Jacobin

 

(jăk'əbĭnz) , political club of the French Revolution. Formed in 1789 by the Breton deputies to the States-General, it was reconstituted as the Society of Friends of the Constitution after the revolutionary National Assembly moved (Oct., 1789) to Paris. The club derived its popular name from the monastery of the Jacobins (Parisian name of Dominicans), where the members met. Their chief purpose was to concert their activity and to secure support for the group from elements outside the Assembly. Patriotic societies were formed in most French cities in affiliation with the Parisian club. The members were, for the most part, bourgeois and at first included such moderates as Honoré de Mirabeau. The Jacobins exercised through their journals considerable pressure on the Legislative Assembly, in which they and the Feuillants were (1791–92) the chief factions. They sought to limit the powers of the king, and many of them had republican tendencies. The group split on the issue of war against Europe, which the majority, including the Brissotins (see under Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre) sought. A small minority opposed foreign war and insisted on reform. This group of Jacobins grew more radical, adopted republican ideas, and advocated universal manhood suffrage, popular education, and separation of church and state, although it adhered to orthodox economic principles. In the National Convention, which proclaimed the French republic, the Jacobins and other opponents of the Girondists sat in the raised seats and were called the Mountain. Their leaders—Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just, among others—relied mainly on the strength of the Paris commune and the Parisian sans-culottes. After the fall of the Girondists (June, 1793), for which the Jacobins were largely responsible, the Jacobin leaders instituted the Reign of Terror. Under Robespierre, who came to dominate the government, the Terror was used not only against counterrevolutionaries, but also against former allies of the Jacobins, such as the Cordeliers and the Dantonists (followers of Georges Danton). The fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) meant the fall of the Jacobins, but their spirit lived on in revolutionary doctrine. The movement reappeared during the Directory and in altered form much later in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.

Bibliography

See I. Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (1970); M. L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Club of Marseilles (1973); Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution (2 vol., 1982–88).

This page describes the political term "Jacobin." For discussion of the political organization of the French Revolution era, see Jacobin Club. Jacobinism is unrelated to Jacobitism or the English Jacobean period.

In the context of the French Revolution, a Jacobin originally meant a member of the Jacobin Club (1789-1794), but even at that time, the term Jacobins had been popularly applied to all promulgators of extreme revolutionary opinions: for example, "Jacobin democracy" is synonymous with totalitarian democracy. In contemporary France this term refers to the concept of a centralised Republic, with power concentrated in the national government, at the expense of local or regional governments. Similarly, Jacobinist educational policy, which influenced modern France well into the 20th Century, sought to stamp out French minority languages that it considered reactionary, such as Breton, Basque, Catalan, Occitan, Alsatian, Franco-Provençal and Flemish.

Historical meaning

In the sense of "promulgator of extreme revolutionary opinion", the word "Jacobin" passed beyond the borders of France and long survived the Revolution.

United Kingdom

Canning's paper, The Anti-Jacobin, directed against the English Radicals, of the 18th-19th Century, consecrated its use in England.

The English who supported the French Revolution during its early stages (or even throughout), were early known as Jacobins. These included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and others prior to their disillusionment with the outbreak of The Terror. Others, such as William Hazlitt and Thomas Paine remained idealistic about the Revolution. Much detail on English Jacobinism is to be found in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.

The Anti-Jacobin was planned by Canning when he was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He secured the collaboration of George Ellis, John Hookham Frere, William Gifford, and some others. William Gifford was appointed working editor. The first number appeared on November 20, 1797, with a notice that "the publication would be continued every Monday during the sitting of Parliament". A volume of the best pieces, entitled The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, was published in 1800. It is almost impossible to apportion accurately the various pieces to their respective authors, though more than one attempt has been made to do so. When is finished in 1798, John Gifford began The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, which ran until 1821.

Austria

In the correspondence of Metternich and other leaders of the repressive policies that followed the second fall of Napoleon in 1815, Jacobin is the term commonly applied to anyone with liberal tendencies, even to so august a personage as the emperor Alexander I of Russia.

United States

Some contemporary political theorists, including Thomas J. DiLorenzo, have criticized Neoconservatism for "Jacobinist" tendencies.^[1]

Allegorical usage

The conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. It was commonly contrasted with the stolid stocky conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire.

See also (other national personifications)

• Helvetia
• Germania
• Marianne
• Uncle Sam
• John Bull
• Johnny Canuck
• Johnny Reb
• Deutscher Michel
• Aura the Finnish Maiden
• Polish Jacobins

References

1. ^ DiLorenzo, Thomas J. (2006-04-08). America’s Jacobin Ideologues. Retrieved on 2007-07-01.

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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