452 Chapter XIX
foreign countries. Still less, in general, did the foreign revolutionaries understand
or know much about the demands of the most advanced revolutionaries in Paris.
Usually, however, both had much to complain of at the hands of the French revo-
lutionary authorities. In March and April 1793 the Brissot- Dumouriez group, de-
spite Dumouriez’ disaffection, was still preponderant in the committees of the
Convention. The international revolutionaries blamed them for the defeats and
failures in Belgium and Holland. (Much less concern was expressed for Poland,
although Kosciuszko was in Paris at this very time to solicit aid.) The popular
revolutionaries were annoyed by the defeats also, which were bringing the enemy
within the gates, and in addition they suffered the effects of food shortage and
inflation. An extreme crisis of confidence in the political realm coincided with an
extreme economic crisis. In the inflamed psychology of the moment, both crises
were blamed on the same people. Suspicion was rampant. The guilty must be in-
vestigated and pursued. In March the Convention created a new special court for
this purpose, the Revolutionary Tribunal, in which the civil liberties and legal re-
forms introduced by the Revolution could be suspended.
An enlightening history of the Revolution in France could be written in terms
of the paper money alone, the assignats. For the political and social consolidation
of the Revolution the program proved highly successful. In the absence of gold
coinage (which was hoarded, or taken out of the country by émigrés, or used in
connection with foreign payments), the paper money enabled the successive Revo-
lutionary governing groups to finance their operations. It also provided the mecha-
nism for the transfer of former church, crown, and émigré real estate to new own-
ers, blending the upper levels of the peasantry, the bourgeoisie, and many ex- nobles
into a numerous property- owning class of modern type, which had a material in-
terest in the preservation of the Revolutionary innovations.
But the costs of war led to a rapid printing of assignats, which steadily lost
value, especially since the future of the régime that printed them was highly uncer-
tain. The decline was precipitous in the first half of 1793, when the assignats fell to
only a fourth the value of gold. There were also positive scarcities. As causes of
scarcity, to the normal effects of war and mobilization, and unwillingness of farm-
ers to part with their produce for paper money, was added a general breakdown in
commercial distribution in the confusion of revolutionary conditions. Prices
soared. Bakeshops and grocers’ shops were often found empty by women who had
waited for hours to obtain a day’s supply.
There were therefore demands for price controls, and for measures against
hoarding and profiteering. By attributing these demands specifically to the work-
ing class, and resistance to them to the bourgeoisie, various historians have seen
this period of the Revolution as characterized chiefly by a class conflict, of a kind
that relates it to the socialisms of the twentieth century.^8 It is true that the Brissot
8 Notably Albert Mathiez in various writings; and with a significantly different emphasis, in that
they see a sharp opposition between the popular revolutionaries and the middle- class Jacobins of the
Mountain, Albert Soboul, Les Sans- culottes parisiens de l ’An II: mouvement populaire et gouvernement
révolutionnaire, 2 juin 1793–9 thermidor An II (Paris, 1958), and the more narrowly conceived G. Rudé,
The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959). See also M. J. Sydenham, The Girondins (London,
1961), which is wholly different in purpose and inspiration from the Left- oriented works of Soboul