Jacobinism

Jacobinism takes its name from the Jacobin Club, the most famous political society of the French Revolution. In its narrow sense, it refers to the ideas and policies of the radical Jacobins led by Maximilien Robespierre, who dominated the revolutionary government in 1793 and 1794 during the period known as the Reign of Terror. In a broader sense, the word is used for a political tradition that favors a strong, centralized and secular republic, equality of citizens before the law, civic virtue and the idea that a revolutionary government may use extraordinary measures to defend the republic. The term is also used, often critically, to describe any radical movement willing to use state power and coercion to remake society in the name of the people.

The club began in 1789 as the Breton Club, a group of deputies at Versailles, and moved to Paris, where it met in a former Dominican convent whose friars were known as Jacobins. It built a large network of affiliated clubs across France. In 1791 moderate members left to form the Feuillants, and the club grew more radical. After the monarchy fell in 1792, Jacobin deputies, known as the Mountain, pressed for the execution of Louis XVI and drove the rival Girondins from the National Convention in 1793. The Committee of Public Safety, in which Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were leading figures, organized mass conscription, imposed price controls under the Law of the Maximum and used revolutionary tribunals against suspected enemies. Robespierre was overthrown on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794) and executed, and the Paris club was closed in November 1794.

Historians distinguish the revolutionary Jacobinism of 1793 and 1794 from later Jacobin traditions. In nineteenth and twentieth century France, the Radicals and many republicans saw themselves as heirs to Jacobin ideas of centralization and secularism. Some socialist and communist revolutionaries, including Lenin, drew comparisons between their methods and those of the Jacobins. Today French writers often use Jacobin simply to mean a supporter of a centralized state.

Liberal critics such as Benjamin Constant argued that Jacobinism confused popular sovereignty with unlimited power and crushed individual rights in the name of the people. Conservatives from Edmund Burke onward saw it as the clearest example of the dangers of rebuilding society on abstract principles. Historians point to the human cost of the Terror: Britannica estimates that about 17,000 people were officially executed and many more died in prison or without trial, while the repression of the revolt in the Vendée killed many thousands more.

The Jacobin period left a mixed legacy. It produced the democratic Constitution of 1793, which provided for universal male suffrage but was never applied, and saw the Convention abolish slavery in the French colonies in 1794. It also produced the Law of Suspects and mass executions. Its model of an indivisible, centralized republic strongly shaped modern French institutions.