Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon

BROWN argues in this book that the French Revolution involved the destruction of a traditional society that incorporated wide-ranging local variations. These were the product of many different but interrelated elements such as local geography, past history and unpredictable factors such as the temperament of local magnates and the presence—or absence—of traditional family vendettas. In its place, the revolutionaries, whom he is inclined to assimilate under the general term of ‘Jacobins’, aspired to create a new kind of universal society, based on abstract principles that were believed to be morally self-evident, which would serve the interests of society as a whole and further the spiritual and material ends of its individual members. He describes this as the replacement of the principles of Hobbes by those of Rousseau and by what he calls ‘liberal democracy’. Such an abrupt transformation of both attitudes and institutions provoked a considerable amount of opposition. Those who rejected it, on social, political or religious grounds, were often disposed to resist it by force, and the result of their reactions was to create a problem of security whose consequences shared many common characteristics, although their causes and intensity showed wide local variations. He suggests that this threat of social disintegration underlay all the problems of politics, religion and national defence that have been seen as the immediate causes of the collapse of the Directory.