412 Chapter XVII
enment. Some could not manage to adjust to dealing with irate tradespeople, or
worse. They in turn came to be detested by the sans- culottes. This was the group of
Jacobins who came to be called Girondins—Brissot, Cordorcet, Vergniaud, the
Rolands, and others—for whom the Revolution of 1792 was the beginning of the
end. Others made the adjustment with more success, including men like Danton,
a bit plebeian himself, or like Robespierre, who managed to go along with the
popular upsurge without sacrifice of his own meticulous habits. These were the
kinds of Jacobins known in 1793 and 1794 as the Mountain.
But the Jacobins of the Mountain were never free agents. With many sans-
culotte ideas, for a time at least, they genuinely agreed. They had little alternative,
if they were to try to govern. They worked under enormous popular pressure. It was
their dilemma that they had to yield to and use this popular zeal, but also to bring
it under control.
International Revolutionism
The French popular democrats, or sans- culottes, were usually friendly to foreigners
whom they saw personally, even to prisoners of war interned in French villages, but
they knew little of foreign countries, which they believed to differ from France in
being peopled mostly by slaves. They were suspicious of foreigners in the abstract.
French popular revolutionism and international revolutionism were entirely
distinct.
Agitation within the several countries will be described in succeeding chapters.
At present, the problem is to see international revolutionism as it presented itself
in France in 1792. Three preliminary observations may be made.
First, French historians, including those most sympathetic to the Revolution,
have generally set a low estimate on the degree of genuine Revolutionary activity
in the 1790’s outside of France itself. For Albert Mathiez the presence of foreign
zealots in Paris was a kind of illegitimate interference with the French Revolution,
one of the many nuisances with which Robespierre had to deal.^10 Few Frenchmen
have been attracted to the subject. Not until the work of Professor Godechot of
Toulouse, published in 1956, had a French scholar given a full account of interna-
tional revolutionism as a whole in the 1790’s.^11 In countries with a stable history in
the past century, such as England and Holland, there has been little incentive to
study, still less to emphasize, their native “Jacobins” of that time.
Secondly, it is true that these radicals or revolutionaries in other countries ac-
complished nothing except in conjunction with the French armies. Revolutions
failed where they were attempted without French military support, as in Poland
and Ireland. They succeeded where, and as long as, they could make use of French
power, as in the Netherlands and Italy. This fact has lent weight to the line of
10 A. Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers (Paris, 1918).
11 J. Godechot, La Grande Nation: L’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde, 1789–99,
2 vols. (Paris, 1956). There have been, however, some excellent French studies of single foreign coun-
tries at the time of the Revolution, such as Droz on Germany, Fabre on Poland, or Dufourq on Rome,
cited in relevant chapters below.