Were the Girondins to blame for the Terror?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

People often characterise the likes of the Rolands and Brissot as the chief martyrs of the French Revolution, the moderate left who acted in chief opposition to the Mountain and the royalists alike. And though I don't think they were bad people, reading up on the revolution has made me think that the calls they made were often remarkably wrong headed. First off, you can make a big argument that the Terror was a direct consequence of the war with Austria - a policy that was manically supported by the Girondin ministry and their allied War Minister Dumouriez (certainly the September Massacres were a direct result of the fact the foreign armies were outside). A lot of the really big issues with the Revolution - the insane conspiracies, the mob violence, the alienation of the Vendee, came as a direct result of War. The political calls they made also struck me as bizarre - they were larger than the mountain in the convention, but they all seemed obsessed with partisan bickering, including alienating Danton (who, whatever you may think about him, was a potential ally) and inflating Marat to even great infamy by their attempt to showtrial him.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Their political ineptness certainly helped to pave the way for this. And there was one more important consideration. The Girondins genuinely distrusted the masses' aspiration to have their rightful say in the political process. In fact they've been trying their (similarly inept) best to curb the "unruly mob", and their fetish for "protecting private property" essentially meant they were primarily interested in protecting the interests of well-to-do bourgeoisie. Their stances greatly helped to radicalize the masses, and when they suffered a defeat in Paris, they got themselves mixed up with various insurgent anti-revolutionary movements in the province, in effect helping the efforts to kill the Republic, leading to (not unreasonable) sense of imminent danger from within, forcing the government to resort to terror.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

One thing to remember about the Terror: it wasn't like one day a bunch of crazy dudes thought to themselves "hey, let's have a cool carnage!". The carnage was precisely what the revolutionaries wanted to avoid when their instituted revolutionary tribunals, so the aforementioned bodies can handle identifying and punishing enemies of the Revolution, instead of the masses taking it upon themselves, as they did during the September massacres. Robespierre was on record many times saying "carnage" should be avoided, and it's the instigators that ought to be pursues, not mere followers, which is how many Girondins and Dantonists of the second tier survived in the Convention.

Unfortunately, with the struggle between various revolutionary factions getting more and more tense (to the point when, as Vadier of the General Security Committee openly said in the Convention, "if we don't guillotine them, they'll chop off our heads"), and difficulties in controlling the abuses of individual terror preparators (need I remind of Carrier in Vandee, of bloodbath caused by individual Convention "representatives" like Collot or Fouché), what was devised as a precise instrument to eliminate dangerous enemies from within couldn't be quite stopped due to its' sheer impetus.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

One thing to remember about the Terror: it wasn't like one day a bunch of crazy dudes thought to themselves "hey, let's have a cool carnage!". The carnage was precisely what the revolutionaries wanted to avoid when their instituted revolutionary tribunals, so the aforementioned bodies can handle identifying and punishing enemies of the Revolution, instead of the masses taking it upon themselves, as they did during the September massacres. Robespierre was on record many times saying "carnage" should be avoided, and it's the instigators that ought to be pursues, not mere followers, which is how many Girondins and Dantonists of the second tier survived in the Convention.

Unfortunately, with the struggle between various revolutionary factions getting more and more tense (to the point when, as Vadier of the General Security Committee openly said in the Convention, "if we don't guillotine them, they'll chop off our heads"), and difficulties in controlling the abuses of individual terror preparators (need I remind of Carrier in Vandee, of bloodbath caused by individual Convention "representatives" like Collot or Fouché), what was devised as a precise instrument to eliminate dangerous enemies from within couldn't be quite stopped due to its' sheer impetus.

To me, the Terror can be split into two distinct groups: one prior to prior to the liquidation of the Herbertists and the fall of Danton and the other afterwards. The first is perhaps a bit more understandable: the deranged, paranoid and decentralised Terror that came from a social class deeply terrified of an Austrian insurrection that was going to kill therm all and had agents literally everywhere. This is why I blame the Girondins: they essentially promoted and normalized Germanophobic conspiracy twaddle to the highest level (even to the extent of Dumouriez being promoted as a revolutionary force despite having no political scruples beyond "I HATE AUSTRIA") that everybody was extra suspicious when things went south. The war they ran France into was completely avoidable (to be blunt: their theories on Austria's status as puppet master assumed the Habsburgs were far more competent than they ever were) and meant this early stage of the Terror basically amounts to everyone pissing themselves when they were losing the war, from that time they kept on killing their generals who were losing the initial battles in Belgium rather than admitting they had bitten off more than they could chew down to the dirtiest of the reprisals against the Vendee. It was also far more improvised and slapdash, with the worst reprisals coming from random departmental Jacobins rather than the the Mountain taking the initiative.

The second half was after Robespierre literally suffered some mental break in early 1974. I don't want to pretend like I knew the inside of the guy's head, but the difference between the cool-headed man of moderation who spoke against the war/dechristianization/extreme mob violence and the deranged Virtue cultist that emerged is so stark that I think something must have happened. The difference is that stage had almost no connection with the war - in fact the war was going quite well for the majority of the Great Terror - and completely centralised around the persona of Robespierre and his pursuit of Virtue.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

One thing to remember about the Terror: it wasn't like one day a bunch of crazy dudes thought to themselves "hey, let's have a cool carnage!". The carnage was precisely what the revolutionaries wanted to avoid when their instituted revolutionary tribunals, so the aforementioned bodies can handle identifying and punishing enemies of the Revolution, instead of the masses taking it upon themselves, as they did during the September massacres. Robespierre was on record many times saying "carnage" should be avoided, and it's the instigators that ought to be pursues, not mere followers, which is how many Girondins and Dantonists of the second tier survived in the Convention.

Unfortunately, with the struggle between various revolutionary factions getting more and more tense (to the point when, as Vadier of the General Security Committee openly said in the Convention, "if we don't guillotine them, they'll chop off our heads"), and difficulties in controlling the abuses of individual terror preparators (need I remind of Carrier in Vandee, of bloodbath caused by individual Convention "representatives" like Collot or Fouché), what was devised as a precise instrument to eliminate dangerous enemies from within couldn't be quite stopped due to its' sheer impetus.

To me, the Terror can be split into two distinct groups: one prior to prior to the liquidation of the Herbertists and the fall of Danton and the other afterwards. The first is perhaps a bit more understandable: the deranged, paranoid and decentralised Terror that came from a social class deeply terrified of an Austrian insurrection that was going to kill therm all and had agents literally everywhere. This is why I blame the Girondins: they essentially promoted and normalized Germanophobic conspiracy twaddle to the highest level (even to the extent of Dumouriez being promoted as a revolutionary force despite having no political scruples beyond "I HATE AUSTRIA") that everybody was extra suspicious when things went south. The war they ran France into was completely avoidable (to be blunt: their theories on Austria's status as puppet master assumed the Habsburgs were far more competent than they ever were) and meant this early stage of the Terror basically amounts to everyone pissing themselves when they were losing the war, from that time they kept on killing their generals who were losing the initial battles in Belgium rather than admitting they had bitten off more than they could chew down to the dirtiest of the reprisals against the Vendee. It was also far more improvised and slapdash, with the worst reprisals coming from random departmental Jacobins rather than the the Mountain taking the initiative.

The second half was after Robespierre literally suffered some mental break in early 1974. I don't want to pretend like I knew the inside of the guy's head, but the difference between the cool-headed man of moderation who spoke against the war/dechristianization/extreme mob violence and the deranged Virtue cultist that emerged is so stark that I think something must have happened. The difference is that stage had almost no connection with the war - in fact the war was going quite well for the majority of the Great Terror - and completely centralised around the persona of Robespierre and his pursuit of Virtue.

The big factor in Robespierre's ultimate fall was when he organized the elaborate festival of the Supreme Being, leading many, his committee colleagues, to conclude he went seriously mental, and you just don't let a mental dude play with a (national) razor.

Also, there's a good measure of truth in the saying nothing's more lethal to dictators than becoming subjects of ridicule.