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Politics and Class, 1790-1794: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression in Southern France

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Politics and Class, 1790-1794: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression in Southern France Politics and Class, 1790-1794: Radicalism, Terror, and Repression in Southern France Stephen Miller University of Alabama at Birmingham Between 1789 and 1793, popular uprisings and resistance to taxation played havoc with the nine departments into which the National Assembly divided Languedoc. Counterrevolutionaries organized a series of military assemblies between 1790 and the spring of 1793. These challenges to the constitutional order dominated local politics. Wealthy merchants, lawyers, and former nobles who embraced the constitution of 1791 represented stability and won the support of property owners in elections. Yet in 1793 and 1794, as the internal challenges to the constitutional order diminished, the social composition of local government changed, and many members of the upper classes faced proscription in the period known as the Terror. In the 1970s and 1980s, historians determined that class analysis failed to account for this period. Richard Cobb saw that the Terror was the first instance of popular government in French history but maintained that it was the work of militant coteries, not a social movement. Certain individuals had the talent and temperament to seize power on the local level and impose their vision of a revolutionary order. François Furet argued that the collapse of royal authority undid the social moorings of politics and permitted militants of clubs and electoral assemblies to rally a political community around the ideology of equality and pure 140 Politics and Class, 1790-1794 141 democracy. The underside of this ideology was the contention that its expected enemies, the privileged orders, plotted against the people. Revolutionaries used terror against imagined opponents. Lynn Hunt finds that a "new political class" of merchants, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, and ex- priests rose to power in towns throughout France in 1793 and 1794. It shared the fears of people across the Atlantic world that political organizing outside of pubic assemblies harbored malevolent plots. The French absolute monarchy had deprived its subjects of practical experience in politics. When these subjects undertook an unprecedented project of transforming political language, rituals, and organizations, they therefore had a particularly difficult time tolerating the emergence of political organizations.1 Like the work of Furet and Hunt, this paper shows that language, symbols, and political loyalties rather than economic or property relations motivated the pursuit of 1 Albert Soboul provided the dominant interpretation of the Terror prior to Furet. He argued that a faction of the bourgeoisie allied with an ensemble of shopkeepers, artisans, and workers known as the sans culottes to defeat the aristocracy in 1793 and 1794. Political leaders fixed the price of life's necessities in order to maintain the support of the sans culottes and assure the triumph of the bourgeois class as a whole, even if this measure contravened the capitalist principle of private property. Once this interclass alliance vanquished the feudal nobility, it came apart at the expense of the sans culottes in Thermidor. The Sans-Culottes: the Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government 1793-1794, trans. Remy Ingris Hall (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 251, 254, 263; Richard Cobb, The French and their Revolution: Selected Writings, ed. David Gilmore (New York: The New Press, 1998), 171-74, 220-21, 223-24, 227, 240; François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 22, 24-27, 48, 51; and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 2, 12-13, 24, 32, 39-40, 43, 48- 49. Volume 32 (2004) 142 Stephen Miller national regeneration. It bears out Cobb's insight that the Terror was the work of individuals rather than a social movement. Nevertheless, class analysis helps to explain why revolutionary leaders succeeded in using rhetoric, ideology, and symbols to mobilize townspeople around repressive policies. One can best describe the politics of the merchants, surgeons, master craftsmen, workers, and farmers who entered the political fray in the departments of old regime Languedoc in 1793 and 1794 as envious hostility to the privileged and rich. While these politics are latent in orderly and peaceful times, they become active in periods of political and economic dislocation. Such periods prompted artisans, shopkeepers, technicians, small proprietors, bookkeepers, and lesser civil servants to demand a place at the political table, sacrifices from the privileged and rich for the good of the community, and even the repression of imaginary enemies. The absolute monarchy in late eighteenth-century France created a propitious context for the development of these political sentiments, for it left the impression among contemporaries of a regime of private interests and pretentious displays. Classic studies of the absolutist state show that it not only enforced the personal authority and property rights of seigneurs, office holders, and other nobles but also entitled these figures to lord their affluence over the rest of society.2 2 Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy (1598-1789): Society and the State, trans. Brian Pierce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 121-22, 139-40, 668; David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: the Road to Modernity? (London: Routledge, 1996), 134, 144-46, 149, 181-82, 185; William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 13, 153-54, 281, 292, 296-97, 304, 308, 332. In a review of cultural and political studies of the old regime, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Politics and Class, 1790-1794 143 Jurists, wholesale merchants, former nobles, and other proprietors had the wealth and influence to carry electoral assemblies and control the governments of the nine departments of old regime Languedoc in the first years after 1789, but the Revolution awakened hope among the urban population for participation in political affairs. In 1791, master craftsmen, surgeons, farmers, workers, and merchants began joining Jacobin clubs. Some called for a republican government to destroy the influence of refractory clergy and aristocrats. Many others demanded the mobilization of troops to fight foreign monarchies and internal enemies.3 Sarah Maza highlighted "the realities of eighteenth-century French urban life, with its conspicuous displays of hierarchical pomp and loud assertions of corporate pride:" "Politics, Culture and the Origins of the French Revolution," Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 703-23, as quoted on page 711. 3 Archives Nationales [hereafter AN] H1/748/134, H1/748/292; Archives Départementales de la Haute Garonne [hereafter ADHG] L4543, L4548, L4552, L4553; Archives Départementales du Gard [hereafter ADG] L158, L415, L1089, L1838, L2122, L2123; Pierre Vialles, Études historiques sur la cour des comptes, aides et finances de Montpellier (Montpellier: Firmin et Montane, 1921), 259n; Joseph Duval-Jouve, Montpellier pendant la Révolution. 2e période--La République du 21 7bre au 18 brumaire an VII, 2nd ed. (Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1974), 19n, 20; Xavier Gutherz and Raymond Huard, Histoire de Nîmes (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1982), 222-24; François Rouvière, Histoire de la Révolution dans le département du Gard, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1974), 2:74-5, 78, 307n, 3:30, 34, 34n, 37-38; Gaston Arnaud, Histoire de la Révolution dans le département de l'Ariège (1789-1795), 2nd ed. (Marseille: Laffitte Reprints, 1981), 80, 151, 151n, 153, 187, 205-8, 249-50, 292-95, 324- 35; Peter McPhee, Revolution and Environment in Southern France: Peasants, Lords and Murder in the Corbières 1780-1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 106-7, 111; Georges Fournier, "Structures sociales et révolution dans quelques villes languedociennes," Annales du Midi 96 (1984): 401-32; Georges Fournier and Michel Péronnet, La Révolution dans le département de Volume 32 (2004) 144 Stephen Miller Political mobilization took place within a context of growing economic insecurity. Grain prices increased in the second half of the eighteenth century and then climbed sharply in 1788 and 1789. Prices stabilized in Toulouse between the fall of 1789 and the summer of 1791, but then began to rise until an upsurge between August 1792 and May 1793 made grain almost three times as expensive as it had been in the summer of 1791. Inhabitants of the Hérault and the Gard had never produced enough grain for local needs, and bad harvests in the areas where they normally purchased grain, the bankruptcy of local administrations, and the disruption of shipments by rebellious crowds created the possibility of dearth in 1792 and 1793. The collection of food for the troops being mobilized against the Spanish and Austrian monarchies exacerbated the crisis.4 Economic insecurity fueled conflict between townspeople and local authorities. In early 1793 the Jacobin club of Toulouse, known at the time, like all such clubs, as the l'Aude 1789-1799 (Le Coteau: Horvath, 1989), 110-11; Jean Rives, "Une ville peu révolutionnaire (1789-1800)," in Histoire de Carcassonne, eds. Jean Guilaine and Daniel Fabre, 2nd ed. (Toulouse: Privat, 2001), 163-64; Lenard Berlanstein, The Barristers of Toulouse in the Eighteenth Century (1740-1793) (Baltimore: Johns
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