Impact of Political and Industrial Revolutions 193and other necessities, and often added to the prevailing economic
disorder by seizing goods without regard to competing claims, e.g., for
the provisioning of Paris and other cities.
As long as the armies remained on French soil, such behavior made
civilian life in the towns precarious, and the precariousness of civilian
life in turn encouraged young men to submit to enlistment.^18 Such
feedback made the Convention’s degree of August 1793 a living real
ity in the months that followed; and provided the revolutionary armies
with the numbers and enthusiasm needed to put down all the pockets
of counterrevolutionary action inside France. This was achieved by the
end of 1793, whereupon it became possible to concentrate superior
numbers against the revolution’s foreign foes. After their first vic
tories, the armies then moved onto foreign soil. From that time on
ward, the costs of their support devolved largely upon populations
outside French borders; economic recovery within France and return
to a market system for supplying urban centers with food became
possible once again.
This, by and large, was the situation by 1794;^19 and as return to
more normal conditions began to seem feasible, a powerful reaction
gained headway against revolutionary terror, price fixing, and the
armed infringement of property rights which had occurred so gener
ally at the height of the crisis. Simultaneously, the mass and energy
went out of city crowds, even in Paris, for most of the young and
unemployed males were miles away in the ranks of the army. Hence,
even when discomfited politicians attempted to summon the genie of
crowd action once again in order to prevail against their foes, the
former force and fervor were no more. Robespierre’s friends vainly
summoned the sections of Paris to his rescue in July 1794; and about a
year later, on 3 June 1795, after another angry crowd had tried to cow
the Convention as aforetime, army units were called in to subdue the
Faubourg St. Antoine, whence the crowd had come. “This is the date
which should be taken as the end of the Revolution” says Georges
Lefebvre;^20 and not without reason.
- It also encouraged counter-revolution, as at Lyons, Toulon, and in the Vendée.
For a while in 1793 it was unclear which reaction would prevail. By the end ol that year,
the superior organizational effort from Paris, centering in the famous Committee of
Public Safety, and the appeal of liberty, even when paradoxically it meant conscription,
combined to tip the balance. - In June 1794 an official rapporteur told the Convention that the French army was
three times as large as a year before yet cost only half as much. S. J. Watson, Carnot
(London, 1954), p. 88. On military service and the poor see Alan Forrest, The Trench
Revolution and the Poor (Oxford, 1981), pp. 138–67. - Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (London, 1964),