Girondins

Who they were

A name given by others

The Girondins were never a party. They had no membership list, no programme and no founding date: only a circle of deputies who dined together, read the same newspapers and voted together often enough for their enemies to give them a name. Contemporaries called them Brissotins, after the journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot, or Rolandins, after the minister Roland and his wife, whose salon was their meeting place. The name that lasted came from the department of the Gironde, around Bordeaux, which sent some of their best speakers to Paris: Pierre Vergniaud, Élie Guadet and Armand Gensonné. Lamartine's Histoire des Girondins of 1847, which made them romantic heroes, fixed it for good.

Most were lawyers, journalists and men of letters from the provinces: members of the Jacobin Club at first, republicans by 1792, opposed to price controls and wary of the power of Paris. Around them stood the philosopher and mathematician Condorcet and Jérôme Pétion, mayor of Paris. Historians still argue over how many there were: a core of a few dozen deputies, with a wider fringe that voted with them on some questions and against them on others. In 1961 the British historian M. J. Sydenham went further and argued that a coherent “Girondin party” was largely the invention of its enemies.

The party of war

In the Legislative Assembly, which met in October 1791, Brissot and the orators of the Gironde made war their cause. France, they argued, was threatened by the émigré nobles gathering across the Rhine and by the princes who sheltered them; a war would unmask the traitors at home, rally the nation and carry liberty to the peoples of Europe. At the Jacobin Club, Robespierre argued against them all winter, warning that the court wanted war too, for its own reasons.

In March 1792 Louis XVI appointed ministers close to the Girondins, Roland at the Interior and Clavière at Finance among them, and on 20 April France declared war on Austria. The war opened with defeats. When the king vetoed decrees against the priests who refused the oath and for a camp of volunteers near Paris, Roland sent him a lecturing letter, drafted with his wife, and in June he was dismissed with his colleagues. The Girondins had done much to weaken the monarchy, but they hesitated when it fell: the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August was the work of the Paris sections and the insurrectionary Commune, not theirs. After it, Roland returned to the Interior.

The Convention and the king

The National Convention met in September 1792 with the Girondins at the height of their influence: Pétion was elected its first president, Roland held the Interior, and their friends filled its committees. They sat on the right of the hall. Facing them from the high benches on the left sat the Mountain, led by the deputies of Paris: Robespierre, Danton and Marat. The Girondins blamed Paris for the September massacres, attacked Marat and the Commune, and in October Louvet accused Robespierre from the tribune of aiming at dictatorship. The quarrel became personal and bitter.

The king's trial showed their weakness. None of them defended Louis XVI, but many wanted to spare his life, and they proposed that the verdict be put to the people, meeting in their primary assemblies. The Mountain called it a way to divide France and delay justice, and on 15 January 1793 the Convention rejected it.

On the sentence they split. Vergniaud voted for death and, as president of the Convention, announced the verdict; others among them voted for detention or for a delay. The execution of Louis XVI on 21 January left them looking hesitant to the Paris crowds, and Roland resigned from the ministry the next day.

The fall

From 31 May 1793 to the scaffold

Spring 1793 brought defeat abroad, revolt in the Vendée and hunger in Paris. On 5 April General Dumouriez, a former minister close to the Girondins, went over to the Austrians. When Girondin deputies accused Danton of complicity with the general, he broke with them for good. They had Marat sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal; on 24 April he was acquitted and carried back into the Convention in triumph. In May they set up a Commission of Twelve to investigate the Commune, which arrested the journalist Hébert, and Isnard, presiding over the Convention, warned that Paris would be destroyed if it laid hands on the nation's deputies.

Paris answered with an insurrection. On 31 May the sections rang the tocsin and marched on the Convention. On 2 June tens of thousands of National Guards under Hanriot surrounded the Tuileries, where the Convention now sat; when the deputies tried to walk out, they were turned back. The Convention voted the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies and two ministers, Clavière and Lebrun.

Some escaped to the provinces, where Caen, Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseille rose against Paris in the so-called federalist revolts; in Caen, Charlotte Corday heard them speak before she went to Paris and killed Marat on 13 July. Others waited in prison. From 24 October twenty-one of them stood trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. When the sentence was read on 30 October, Valazé stabbed himself in the courtroom. The next day the other twenty, with his body, were taken to the Place de la Révolution and guillotined, reportedly singing the Marseillaise.

Madame Roland followed on 8 November, and Roland killed himself when he heard. Condorcet died in prison in March 1794; Pétion and Buzot killed themselves in hiding near Saint-Émilion that June. The fall of the Girondins left the Mountain in control of the Convention and opened the way to the Terror. Only after the fall of Robespierre were the survivors let back into the Convention, in December 1794 and March 1795.