This included establishing the world's first universal military draft as a solution to filling army ranks to put down civil unrest and prosecute war.
[10][11] The Jacobin dictatorship was known for enacting the Reign of Terror, which targeted speculators, monarchists, right-wing Girondin, Hébertists, and traitors, and led to many beheadings.
[12] Another tenet of Jacobinism is a secularism that includes the elimination of existing religions in favor of one run by the state (i.e., the cults of Reason and the Supreme Being).
[17][18] His political ideology was a form of neo-Jacobinism and primordial communism that highlighted egalitarian division of all land and property enforced by a dictatorship run by the Equals.
"[21][20] Leon Trotsky echoed these sentiments, stating that the foundation of the Communist International marked a "carrying on in direct succession the heroic endeavours and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf.
[29] After the French Revolution of 1848, he criticized contemporaries who claimed to be heirs of Jacobinism, writing: "Our own self-styled Montagnards are a caricature, indeed a very poor copy, of the Girondins.
"[25][30] His view of Robespierre later changed over an understanding of the Terror's executions of Georges Danton and the Hébertists, as well as the formation of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the latter due to Blanqui's promotion of materialism and atheism.
[25][31] He said that socialism needed to be built on the foundations laid by the French Revolution, and would better defend the ideals of the Enlightenment than Jacobinism, adding the toast, "Citizens, the Mountain is dead!
[36] During the subsequent Fourth Anglo-Mysore War of 1799, British forces captured French volunteers led by François Ripaud who were serving under Mysorean command.
[37] French historian Jean Boutier argued that senior officials of the East India Company fabricated the club's existence to justify their war against Mysore.
"[25][40] The masthead of his newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia carried quotes from Blanqui ("Whoever has steel has bread") and Napoleon Bonaparte ("The Revolution is an idea which has found bayonets!").
[49] Russia's notion of the French Revolution permeated educated society and was reflected in speeches and writings of leaders, including Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin.
[60] The conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank.
Prominent members of the Society who worked for the Radical Manchester Herald newspaper even contacted the Jacobin Club in France on 13 April 1792.
[62] Regional Painite radicalism was incorrectly portrayed as English Jacobinism and were attacked by Conservative forces including Edmund Burke as early as 1791.
[65] English Jacobins included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and others prior to their disillusionment with the outbreak of the Reign of Terror.
The London Corresponding Society founded in 1792 was partly modeled on the Jacobins to pressure the government in a law-abiding manner for democratic reform.
[3] Chartist leader James Bronterre O'Brien defended Robespierre, describing him as "one of the greatest men, and one of the purest and most enlightened reformers, that ever existed in the world.
[72] In the correspondence of Austrian statesman and diplomat Prince Klemens von Metternich and other leaders of the repressive policies that followed the second fall of Napoleon in 1815, Jacobin is the term commonly applied to anyone with progressive tendencies, such as the emperor Alexander I of Russia.
[citation needed] In modern American politics, the term Jacobin is often used to describe extremists of any party who demand ideological purity.
[81] In contrast, L. Brent Bozell, Jr. has written in Goldwater's seminal The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) that "Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with 'democratic' Jacobins.
[91][92] The undercurrent of radical and populist tendencies espoused and enacted by the Jacobins would create a complete cultural and societal shock within the traditional and conservative governments of Europe, leading to new political ideas of society emerging.
[94][95] Jacobin populism and complete structural destruction of the old order led to an increasingly revolutionary spirit throughout Europe and such changes would contribute to new political foundations.
For instance in France, Georges Valois, founder of the first non-Italian fascist party Faisceau,[96] claimed the roots of fascism stemmed from the Jacobin movement.
[97] While fascism bears similarities to Jacobinism particularly as a democratic nationalism fighting against an existing order, it is difficult to directly trace such lineage.