Revolutionizing of the Revolution 407
townspeople who were committed to the Revolution, and who could not take the
risk of seeing it undone. They were men who had either accepted local or munici-
pal office under it, or talked rather volubly in public, or given offense to cleric or
noble, or spent their money to purchase land or buildings that had formerly be-
longed to the church. The local political clubs, following the lead of the Paris Jaco-
bins, saw to it that the primary assemblies were filled by as many good patriots as
possible, while taking steps to keep “uncivic” persons away. Since these steps in-
volved actual danger to those excluded, the election was no model of democratic
propriety. The Convention when elected, was “democratic” in principle, but not in
practice. It represented the revolutionary element in the population, not France as
a whole. By its later actions it alienated much of the support with which it began.
The French republican historian, Aulard, writing in the 1890’s, thought that the
Convention well represented the France of 1792. Opponents of the Revolution, in
France and elsewhere, then and since, have seen in it the representative only of a
Jacobin minority. In recent times it has been called a minority government also by
writers of the Left, who relish the idea that vigorous elites are the real authors of
revolutions. Actually the question seems irrelevant. Majorities and minorities exist
only where men can be counted, pro or con, on specific questions or candidates. To
be for or against so vast and undefinable a thing as the Revolution was highly un-
specific. There was no majority and minority on such a question. All sorts of people
who favored something in the Revolution probably put in an appearance in the
voting assemblies. The convention was as representative as any conceivable assem-
bly in France in 1792 could have been. Any assembly in which all the divisions in
the country were exactly reflected could never have functioned as a parliamentary
body at all. The Convention did not function well, but it did function, too effec-
tively indeed for the taste of those who most despised it.
It first met on September 20, 1792. Avoiding a direct proclamation, it resolved
two days later that September 22, 1792, was the first day of French Republic.
At the same time the French met the Prussians at Valmy, fifty miles within the
French frontier, and after a brief engagement the Duke of Brunswick retreated.
Elation on one side was matched by consternation on the other.
Popular Revolutionism
The Revolution was revolutionized in 1792, as already remarked, by the infusion of
popular and international revolutionism. Let us look more closely at each of these
in turn.
Popular revolutionism is taken to mean the rebelliousness and state of mind of
persons who, in occupational or income levels and hence in their mode of life,
stood below the professional, business and property- owning classes. The French
language distinguished them as peuple as opposed to bourgeoisie. Class analysis has
often been attempted with categories derived from Marxism. But the best recent
Marxist historians, in France and elsewhere, insist that the popular elements in the
French Revolution were not proletarians in a Marxist sense. Class and class-
consciousness were nevertheless very important.