532 Chapter XXII
certain amount of political hooliganism, led especially by young men of good fam-
ily, the jeunesse dorée. Their importance should not be overstated. As a British spy
reported in 1795: “The famous youth of Paris is only a conglomeration of scamps
and elegant rascals, of whom this city always has a fortunate abundance. The body
of them, so to speak, numbers four or five hundred.” Gathering in cafes, they wear
what they think is English costume, but is “really only a ridiculous caricature.”
Sometimes they are joined by ruffians from the public markets and by swarms of
draft- dodgers. “These gentry police the theaters, and if an actor is thought tainted
with Jacobinism, he dares not appear.” The author of this report advised the British
Foreign Office not to be misled by French foolishness. Hacking down liberty trees
and stamping on the tricolor did not mean that the country had rejected the
Revolution.^2
The trouble with the stereotype, apart from its inaccuracy, is that it diverts atten-
tion from the problem of real interest, the political problem of introducing a mod-
erate regime after a period of drastic action and feverish excitement. By a “moder-
ate” regime is here meant, not merely one that preferred to avoid obvious violence,
but in a more objective sense a regime that occupied an intermediate position on
the spectrum of political beliefs.
This spectrum, it may be recalled from an earlier page, while of course having its
nuances, consisted essentially in five distinguishable shades. At the Right was the
extreme royalism of monarchical absolutism. Next came the idea of some kind of
liberal, constitutional, and modernized monarchy. Then came constitutional repub-
licanism. To the left of it was the doctrine of those republicans who were less insis-
tent on constitutional forms, more dedicated to equality and fraternity, more mili-
tant in temper, and more hostile to all vestiges of the former social order in France.
The Jacobinism of 1792–1794 had fallen at this place in the spectrum, but even at
that time most Jacobins had looked forward to constitutional republicanism as
their goal, so that after 1795 many Jacobins had “evolved,” as the phrase was, a bit
rightwards into the constitutional category. Others, unsatisfied with the new con-
stitution after 1795, may be thought of as straight political democrats. To their
left, and the furthest left on the spectrum, carrying on the tone of the popular
revolutionism of 1792–1793, and attracting a few former Jacobins, was the doc-
trine of those for whom political democracy should merge into a kind of social
democracy, with some degree of equality in wealth and income.
The post- Robespierrist Convention, continuing the reaction against popular
revolutionism which the Revolutionary Government had itself initiated, ran into
increasing trouble with the popular classes of Paris, whose elementary needs for
warmth and sustenance in the terrible winter of 1794–1795 went neglected and
unsupplied. Invaded by angry crowds, the Convention reacted with vehemence,
and in the ensuing repression alienated the most active popular revolutionaries
from the “bourgeois” republic. Scrapping the constitution hastily adopted and rati-
fied in the summer of 1793, but never put into effect (the Constitution of the Year
I), the Convention drafted another, the Constitution of the Year III or 1795. The
2 Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Papers of J. B. Fortescue Pre-
served at Dropmore, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927), III, 63–64.