist historian, C. L. R. James (1938), Toussaint Louverture (1746–1803) and his followers successfully fought for the French Republic against the British, forcing them to withdraw from Haiti in 1798. In the early twenty-first century, some critics of American foreign policy believe that the neoconservative quest for global hegemony in the name of “human rights,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “equality,” and “capitalism” represents an extension of the Jacobin imagination.