French Revolutionary Government

The aim of this essay is to identify the principal reasons which lead Republican France to go through the revolutionary government and the Terror. The essay will focus on the political decisions which decreed the institution of a revolutionary government. Although a manifestation of the Convention nationale, this government was in fact ruthlessly ruled by the Committee of Public Safety (CPS). The relationship between these two political bodies allows to examine the causes of a dramatic shift from the revolutionary idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the de facto dictatorship of the CPS.
Up until the Directory of 1795, the French revolutionaries experimented multiple ways of exercising executive power without the aid of a government.

This way, it managed to reduce the authority of the executive power and broaden the area of competence of the Assembly to virtually the whole political sphere. The king’s escaping attempt and his capture in Varennes only hastened this power centralization since the Assembly was almost forced to provide leadership. The distrust toward the king and the monarchic institution thus justified the increasing number of committees. In his speech of December 26, 1791, held in the Legislative Assembly, Armand Gensonnée stated that in the past ‘it had been possible for men of good will to belong to all political groupings’. However, it was no longer the case, ‘there could be only two parties – for the Revolution and against it, good and evil.’ The following year, the committees of the Legislative Assembly became the main vehicles of executive power, even though they were still subordinate to the legislative power. Nonetheless, ‘in line with the Declaration of Rights, justice was to be free and men equal before the law…criminal cases were to be tried by jury…some of the humane ideals of the Enlightenment could be put into practice – torture, branding and hanging were abolished.’ In 1792 everything changed once again. The insurrection of August 10th rejected monarchy once and for all. The

As stated by D.G. Wright, ‘the constitution of an extraordinary criminal tribunal on August 17th, 1792, put the First Terror into action as judges were to try those suspected of counter-revolutionary crimes.’ Gensonnée’s speech regarding good and evil, against and pro-Revolution, took its toll with the ‘series of bloody massacres from September 2nd to September 7th 1792 [which] openly showed the underlying violence of the First Terror, as about 1300 prisoners were killed in the September Massacres.’ In January 1793, the Convention nationale put into place the Committee of General Defence charged with the organization and direction of France’s military effort. Furthermore, the Convention’s Jacobin majority pushed for a decision which was going to bear sombre consequences. As stated by