404 Chapter XVII
on civilians. It had been so employed a year before, when, in the “Massacre of the
Champ de Mars,” the authorities had broken up a republican demonstration. In
July 1792 the Jacobin journalist Carra, turning the tables, procured a red flag on
which he had sewn in black letters: “Martial Law of the Sovereign People against
Rebellion by the Executive Power.”^4
This political theory of insurrection was elaborated by Robespierre. As a former
Constituent, ineligible at the time of the election, he was not a member of the
Legislative Assembly. He was thus in a better position to yield to the demand for
its replacement, and to formulate a program and offer a leadership for the section
pressures. He did so in a series of speeches at the Paris Jacobin Club. To the nega-
tive insistence upon dethronement he added two positive aims: There should be a
National Convention, and in election of deputies the suffrage should be universal
for all adult males.
Thus the second French Revolution adopted for its justification the essential
revolutionary theory of the whole revolutionary era. Against a constitution that
proved to be an embarrassment the revolutionaries of 1792, like those in America
in the 1770’s, offered the doctrine of the people as a constituent power. They un-
dercut existing authorities with the claim of popular sovereignty. The authorities
now undercut were those which the Revolution of 1789 and the constitution of
1789–1791 had created: Louis XVI in his legal role as constitutional monarch, and
the Legislative Assembly as the elected body of deputies. Both, in the circum-
stances brought on by war, were easy for radicals to discredit, and difficult for mod-
erates convincingly to defend. Both could be accused of helplessness if not down-
right collusion in the face of invasion. Against Counter- Revolution both seemed a
frail defense. As Robespierre put it, since the executive and the legislature were
equally rotten, both should be regenerated by the people. They were legally washed
away by the appeal to a new Convention.
This new Convention, far more than the first Constituent Assembly, would have
that fullness of constituent power which the abbé Sieyès had described in 1789. It
could, in principle, create organs of government freely. It would not have to accept
a ready- made king as its executive as in 1789. It would be a true image of the
people of France. Where half the members of the first Constituent had come orig-
inally from the nobility and the clergy, the Convention would suffer from no such
distortion. Even the vestiges of the former estates now disappeared. Events of
1792 had discredited the upper classes in the eyes of the lower. Leadership struc-
tures were in ruins, habits of deference had been broken. Universal suffrage in
election of the Convention was the result. Some demanded it as a thing good in
itself, or in the belief that the less favored classes of society would benefit. Others
accepted it as a necessity or an expedient, to placate the popular agitators, or in the
belief that all should vote because no particular group could be trusted.
In terms of social identity, the first revolution had put into power, or left in it,
persons who before the revolution had been of some importance: Louis XVI
himself, carried over as constitutional ruler and chief executive, important mem-
bers of the nobility such as Lafayette and Talleyrand, and well- to- do or otherwise
4 Ibid., 61.