The victory of Paris

Last April I got directed to Robespierre and his immediate memory in Directory France. It occurred to me that for all my reading on Catharism and French Catholicism, I had only a junior-high understanding of the Revolution. I bought Simon Schama's Citizens I think that very month and then I, er, failed to read it.

A family-member beat me to it. So I've been catching up, June and July. I am toward the end: the Committee of Public Safety has centralised the government (Schama sees Saint-Just as the Lenin of this régime), and quelled the federalist and royalist rebellions. Robespierre is still a relative moderate, a Jeffersonian Deist where the others - in their madness - are worshipping reified Classical Roman ideals.

Schama had to argue the Vendée case, which modern historians now accept. Every now and then Schama does pause his narrative to settle modern scholarly scores. I am un-fond of such excursions. I suppose in the 1980s writers didn't know better.

One facet which intrigues me here is how disorganised was the opposition. It seems not to have occurred to the Jacobins' many enemies that they stood a better chance if they united. The Vendée wasted its effort on a siege of Nantes. Nantes itself seems like it had little love for the Revolution, given how hard the Parisians purged it. But the Girondins, who became federalists contra Paris, stubbornly held that they were still republicans and secularists. Those Vendée reactionaries were Not Their Sort.

Paris suffered her own divisions. But once the anti-Jacobins had arrayed themselves against Paris, first among the royalists and then among the Girondins, Paris united behind the most cohesively pro-Paris party. That party was Jacobin.

Given all that, the counter-Revolution needed to define itself as non-Parisian. From that, it needed to unite its provinces. Given that Ludvig von Fresen was already King Louis XVII of the Vendée in spirit (and, more to the point, on their assignat currency), a federalist constitutional-monarchy on the Habsburg model seems a natural compromise. The counter-revolution also needed a man to head it - it needed a Franco. It didn't ever get one. General Dumouriez might have become one, given five more months, but short-term he was compromised by tacit Prusso-Austrian support, and couldn't get near the capital.

That leads to another problem: that foreigners were attacking the frontiers at the time. The Jacobins, holding the capital, could pose as the patriots whilst the provinces were Endangering The Patrie. When the patriots started winning those battles in the east, the rebellions west and south were left, like Dumouriez, compromised. I suppose if the Prussians and Austrians afield had enjoyed better logistical support, the Revolution would have ended up like the Paris Commune in 1871. But Bismarck wasn't born yet.

The Revolution had to implode by itself, first. Only much later, could Napoleon step in.

UPDATE 10/31/21: What everyone suspected of "Louis XVII" is probably true.