Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONdecisive. Moreover, the very needs of the war obliged any governmentto centralize and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, directdemocracy of club and section, the casual voluntarist militia, the freeargumentative elections on which the Sansculottes thrived. The processwhich, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, strengthened Communistsat the expense of Anarchists, strengthened Jacobins of Saint-Just's stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hubert's. By 1794 governmentand politics were monolithic and run in harness by direct agentsof Committee or Convention—through delegates en mission—and alarge body of Jacobin officers and officials in conjunction with localparty organizations. Lastly, the economic needs of the war alienatedpopular support. In the towns price-control and rationing benefitedthe masses; but the corresponding wage-freeze hurt them. In thecountryside the systematic requisitioning of food (which the urbanSansculottes had been the first to advocate) alienated the peasantry.The masses therefore retired into discontent or into a puzzled andresentful passivity, especially after the trial and execution of the H6bertists,the most vocal spokesmen of the Sansculotterie. Meanwhile moremoderate supporters were alarmed by the attack on the right wingopposition, now headed by Danton. This faction had provided a refugefor numerous racketeers, speculators, black market operators and othercorrupt though capital-accumulating elements, all the more readily asDanton himself embodied the a-moral, Falstaffian, free loving and freespending which always emerges initially in social revolutions untiloverpowered by the hard puritanism that invariably comes to dominatethem. The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres(or by those who pretend to behave like Robespierres) because hardnarrow dedication can succeed where bohemianism cannot. However,if Robespierre won moderate support for eliminating corruption,which was after all in the interests of the war-effort, the further restrictionson freedom and money-making were more disconcerting to thebusinessman. Finally, no large body of opinion liked the somewhatfanciful ideological excursions of the period—the systematic dechristianizationcampaigns (due to Sansculotte zeal) and Robespierre's newcivic religion of the Supreme Being, complete with ceremonies, whichattempted to counteract the atheists and carry out the precepts of thedivine Jean-Jacques. And the steady hiss of the guillotine reminded allpoliticians that no one was really safe.By April 1794, both right and left had gone to the guillotine and theRobespierrists were therefore politically isolated. Only the war-crisismaintained them in power. When, late in June 1794, the new armiesof the Republic proved their firmness by decisively defeating the7i