Girondins
The Girondins were a group of loosely affiliated individuals rather than an organized political party and the name was at first informally applied because the most prominent exponents of their point of view were deputies to the Legislative Assembly from the département of Gironde in southwest France.
The collective name "Girondins" is used to describe "a loosely knit group of French deputies who contested the Montagnards for control of the National Convention".
[8][11] Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Jean Marie Roland and François Buzot were among the most prominent of such deputies and contemporaries called their supporters Brissotins, Rolandins, or Buzotins, depending on which politician was being blamed for their leadership.
In the Legislative Assembly, they represented a compact body of opinion which, though not as yet definitely republican (i.e. against the monarchy), was considerably more "advanced" than the moderate royalism of the majority of the Parisian deputies.
[7] A group of deputies from elsewhere became associated with these views, most notably the Marquis de Condorcet, Claude Fauchet, Marc David Lasource, Maximin Isnard, the Comte de Kersaint, Henri Larivière and above all Jacques Pierre Brissot, Jean Marie Roland and Jérôme Pétion, who was elected mayor of Paris in succession to Jean Sylvain Bailly on 16 November 1791.
[13] The party cohesion they possessed was connected to the energy of Brissot, who came to be regarded as their mouthpiece in the Assembly and in the Jacobin Club,[citation needed] hence the name "Brissotins" for his followers.
[15] Brissot called on the National Convention to dominate Europe by conquering the Rhineland, Poland and the Netherlands with a goal of creating a protective ring of satellite republics in Great Britain, Spain and Italy by 1795.
The Girondins also called for war against Austria, arguing it would rally patriots around the Revolution, liberate oppressed peoples from despotism, and test the loyalty of King Louis XVI.
[16] Girondins at first dominated the Jacobin Club, where Brissot's influence had not yet been ousted by Maximilien Robespierre and they did not hesitate to use this advantage to stir up popular passion and intimidate those who sought to stay the progress of the Revolution.
They compelled the king in 1792 to choose a ministry composed of their partisans, among them Roland, Charles François Dumouriez,[16] Étienne Clavière and Joseph Marie Servan de Gerbey; and they forced a declaration of war against Habsburg Austria the same year.
Montagnards and Girondins alike were fundamentally opposed to the monarchy; both were democrats as well as republicans; and both were prepared to appeal to force in order to realise their ideals.
Jean-Marie Roland was typical of their spirit, turning the Ministry of the Exterior into a publishing office for tracts on civic virtues while riotous mobs were burning the châteaux unchecked in the provinces.
On Sunday morning 2 September the members of the Commune, gathering in the town hall to proceed the election of deputies to the National Convention, decided to maintain their seats and have Roland and Brissot arrested.
[26] When the National Convention first met on 22 September 1792, the core of like-minded deputies from the Gironde expanded as Jean-Baptiste Boyer-Fonfrède, Jacques Lacaze and François Bergoeing joined five of the six stalwarts of the Legislative Assembly (Jean Jay, the Protestant pastor, drifted toward the Montagnard faction).
The Girondins proposed suspending the king and summoning of the National Convention, but they agreed not to overthrow the monarchy until Louis XVI became impervious to their counsels.
Moreover, the Septembriseurs (the supporters of the September Massacres such as Robespierre, Danton, Marat and their lesser allies) realised that not only their influence but their safety depended on keeping the Revolution alive.
Their orators had no serious rivals in the hostile camp—their system was established in mere reason, but the Montagnards made up for what they lacked in talent or in numbers through their boldness and energy.
[31] The growing hostility of Paris to the Girondins received a fateful demonstration by the election on 15 February 1793 of the bitter ex-Girondin Jean-Nicolas Pache to the mayoralty.
They unintentionally increased the prestige of their most vocal and bitter critic Marat by prosecuting him before the Revolutionary Tribunal, where his acquittal in April 1793 was a foregone conclusion.
A list drawn up by the Commandant-General of the Parisian National Guard François Hanriot (with help from Marat) and endorsed by a decree of the intimidated Convention, included 22 Girondin deputies and 10 of the 12 members of the Commission of Twelve, who were ordered to be detained at their lodgings "under the safeguard of the people".
Others, including Brissot, Louvet, Buzot, Lasource, Grangeneuve, Larivière and François Bergoeing, escaped from Paris and, joined later by Guadet, Pétion and Birotteau, set to work to organise a movement of the provinces against the capital.
On 13 June 1793, it voted that the city of Paris deserved well of the country and ordered the imprisonment of the detained deputies, the filling up of their places in the Assembly by their suppléants and the initiation of vigorous measures against the movement in the provinces.
[29][34] The excuse for the Terror that followed was the imminent peril of France, menaced on the east by the advance of the armies of the First Coalition (Austria, Prussia and Great Britain) on the west by the Royalist Revolt in the Vendée and the need for preventing at all costs the outbreak of another civil war.
Another 39 were included in the final acte d'accusation, accepted by the Convention on 24 October 1793, which stated the crimes for which they were to be tried as their perfidious ambition, their hatred of Paris, their "federalism" and above all their responsibility for the attempt of their escaped colleagues to provoke civil war.
[29][38] The survivors of the party made an effort to re-enter the Convention after the fall of Robespierre on 27 July 1794, but it was not until 5 March 1795 that they were formally re-instated[citation needed] forming the Council of Five Hundred under the Directory.
The book echoes such popular novels as Rousseau's Julie or the New Héloise by linking her feminine virtue and motherhood to her sacrifice in a cycle of suffering and consolation.
