Survival of the Revolution in France 461
hopeful for revolution elsewhere, turned to the idea, in modern terms, of revolu-
tion in one country first. This had always been Robespierre’s real conviction, sus-
pended only in moments of rhetoric or during the contest with Brissot. It was
clear, in the supreme hour of need for the Republic in France, that no other people
would lend any useful assistance. There was apathy, and even public protest against
the war, in England, Holland, Belgium, the Rhineland, and elsewhere. Nowhere,
except in far- off Poland, was there any revolt against a government with which
France was at war. There was no revolution in aid of France. It was perfectly evi-
dent that the foreign revolutionaries were entirely dependent on the French. The
French were indeed the only people in the whole period (the Americans having
been no exception) who carried out a revolution, and defeated a counter- revolution,
entirely with their own resources. The fact offers some explanation of the intensity
of the Terror, and of why the Terror occurred only in France.
The French Jacobins, these being the facts, developed a scorn for the revolution-
aries of other countries, whom they accused of lacking the vigor or courage to
stage a revolution of their own. On September 15, 1793, as the Revolutionary
Government was taking form, the Convention, on initiative of the Committee of
Public Safety, in effect rescinded the decree of the preceding November promising
“aid and fraternity to peoples wishing to recover their liberty.” French generals in
the field should have nothing to do with revolutionaries in Belgium or elsewhere.
“Renouncing henceforth all philanthropic ideas adopted by the French people
with a view to making foreign nations alive to the value and advantages of liberty,
French generals shall conduct themselves toward the enemies of France in the
same manner as the Allied powers conduct themselves toward it; they shall ob-
serve, toward countries and individuals subjected by French arms, the ordinary
laws of war.” They should therefore disarm the inhabitants, take hostages, and ex-
ploit the local resources, keeping such exploitation under control of the French
army and government. It was the policy, which had so dismayed the Dutch and
Belgian revolutionaries in Dumouriez’ time, of treating occupied areas as con-
quered country.^17
The foreign revolutionaries in Paris were a miscellaneous lot. Since they lived in
an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue, most of them on the fringes of politics, they
remain one of the mysteries of the French Revolution. The personal relationships
between the two kinds of “ultras,” the foreigners and the spokesmen of popular
revolution, remain very unclear.^18
17 Mavidal, et al., Archives parlementaires 1787–1801 (Paris, 1909), vol. 74, p. 231; A. Aulard,
Recueil des actes du Comité de salut public (Paris, 1893), VI, 553–54.
18 Soboul, interested in the popular revolutionaries but not in the international revolutionaries,
believes (Sans- culottes parisiens, 779–885) that there was no political or ideological connection be-
tween the two groups, and that the governing committees threw the two together under a common
indictment, so as to discredit the popular revolutionaries with a stigma of “conspiracy” and of associa-
tion with foreigners. This view seems to arise from Soboul’s unwillingness to understand Robes-
pierre’s conception of “ultras” except in a context of class conflict. On the intricacies of the foreign
revolutionaries not much has been accomplished since the monographs of Mathiez over forty years
ago, except for sporadic and sometimes excellent pieces of specialized research, such as those of Gen-
eral Herlaut, including his Autour d ’Hébert: Deux témoins de la Terreur, le citoyen Dubuisson, le ci- devant
baron de Haindel (Paris, 1958).