Ever since Edmund Burke deserted the liberalism that had distinguished him as a champion of American independence and Irish home rule and threw up his hands in horror at events across the water, generations of writers have recoiled in disgust from the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. In other words, Robespierre and his allies should have behaved better. The supreme merit of David Andress’s dispassionate study of the course of the revolution after the attempted flight of Louis XVI in 1791 doomed the French monarchy is to draw our attention away from a select band of supposedly bloodthirsty, crazed demagogues and to focus it on what became a true civil war, a vast national upheaval that brought in on the republican side ‘a population mobilised to an unheard-of extent, and ready to commit remarkable crimes in the name of liberty’.
Underlying France’s descent into proliferating violence and authoritarian rule was the constant threat to the new republic from counter-revolution, both at home and abroad, and the pressure exerted on the Convention (as the National Assembly elected to promulgate a new constitution was known) by the sans-culottes to extirpate that threat. Paris, the fulcrum of the revolution, was largely unopposed in the north-east and the centre. Counter-revolution, faithful to monarchy, proud of local differences and devoted to the multitude of non-juror priests who defied the new ‘nationalised’ civil constitution of the clergy, flourished far beyond the Vendée and exploded into open revolt in a great arc from Marseille and Lyon in the south-east to Bordeaux, Caen and the Atlantic départements of the west. The republicans’ abiding fear was that foreign invasion, accompanied by the return of the émigré notables, would bring victory to the swelling forces of counter-revolution. The Brunswick Manifesto, issued in the name of the Prussian and Austrian monarchies in July 1792, promised ‘an exemplary and ever-memorable vengeance, by delivering up the city of Paris to military execution and total destruction’.
That ever-present danger to the Republic shares centre-stage in Andress’s account with the urgent radicalism of Paris opinion, emanating from the Jacobins, the Cordeliers, the Sections and the Paris Commune, and embracing a broad swathe of the citizenry.
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