Les Jacobins
Jacobins, Les. In May 1789 a group of Breton deputies to the États Généraux founded the Club Breton, which soon became a place for debate for other patriotic deputies. That October the club, following the Assembly to Paris, quartered in the library of the Dominicans, or Jacobins, in the rue Saint-Honoré, where the Société des Amis de la Constitution (rebaptized Société des Jacobins after the fall of the monarchy) continued to be an amorphous body of deputies linked solely by their ‘constitutionalism’. However, in 1790, impelled by fear of real (and imaginary) counter-revolution, the club—aided by a succession of schisms and departures—started to move leftwards. By late 1792, thanks to judicious recruitment, increasing democratization, tighter discipline, and periodic purges, the Left—though divided—controlled the club. Internal division did not, however, impair the influence it wielded outside. In its heyday (1791-4) the club, as two Assemblies discovered, was a significant force. For it was not merely a Parisian pressure-group. It genuinely represented a national movement: from 1790 onwards it coordinated and inspired (manipulated even) the efforts of all its affiliated branches throughout France. The result was a ‘climate of opinion’ which was most significant during l'An II (1793-4), when the Jacobins counted some 2, 000 provincial branches and provided most of the personnel for the comités de surveillance and the armées révolutionnaires. Yet it was at that height of influence that there came a series of fratricidal disputes between Montagnards and Girondins, then between Robespierristes, Maratistes, Hébertistes, and Dantonistes, which badly compromised the vitality of the club. Harassed by the Thermidorians, and finally suppressed by law (23 August 1795), the Jacobins thereafter slowly declined into obscurity, though some did join Babeuf in 1796.
In 1791-4 the importance of the Jacobins was such that their name became universally synonymous with ‘radical Revolutionary’ (though they were much less radical, much more prudent, than the Cordeliers). Later, ‘Jacobin’ became a term of abuse. Marx and traditional Marxists, though influenced in their conception of the socialist revolution by the Jacobinism of 1792-4, found the movement wanting; for them Jacobinism has symbolized the romantic belief that human will rather than economic realities can shape history. Most people now understand Jacobinism to mean contempt for democratic processes and majority opinion. In modern parliamentary terms, ‘Jacobin’ designates an intransigent democrat who is hostile to any weakening of the central, centralizing authority of the state.
[John Renwick]
