Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONfound. In the course of its crisis the young French Republic discoveredor invented total war: the total mobilization of a nation's resourcesthrough conscription, rationing and a rigidly controlled war economy,and virtual abolition, at home or abroad, of the distinction betweensoldiers and civilians. How appalling the implications of this discoveryare has only become clear in our own historic epoch. Since the revolutionarywar of 1792-4 remained an exceptional episode, most nineteenth-centuryobservers could make no sense of it, except to observe(until in the fatness of later Victorian times even this was forgotten)that wars lead to revolutions, and revolutions win otherwise unwinnablewars. Only today can we see how much about the Jacobin Republicand the 'Terror' of 1793-4 makes sense in no other terms than thoseof a modern total war effort.The Sansculottes welcomed a revolutionary war government, notonly because they rightly argued that counter-revolution and foreignintervention could only thus be defeated, but also because its methodsmobilized the people and brought social justice nearer. (They overlookedthe fact that no effective modern war effort is compatible withthe decentralized voluntarist direct democracy which they cherished.)The Gironde, on the other hand, was afraid of the political consequencesof the combination of mass revolution and war which they unleashed.Nor were they equipped for competition with the left. They did notwant to try or execute the king, but had to compete with their rivals,'the Mountain' (the Jacobins), for this symbol of revolutionary zeal;the Mountain gained prestige, not they. On the other hand, they didwant to extend the war into a general ideological crusade of liberationand a direct challenge to the great economic rival, Britain. They succeededin this object. By March 1793 France was at war with most ofEurope, and had begun foreign annexations (legitimized by the newlyinventeddoctrine of France's right to her 'natural frontiers'). But theexpansion of the war, all the more as it went badly, only strengthenedthe hands of the left, which alone could win it. Retreating and outmanoeuvred,the Gironde was finally driven to ill-judged attacksagainst the left, which were soon to turn into organized provincial revoltagainst Paris. A rapid coup by the Sansculottes overthrew it on June 2,1793. The Jacobin Republic had come.IllWhen the educated layman thinks of the French Revolution it is theevents of 1789 but especially the Jacobin Republic of the Year II whichchiefly come to his mind. The prim Robespierre, the huge and whoring67