The Paris club at the heart of the radical Revolution
A political club born among the deputies of 1789, which met in a Dominican convent in Paris and spread a network of affiliated societies across France. Its debates set the tone for the Assembly and drove out first the constitutional monarchists, then the Girondins; in 1793–94, with Robespierre as its leading voice, it stood behind the government of the Terror. It was closed a few months after his fall, in November 1794.
In the spring of 1789, deputies from Brittany who had come to Versailles for the Estates-General began meeting to agree their line before each session. Deputies from other provinces joined them, and the Breton Club became the meeting place of the patriots — the members of the Assembly who wanted a constitution that would limit the king’s power.
When the Assembly followed the king to Paris in October 1789, the club came too. It rented a hall in the convent of the Dominican friars on the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Assembly’s new hall. Parisians called the Dominicans “Jacobins”, after their first house in the Rue Saint-Jacques, and the name stuck to the club, although its official name was the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. Unlike the Breton Club, it admitted members who were not deputies, and they paid a subscription.
Its strength was its reach. Clubs in provincial towns asked to be affiliated, received its circulars and sent back addresses of their own; by 1791 there were hundreds of them, and a motion argued in the Rue Saint-Honoré could be taken up across France.
After Varennes, the moderates walked out
The flight of the royal family to VarennesEvent: Flight to Varennes. The king's escape that ended fifty kilometres from safety in June 1791 broke the club in two. Some members wanted the king deposed; the Assembly’s leaders, among them Barnave, Duport and the Lameth brothers, wanted him restored to save the constitution. When the club debated a petition against the king, almost all the deputies walked out, on 16 July 1791, and set up a rival club in the nearby convent of the Feuillants. The next day the National Guard under LafayetteFigure: Marquis de Lafayette. The hero of two worlds who tried to hold the middle ground fired on the petitioners gathered on the Champ de Mars.
Only a handful of deputies stayed, RobespierreFigure: Maximilien Robespierre. The Incorruptible who defended the Terror and died by it and Pétion among them. But most of the provincial clubs stayed loyal to the Rue Saint-Honoré, and within months the Jacobins had recovered — now as the club of the left.
In the winter of 1791–92 the club became the stage of a great quarrel. Brissot and his friends argued that a war against the émigrés’ protectors abroad would unmask the king’s treachery and carry the Revolution beyond France’s borders. Robespierre warned the club that “no one loves armed missionaries”, and that war would bring either defeat or a general. The war came in April 1792. After the monarchy fell in August, the club renamed itself the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Liberty and Equality, and in October it expelled Brissot.
In the new Convention the Jacobins sat on the high benches on the left — the Mountain — facing the GirondinsGroup: Girondins. The deputies who took France to war and lost Paris to the Mountain. The quarrel over the king’s trial, the war and the power of Paris ended on 2 June 1793, when the armed sections of Paris surrounded the Convention and forced it to order the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies.
From the summer of 1793 the Jacobins were the party of government in all but name. Their members sat on the committees that ran the country, and the club was where policy was explained, tested and sent out to the affiliated societies — the voice, and the sounding board, of the TerrorArticle: What was the Terror?. How a republic at war made fear an instrument of government. Its purges followed the government’s: in the spring of 1794 the Hébertists, and then DantonFigure: Georges Danton. The orator who called for audacity, then for mercy and Camille DesmoulinsFigure: Camille Desmoulins. The journalist who called Paris to arms, then pleaded for clemency, went to the guillotine.
In January 1794, when Robespierre proposed that the numbers of Le Vieux Cordelier, the journal in which Desmoulins pleaded for clemency, be burned, Desmoulins answered him with a line from Rousseau:
“Burning is not answering.”
On the evening of 8 Thermidor (26 July 1794) Robespierre read to the club the speech that had divided the Convention that afternoon; the members cheered him and drove his opponents Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne out of the hall. The next day the Convention turned on himEvent: Fall of Robespierre. How the Convention turned on the Incorruptible in a day and a night, and on 28 July he was guillotined. Purged, and attacked in the street by the “gilded youth”, the club was closed by the Convention on 12 November 1794. The word outlived it: “Jacobin” still means a radical who trusts a strong, centralised state to act in the people’s name.
