788 Chapter XXXII
sons in England paid only ten per cent by the law of 1799, those in France might
lose as much as three- quarters of their annual revenue. Most ominously recalling
the Terror was the Law of Hostages of July. It was enacted to deal with counter-
revolutionary conspiracy, insurrection and collusion with enemy powers, of the
kind which, as already mentioned, threatened Toulouse in August. By this legisla-
tion, in any region declared by its local authorities to be troubled, the relatives of
émigrés, ex- nobles, and “brigands” were to be put under arrest. For each patriot
killed by political violence, four “hostages” would be deported. For each act of pil-
lage, the hostages would raise a sum to indemnify the victim. The emergency
passed before much enforcement of this law began.
A sign also of revived revolutionary enthusiasm, outside the ranks of govern-
ment itself, was the reopening of political clubs, on the model of the true Jacobins
of five years before, in Paris and other cities through the country. The Constitution
of the Year III, like George Washington, frowned upon “self- created” societies. It
put the formation and operation of political clubs under close restriction. The Pan-
theon Club had been closed in 1796, and the constitutional circles of 1798 had
found it hard to develop beyond the status of local discussion groups. In the sum-
mer of 1799, facing much the same situation as in 1792, upholders of the new
order again rushed to its defense. On July 6 a group met in Paris that called itself
the Reunion of the Friends of Liberty and Equality—the very name that the Jaco-
bins had officially adopted in 1792. Several of its members had played prominent
roles during the Year II; one, Prieur of the Marne, had been a member of the great
Committee of Public Safety. Speakers called for a return of that exalted spirit that
had stopped the First Coalition; they denounced suspects, conspirators, profiteers,
royalists, and aristocrats; they praised various figures of the past, even the “virtuous
martyr” Babeuf; and they demanded that the Republic save itself by using the
money of the rich and the enthusiasm of the common man. The Paris club voted
to restore “the democratic spirit” in government, to establish “equal and common
education,” to provide work for the needy, and property for veterans who had
risked themselves in defense of the country. The notable point, however, is that this
revived Jacobin club proved very ephemeral. The Directory itself, which now re-
flected the wishes of the democratized councils, closed the club down on August
- It had lasted only thirty- eight days.
Enough happened in the summer of 1799 to raise a specter of social revolu-
tion, “agrarian law,” division of property, and confiscatory taxation of the rich. All
this made it easier for Bonaparte a few months later to present himself not only
as the defender of the New Order against the Coalition and the Bourbons, but as
the savior of society itself from dissolution and anarchy. Yet it seems clear, on bal-
ance, that the neo- Jacobinism of 1799 was not an actual renewal of real revolution,
so much as the excited reaction of an abortive democracy, half- formed and ill-
formed by four troubled years of very imperfect constitutional government, to a
threat posed by internal subversion and foreign invasion, on the part of men and
powers whose intention to destroy “democratic” institutions was unconcealed. It is
very doubtful that the neo- Jacobin or quasi- democratized regime in France in
1799 was a viable government. But its non- viability was due as much to the
strength of its enemies as to its own weaknesses.