Fear and Violence in the French Revolution

Chapter 1 — Updated May 29, 2011 — 18,898 characters

In general, people were scared during the French Revolution: “something about the message of the Fear must have struck a universal chord in French rural society.” 1 From the start of the Revolution and the events of the Great Fear in 1789, the French were relatively unsure of the viability of their entire social structure and reasonably unsure of their place in the still heavily monarchical European system. Candidly, France was the place where the core of the old central European monarchical system, under the strain of its own weight, started to collapse in on itself. France’s periphery, the rural, agricultural peasantry, was poverty stricken, starving and crumbling because of trying to support the heavy burden of the voracious appetites of the abusive elite few. The social structure had to change for the peasantry to survive, and the strain of that intense social structural change inevitably pushed the people of France, through their own fear and insecurity of their situation, to act out violently when change was not thorough enough or immediate enough to ease their suffering.

The overriding sentiment, and thus one of the main catalysts of the French Revolution, was definitely fear and paranoia. True, there was a strong sense of nationalism and a powerful desire for equality and obtaining the ideals of Rousseau. However, the strong sentiment of nationalism did not really permeate France until after the beheading of King Louis XVI and, because of the level of literacy, the readers of Rousseau were mainly members of the educated upper class, not the entirety of the population of France; therefore, Rousseau’s ideas were only partially responsible for the revolutionary actions of the peasantry. In the end, the most commonly shared experience throughout all class levels, government bodies and individuals was a deeply felt sense of fear and paranoia accompanied by the need to stabilize their particular group’s position as quickly as possible. Modern psychological studies show that, in general, human beings, as social animals, need some sense of structure. It is also the case that once people have achieved one level of structure or comfort it is very difficult for them, for any real length of time, to return to a structure of less comfort and structure. According to social scientist John Paul Scott, from the Center for Research on Social Behavior:



If, however, strange individuals are taken from several different groups and forcibly thrown together, or if a number of strange individuals are thrown into a well-organized group, the individuals begin to interact with each other in the absence of social relationships. Relationships are formed over a period of time, but this becomes very difficult in a large group of strangers. A frequent consequence…is an outbreak of destructive violence.2



This was the situation in France by the time of the Revolution. From the rural peasant farmers still under the control of the aristocracy during the Fear to the Committee of Public Safety and the Sans-culottes in Paris and still more groups in other major urban and rural areas, strangers wandered from one place to the other in search of food, work or were on government duty. The tightly knit groupings of a mass agrarian, monarchically governed type of society was all of a sudden radically changed. If, according to Scott, an uncomfortable or severely unfamiliar situation is not resolved quickly, it interrupts the comfort level of the masses too much. The reaction of most of the people in that social grouping is severe and violent; they will try to do anything that they can to bring equilibrium back to their situation (even if that means briefly returning to an even more unstable, further degraded cultural or structural level). Therefore, we can theoretically pinpoint the outbreaks of violence to the point at which the brevity of the situation lingers into a length of time that is generally unacceptable to the majority, making them too uncomfortable (from starvation, lack of political and mental freedom, fear of physical danger).

Massive social change, through the introduction of many different types of strangers and new radical ideas into essentially small, cloistered, rural and agricultural areas of the countryside upset the balance of things in France. By the time of the Great Fear of 1789, France had truly started down a road of mass fear and paranoia that would continue throughout the duration of the Revolution. There were four distinct types of fear or paranoia that drove the French Revolution to such extreme violence. First, the aristocracy feared that the middle and lower classes would rise up against them in violent revolt; basically, the fear of a class war in which they would lose their status, wealth and position. Secondly, the elected officials of the revolutionary government (namely, the Committee of Public Safety [CSP], but the Convention as well) feared being unable to complete their tasks demanded of them in enough time and with enough thoroughness to maintain their all important connection with the lower classes. For the CSP, maintaining the strength (both military and political) and the rule of law, and preserving both the ideals of their revolution and the structure of their state were of utmost importance before a further and more massive collapse of the social structure could occur. Thirdly, there was a fear and paranoia about the “other” that permeated all levels of the French society, an outsider that could potentially liquidate France from the outside, ending the grand experiment. Part of this fear realized itself in a paranoia that there may be those in your same class who are making deals to move upward through the spilling of your blood, or that they were spies sent from above to watch you, or perhaps that your next door neighbor never liked you and was plotting false charges against you. In this case, violence was often exacted using the CSP to send many innocent people to premature deaths; no one could be trusted. This fear / violence cycle continued throughout the entirety of the Revolution, until the French army started to be victorious in foreign wars and Napoleon Bonaparte took leadership of the State, reestablishing a core and structure to French society.

The seeds of the French Revolution were sown in the incredible social changes taking place in France due to the increase of economic wealth experienced around the late 1730s and early 1740s. This new wealth created a new class of people, a growing upper and middle merchant and trade class that the monarchy had trouble identifying with. This emerging class threatened the social structure of France, and more especially challenged the authority and position of the aristocracy. In the 1780s, problems worsened for the monarchy; although there had been a sustained period of economic growth, it was punctuated by periodic economic crises. In 1788 and 1789, there were bad harvests and a failure of new textile industries that were in competition with England. These were the beginnings of a depression. Right before the Revolution hit, “the number of poor, estimated by some at almost one-third the population, reached crisis proportions.”3 Because of bad council and indecision, Louis’ government was about to collapse. Because of the impending collapse, Louis had to call a meeting of the Estates-General for the first time since 1614. The result was that the aristocracy learned just how strong the new, wealthy, non-aristocratic, upper and lower class (the Third Estate) was; they also learned just how quickly this class could gain the support of the suffering lower classes. As a reaction to their perception of an immediate threat from this budding class, the monarchy and aristocracy of France started to take stronger and more aggressive actions against the Third Estate in an attempt to prevent their regime’s toppling. On June 17, 1789, the Estates General soon voted itself to be called the National Assembly, and they found themselves locked out of the meeting place by order of the King. The Estates General vowed to keep meeting and the King, now threatened with an “illegal” group trying to supercede his authority, prepared to use force to shut it down. This initial threat of violence by the monarchy was sparked by the fact that an outside class willing to take over governmental power directly threatened the monarchy and aristocracy, thereby threatening the very social structure and power of the aristocracy. This threat of violence by the aristocracy set the common people off in a fit of violent urban and rural uprisings, in fear of violence being used against what they perceived as their own Estate or class. Eventually, after the initial separation from the aristocracy, the common people realized that this break meant that they had a new found freedom to restructure their government to one that would afford them a more egalitarian status, more rights, and potentially a better living. However, they quickly realized that restructuring an entire social system was going to take time and that they needed some form of structure to lean on while they were creating a completely radically new society.

The people put their trust and need for structure into the hands of the Convention and eventually the twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety. The Convention and the CSP were probably correct in their paranoia over enemies that wanted them deposed from power. Although they had a complicated power structure, the fledgling government was far from stable in terms of longevity or lasting control over the power structure; “they did not consider themselves absolute in law…Robespierrists wanted the dictatorship to last until democracy was secured…the politically effective element was then chiefly the middle class, which had an interest in introducing liberal institutions.”4 This created a set of unique problems for the Convention and its committees; by their own admission they were not meant to be any kind of permanent solution to the problems of France, they were there to ensure that the Revolution succeeded and nothing more. Unfortunately, the CSP overstepped its bounds in the eyes of most commoners and became a dictatorship which, in order to protect its power, was capable of far more horrible atrocities than the ancien régime. Consequently, in part driven by the fear of being ousted by rival political factions or worse yet losing the consent of those they ruled, the Committee used their power to bring about the death of “forty thousand [during] the Terror, one-sixth of one percent of the population”5 to secure their position and insure the continuance of the Revolution to a democratic end. The insistence of the CSP’s main supporters, the sans-culottes, to “maintain a deep-rooted tendency…to speak against the rich was encouraged in the year II by the ruling politicians of the time.”6 The actions of the sans-culottes and the CSP against the wealthy made them the target of the now ex-aristocracy, conservatives, royalists and the bourgeoisie. The royalists always considered them traitors to the throne, murderers of the king himself and a threat to the rest of Europe’s monarchies as well. The upper class bourgeoisie believed themselves targeted by the sans-culottes and the CSP for simply having been financially successful at their trade or merchant abilities. Accordingly, the CSP correctly feared themselves marked as the prime targets of counter-revolutionary, conservative efforts, and external plots to destroy France and the Revolution: “Would not this…be the surest means of rallying all the royalists, all the enemies of liberty whatsoever; of returning them to the primary assemblies which they deserted [in the] happy time of revolutionary crisis .”7 The revolutionary government knew from recent history that the threat against them from above was real, from the actions taken by the King’s Royal Army toward the revolutionaries during the storming of the Bastille and the betrayal by the King learned in the plans seized from his office during his flight and capture at Varennes. Therefore, having earlier evidence about aristocratic counter-revolutionary plans and recent memories of the series of brutal repressive actions by the King and those loyal to him, the CSP’s reaction to any type of perceived aristocratic plot (real or imagined) was quick and brutal. The Robespierrists and the Committee of Public Safety were also very much aware of the grumbling from below that the CSP was taking too long to complete its tasks. People started saying that the CSP’s only real concern was gaining their own political power and that they were not very concerned with carrying out the will of the general will, only that Robespierre and the committee had designs on staying in power as a dictatorship. The starving, suffering masses of Paris and the rest of France had waited long enough and were becoming restless. They were willing to put up briefly with a dictatorship, even a fairly unstable and unpredictable one, just as long as it could meet its obligation to the people; but this government seemed to be losing touch with its people. Ironically, the members of the CSP would soon suffer from the same violent actions that it used to sustain its own position of power.

The last version of fear and paranoia, the idea of an “other” constantly watching you, constantly plotting against you, permeated all social strata during the French Revolution. The people of the lower middle class and lower class themselves were keenly aware that any one of them was in danger of being accused of being “outside the ideals of the Revolution,” and could be brought up on the slightest charge that would send them to a beating or, worse yet, death. According to Scott:



“Problems of collective organization…[have] two alternative goals – social control and social freedom, both desirable but incompatible with each other. We can also postulate a general rule that the more freedom, the greater the dangers resulting from a lack of social control.”8



This mass paranoia about spies and counter-revolutionaries brought on a stifling sense of mistrust, lack of freedom and severe sense of danger: “the sans-culottes considered violence to be the ultimate recourse against those who refused to answer the call of unity.”9 Some of these disputes were simply everyday disagreements over money or contractual agreements, even dislike of character. Other times the disagreements were serious, such as the matter of whether the Revolution would allow people to hang on to old religious beliefs and practices. A cobbler during the Revolution remarked that, “he did not hesitate to use clubs when arguing with noblemen and priests considered enemies of the people.”10 Obviously, the ideals of the Revolution greatly diminished, if not altogether dismissed, the rights of the clergy and Church, most “cogs de village regarded…parish priests: [sic] as rivals for power and authority within the village community…when the opportunity came to strike such rivals down, it was eagerly seized.”11 These disputes and disagreements not only brought on external class violence, but also inner-class violence unlike any other; the people used the CSP as a depository for petty disputes turned into death penalty cases. Regrettably, during France’s grand experiment for democracy in Europe, there was very real cause for the people to worry about a conservative counter-revolution; there were plots against the revolutionaries. However, the threats from within were just as dangerous and potentially destabilizing. There were border wars that revealed the other European monarchies’ intentions against France (since France could not “get its own house in order”). From the start of the Great Fear in 1789 through to the first Napoleonic Wars, there were both genuine and false threats of invasion from either conservative backed internal forces or aristocratically supported external foreign armies, and the best way to deal with whether someone was a real patriot or not was to shoot first, or guillotine first, and ask questions later.

Fear and paranoia, in their different forms and versions, ran rampant throughout the different levels of French social strata, throughout the entire French Revolution. Most of this fear was due to the extreme discomfort created within each of the levels of French society by the destabilization of the overall structure. There is a good deal of evidence that the only reason each of these waves of fear and paranoia appeared, climaxed, and eventually subsided was because of the movements and rhythms of the Revolution itself. As the destabilization effected a certain segment of the population, it reacted violently against it, the violence peaked, and finally that part of the movement lost its energy and ability to combat internal and external threats. Once each of these segments of society ran through its cycle of infection, reaction, and collapse, subsequently losing strength in its position as it progressed, the fear and paranoia moved on to the next most infected group. For example, the monarchy and aristocracy truly became a diminished threat after the violent and most extreme revolutionaries beheaded the King; the ancien régime lost its leadership and most of its power in one stroke. Although this event created a counter-revolutionary force with the potential of bringing the wrath of European monarchies down on France, it was a long way from being able to exercise its most escalative actions of sending in troops to deal with the revolutionaries and a wayward Convention. It to gasped its last breaths in the storming of the Tuilories Palace. As Scott postulates in the conclusion of his book, “we might even conclude that violence and destruction are a necessary consequence of freedom.”12



Sources



1. C. Ramsay, The Ideology of the Great Fear (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. xvii.

2. J.P. Scott and S.F. Scott, Social Control and Social Change (Chicago, 1971), pp.213-214.

3. J. Spielvogel, Western Civilization, Volume C. Since 1789 (Connecticut, 1999), pp. 557.

4. R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton, 1989), pp. 362.

5. Ibid.

6. A. Soboul, The Sans-Culottes (Princeton, 1980), pp. 13.

7. J. Hardman, Robespierre (New York, 1999), pp. 75 (Robespierre, 9,189).

8. J.P. Scott and S.F. Scott, Social Control and Social Change (Chicago, 1971), pp. 215.

9. A. Soboul, The Sans-Culottes (Princeton, 1980), pp. 158.

10. A. Soboul, The Sans-Culottes (Princeton, 1980), pp. 160.

11. W. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989), pp. 17.

12. J.P. Scott and S.F. Scott, Social Control and Social Change (Chicago, 1971), pp.215.