Eventually, Robespierre's extreme policies came to alienate his own supporters among the Jacobins. When Robespierre called for a new purge in , he seemed to threaten the other members of the Committee of Public Safety, and they came to realize how much of a dictatorship the French government had become.
The National Convention quickly rallied to depose Robespierre. Courtois, Deputee of the department of Aube from Call No. C86 provides a compilation of incriminating documents written by Robespierre's with critical commentary. Robespierre was arrested in July and sent to the guillotine the next day, the last victim of the Reign of Terror. This is known as the Thermidorian Reaction , as Robespierre's fall from power occurred during the Revolutionary month of Thermidor.
The Committee for Public Safety's influence diminished, and it was disestablished in The French Revolution had a deep and lasting impact on the French nation, but it also affected the art and monuments in French museums. With the Revolution, the museum now known as the Louvre entered a phase of intensive transformation.
Previously, the Louvre was dedicated to the royal art collections; however during the revolutionary period, the art museum underwent a series of great changes that resulted in the creation of the first public art institutions in the world. The works of art on display were mostly paintings from the collections of the French royal family and aristocrats who had fled abroad. There was a lot of work being done during this time to inventory and preserve these artworks for posterity.
In December , the National Convention established the Commission Temporaires des Arts under the Committee for Public Instruction in order to take inventory and preserve the nation's artistic holdings. McAllister Johnson Collection of rare books. M , a text detailing his concerns and attempts to protect the paintings and treasures of what would become the Louvre. Martin felt that it was his civic duty to write about the situation of the museum's treasures, because he felt that they were about to be lost due to damage, and that some works of art required immediate conservation treatments.
This text frames the importance of restoring the artworks to their original glory as a task to restore national honour.
G de Nancrede. Boston: , Paris: , Joshua Lucock Wilkinson London: , Skip to main content. MacOdrum Library. Exhibits Collections Services About. This text was initially delivered before the Society of the Friends of the Constitution on July 10, poses the questions: Shall the King be tried? By whom shall he be tried? In what form shall he be tried? In what manner shall his place in the interim be supplied?
How shall it be finally be supplied, if he be deposed? The Reign of Terror, The Reign of Terror was a period of violence that occurred after the execution of the King.
Let us save the People, they will assist us. They want liberty regardless of the price. Let us crush the enemies of the revolution, and starting today, let the government take action, let the laws be executed, let the lot of the People be strengthened, and let liberty be saved.
You have just proclaimed to all of France that it is still in a real and active state of revolution. Well, this revolution must be consummated. You must never fear movements that could tempt counterrevolutionaries in Paris, who would no doubt like to extinguish the flame of liberty where it burns the brightest. But the immense number of true patriots, of sans-culottes who have crushed their enemies a hundred times, still exists [and] is ready to take action.
We only need to know how to lead them, and once again they will confound and foil all conspiracies. It is not enough to have a revolutionary army; you must be revolutionary yourselves. Remember that industrious men who live by the sweat of their brow cannot attend the sections and that it is only when the true patriots are absent that scheming can take over the section meetings. Therefore decree that two large section-meetings be held each week, and that the man of the People who attends these political assemblies will receive just remuneration for the time spent away from his work.
It is also good that you proclaim to all our enemies that we are determined to be continually and completely prepared for them. You have ordered thirty million [ francs ] placed at the disposal of the Minister of War in order to manufacture weapons.
Decree that this emergency production cease only when the nation has given a gun to each citizen. Let us announce the firm resolution of having as many guns and almost as many cannon as there are sans-culottes. You will stand up for your country each month of the year, as well as any other time you are required to do so by the national authority. It is the lack of weapons that enslaves us. A country in danger will never be short of citizens. Description Responding to pressure from the sections, the Convention voted on 5 September , to declare that "Terror is the Order of the Day," meaning that the government, through internal "revolutionary armies" that were formed two days later,should and would use force against its own citizens to ensure compliance with its laws, including the law of the Maximum.
Paris: Imprimerie nationale, , , , Date September 5, Identifier As if reaffirming that Paris was the Revolution, it used the topography of the city as a series of theatrical settings, each of which referred to some point in the recent past, the transforming present and the indeterminate but benign future. It was also — as Mona Ozouf, the historian of revolutionary festivals, has pointed out — a carefully planned alternative to the spontaneous disorders and acts of violence which the Jacobin leadership found increasingly distasteful even when they profited from them.
The chaotic people were to be overawed and so defanged by colossal statues representing, among other things, The People; by expansive music scored for enormous choirs Gossec wrote five cantatas for the day ; by imposing oratory and visual pyrotechnics.
Jacques-Louis David would honor them with their own self-importance safely imprisoned in the calm, adamantine universe of symbols. In deliberate repudiation of Caesaro-monarchist victories, the celebrated warriors were the women of October 5, , who had brought the King from Versailles to Paris.
But the disturbingly potent image of belligerent poissardes astride their cannon had been carefully neutralized in conformity with standard Rousseauean-Jacobin doctrine on the wife-mother role for women patriots.
Liberty attacked by the tyrants has need of heroes to defend it. It is for you to breed them. Let all the martial and the generous virtues flow together in your maternal milk and in the heart of the nursing women of France. The pedestal which had once borne the statue of Louis XV was now occupied by the figure of enthroned Liberty. At its feet were dumped a collection of the attributes of royalty: scepters, crowns, orbs — even busts, including one resembling the young Louis XIV.
Like the pseudo poissardes , most were not the real thing, but had come from the prop rooms of the Paris theaters and had been carried on an immense coffin from the Bastille to the statue. At a given signal, a torch was put to the pile, and as the flames began to jump from the smoke, a great cloud of three thousand white doves was released into the sky. The entire day was, of course, an elaborately constructed, operatically executed fantasy.
Even skeptical witnesses who thought the whole business foolish, such as the artist Georges Wille, confessed to being moved and elated by the proceedings, and there seems little doubt that the same was true of the crowds. But for all the bravura of the occasion there was something slightly desperate and defensive about it, built as it was on the systematic denial of revolutionary realities. And from the moment of its acceptance it was made meaningless, first by the Convention itself, which had been charged to dissolve itself on completion of the document, then by the construction of the working institutions of the Terror, which effectively superseded all its provisions.
In the midsummer of , however, this happy outcome of an omnipotent and united People vanquishing its enemies was by no means assured. There was some good news to enjoy. Both sides had run away on hearing the first cannon shots, but the federalists had run faster and further and so were more decisively demoralized. Since significant parts of Normandy had failed to rally to their cause, it was, in effect, the end of the attempt to create a federalist arc from the Pas-de-Calais to upper Brittany.
In the south, on July 27, General Carteaux had retaken Avignon from the little expeditionary force from Marseille and so precluded any junction between the federalists of the Midi and those of Lyon. Those crucial victories were, however, offset by a more alarming string of disasters.
If that last stronghold fell, the valley of the Marne would lie open for an advance on Paris. On the Rhine, General Custine decided to evacuate Mainz and leave it to the Prussians and was promptly declared a traitor in Paris.
Finally, though the federalist cities had been separated, they had not been defeated. What made this alarming situation worse were the bitter divisions notwithstanding the cult of unity within the various revolutionary authorities and factions over how best to confront the crisis.
He was now faced with the same dilemma that had sabotaged the governments of the Girondins, the Feuillants and the King: How to create a viable state amid political turmoil?
His answer, like those of all of his predecessors, the King excepted, was pragmatic rather than dogmatic. But he was astute enough to disguise his pragmatism in rhetorical vehemence. At the tribune, Danton could brush off criticism by the sheer power of his aggressive personality. Unlike Robespierre, whose rhetorical delivery was relatively flat and academic, and who depended for persuasion on carefully crafted arguments and confessions of personal integrity, Danton had developed a style that was improvised, and unpredictable.
Like Mirabeau whom he much resembled he used his big, solid head, often compared by contemporaries to that of a bull, to maximum effect, growling at enemies, bringing the voice up to its full, resonant volume to shake the Convention into assent.
Had not Cloots even claimed that he would not rest until there was a republic on the moon? For the present, Danton reminded his listeners, it was enough to try to save France.
To do this he was prepared to undertake initiatives he had violently condemned a year before when the Republic was facing a similar situation. Like Dumouriez he hoped to detach the Prussians from the coalition. Though the Austrian Emperor was unlikely to negotiate, especially since his military position seemed powerful, Danton believed that the security of Marie-Antoinette might be used as a diplomatic card and so resisted demands from the Commune for her trial.
A startling appearance by Jacques Roux in the Convention on the evening of June 25 seemed to play into the hands of this pragmatism. It was, in fact, a diatribe against its audience.
For four years only the rich have profited from the Revolution. Has the death penalty against hoarding been enacted? Have the people been protected against brutal price rises created by speculators? Roux was greeted with irritated fidgeting, organized coughing, forced sighs and rolling of the eyeballs to the ceiling.
Five minutes into the speech, though, one particular remark of the orator-priest had them sitting bolt upright or standing indignantly, shouting back, waving papers at his audacity. The offense was enough to get him arrested and for the Committee of General Security to run an aggressive campaign in Gravilliers that forced the section authorities to disown him.
But in his disheveled sincerity Roux had in fact hit on an essential truth. Many of those whose violence in and had made Paris ungovernable, and thus allowed the Revolution to succeed, had never been much enamored of economic liberalism or individualism.
Much of their anger had been a reaction against the unpredictable and impersonal operation of the market. They were not only indifferent, then, but actually hostile to much of the modernizing and reformist enterprise embarked on, first by the monarchy and then by successive revolutionary inheritor regimes. This had put them at odds with the revolutionary elite, including most of the Jacobin leadership.
As recently as February , the grocery riots had provoked denunciations against popular price-fixing by the threat or reality of violence.
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