466 Ch. 12 • The French Revolution
The rights of the accused were limited, and new special courts prosecuted
anyone considered disloyal to the republic. On March 19, 1793, the Con
vention passed a law permitting the immediate trial of armed insurgents
without a jury. The Jacobin-dominated Convention established a Committee
of Public Safety of nine and then twelve members, which gradually assumed
more and more power as it oversaw the Terror. The Convention also decreed
a special war tax, including a forced levy on wealthy people, and in May
1793 imposed the “Maximum”—a maximum price on grain. These measures
of centralization and government interference in the economy led to an irre
versible break between the Jacobins, who believed in state controls, and the
Girondins, who believed in economic freedom.
Military requisitions of foodstuffs accentuated hardship. Poor people
rioted against the high price of grain. In Paris, the Society of Revolutionary
Republican Women took to the streets, demanding laws against hoarding
and calling for women to be granted citizenship. A group called the enrages
(the “enraged”) demanded that bakers be penalized if they charged more
than the maximum price for bread.
In June, pushed on by crowds from the radical sections of Paris, the Con
vention expelled twenty-nine Girondin deputies, accusing them of support
ing hoarders, and it ordered the arrest of some of them. Insurgents in Toulon
turned over half of the French fleet to the British. In July, Charlotte Corday,
a royalist noblewoman, stabbed Marat to death in his bathtub. Tax revenue
and foreign trade fell by half. Assignats, more of which had rolled off the gov
ernment presses as the financial crisis continued, plunged further in value.
Two young radical Jacobin leaders strode forward to take charge of the
Terror. Louis Antoine Saint-Just (1767-1794), a precocious, icy young
deputy whose mother had
once had him incarcerated
for running off with the
family silver, waged war on
royalists, hoarders, and
Girondins. “Those who
make revolutions by halves
dig their own grave,” he
warned.
Maximilien Robespierre
(1758-1794) emerged as
the leading figure on the
Committee of Public
Safety. He knew that the
Mountain drew its support
from the sans-culottes,
some of whom supported
the Terror. But he also
Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. believed that the popular