398 Chapter XVI
- They were called Feuillants in the party language of the day. Afraid of popu-
lar radicalism, they were concerned for order and property, and willing to cling to
the person, symbol, and authority of Louis XVI, however much his attachment to
the Revolution might be questioned, lest the country slide into republicanism. Mi-
rabeau might have been of this group had he lived. By the middle of 1792 they had
the cooperation of Lafayette, who in June left his war- time command in the field
and returned to Paris, hoping to suppress Jacobin radicalism, and to remove Louis
XVI from the city, so that, from a point in the provinces, the somewhat patrician
forces of orderly revolution could take a stand. In opinion, this group was not very
different from the liberal émigrés, but its members remained involved in French
politics; some perished in the Terror, but others emerged among the leaders of the
Directory, when a constitutional republic was set up on a constitutional monarchist
model.
To the left of this constitutionalism stood the ideas of the Jacobins, by far the
best known and most famous of all elements in the Revolution. Found every-
where in France, the Jacobins took their name from the Jacobin Club of Paris, as
it was commonly called, its actual name before 1792 being the Society of Friends
of the Constitution, and after 1792 the Society of Friends of Liberty and Equal-
ity. There was nothing secret or conspiratorial or even very well organized about
the Jacobin Club, or the thousands of provincial clubs with which it exchanged
correspondence and delegations. They publicized themselves as much as possible.
They generally said what they thought and believed what they said, being naive
rather than devious. They gloried in the name of “Jacobin,” until the club was
closed late in 1794; but the use of the term by conservatives, both in and out of
France, and the equating of the Revolution itself with “Jacobinism,” was usually
highly inaccurate and intended to be disparaging. The Jacobins were overwhelm-
ingly Frenchmen of the middle class, men of some schooling or professional
standing or assured income or moderate property- holding before the Revolution,
aroused by the ideas of the Enlightenment, acrimoniously hostile to the nobility,
dubious of the church, intolerant of opposition, believers in the close imminence
of a better and freer world, and absolutely dedicated to the great principles of the
Revolution, in whose defense they could be ruthless. Distrust of the upper classes,
in the conditions of 1791 and 1792, converted the Jac obins to republicanism.
They also had come to accept political democracy in the sense of universal suf-
frage, which a few like Robespierre had urged from the beginning. Though great
talkers, they were also men of action. They lacked patience for the hesitant, the
moderate, the procrastinating, and the indecisive. Such qualities aroused their
suspicions. They were combative personalities, more than willing to knock down
and drag out the upholders of royal courts and ornamental nobilities. They wel-
comed war in 1792. Though middle- class, they were not above working with
mobs, and could rally the common people against common enemies by promises
and concessions. Their club was the Mother Society, and they regarded them-
selves as the orthodox of the Revolution; the Feuillants had originated in a split
in the club in 1791, and after Brissot and his followers left the club in October
1792 the Brissotins, or Girondists, were at a great political disadvantage. But