Survival of the Revolution in France 453
group, setting the tone in the Convention, objected to economic controls. They had
fallen into an attitude of negativism and helplessness toward everything that had
happened since the preceding August. The idea of price control was not in itself
very radical. The monarchy had practiced it before 1789, and even the weakly orga-
nized American states, during the American Revolution, had made similar at-
tempts in the face of inflation. So bourgeois a figure as Alexander Hamilton, in
1778, had been as incensed at profiteering as a Paris sans culotte of 1793. But what
for Hamilton and middle- class people was a matter for moral indignation, was for
the working people of Paris a matter of life and death. The sections of Paris seethed
with protest. There developed a great poussée populaire, as Albert Soboul calls it, a
rising tide of the popular democracy described above in Chapter XVII, against the
“corrupt” element in the Convention.
Early in April the Section Halle au Blé circulated among the other sections of
the city a proposed petition to the Convention. Halle au Blé was not a poor sec-
tion; indeed, it had the fewest “indigent” of any of the forty- eight.^9 It demanded
action against hoarders, speculators, and monopolists. Still more vehemently, it ac-
cused the Convention of endless talk and insidious treachery. The proof lay in
Dumouriez’ whole record in Belgium. If the Convention had not protected Du-
mouriez and his accomplices, so ran the indictment, “the Belgians and Liègeois
would not today accuse France of having aided them only to turn them over in
chains to their tyrants. It is with this that all Europe reproaches you, and posterity
will do the same.” The petition demanded the arrest of certain Brissotins, i.e., a
purge of the Convention.
Robespierre defended the petition at the Jacobin Club and in the Convention.
He paid little attention to the economic demands. It was treason that he scented,
and for proof he pointed to the betrayal of the international revolution. He now
sympathized with the patriotes bataves and the braves Liègeois. Why had not Du-
mouriez pursued and destroyed the Prussians after Valmy? Why had the Belgian
Democrats been blocked by him at every turn? Why had he not sooner and more
vigorously carried the war into Holland? (Readers of the last chapter will have an
answer.) Had he seriously invaded Holland, France would now have the use of
Dutch wealth and shipping, so that England would be ruined, and “the revolution
of Europe would be assured.” (This had been precisely the argument of the Dutch
émigrés in December and January, which Robespierre himself had then opposed.)
But no, the Brissot- Dumouriez group had never favored international revolution.
They had disapproved of the annexation of Savoy and Belgium, betrayed the
Dutch, tried “to halt the progress of our revolution in neighboring countries.” In
addition, they were suspiciously close to their friend Philippe Egalité, the ci- devant
and Rudé, but is more consistent with them in its findings than with Mathiez. Sydenham argues that
the existence of the Girondins, as a set group or party, is a myth; that the “Girondins” can hardly be
distinguished from members of the Convention as a whole, and that the name came to be attached
during the political strife, and then by historians, to those persons in the Convention who called at-
tention to themselves by outspoken opposition to Robespierrists and the sans- culottes. This view is
consistent with the view of Soboul and Rudé that the sans- culottes, or popular democrats, in their
demands for price controls, etc., found virtually the whole Convention and the whole Jacobin Club
hesitant and unsympathetic.
9 Soboul, 1091. The petition was printed in the Moniteur, réimpression, XVI, 100.