The Girondins (; ), also called Girondists, were a political group during the French Revolution. From 1791 to 1793, the Girondins were active in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention. Together with the Montagnards, they initially were part of the Jacobin movement. They campaigned for the end of the monarchy, but then resisted the spiraling momentum of the Revolution, which caused a conflict with the more radical Montagnards. They dominated the movement until their fall in the insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793, which resulted in the domination of the Montagnards and the purge and eventual mass execution of the Girondins. This event is considered to mark the beginning of the Reign of Terror.
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. Girondin leader Jacques Pierre Brissot proposed an ambitious military plan to spread the Revolution internationally, therefore the Girondins were the war party in 1792–1793. Other prominent Girondins included Jean Marie Roland and his wife Madame Roland. They also had an ally in the English-born American activist Thomas Paine.
Brissot and Madame Roland were executed and Jean Roland (who had gone into hiding) committed suicide when he learned about the execution. Paine was imprisoned, but he narrowly escaped execution. The famous painting The Death of Marat depicts the fiery radical journalist and denouncer of the Girondins Jean-Paul Marat after being stabbed to death in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympathizer. Corday did not attempt to flee and was arrested and executed.
Historian Alfred Cobban challenged how numerous and powerful the Girondins actually were in his influential work The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Citing M. J. Sydenham's study on the subject, The Girondins (1961), Cobban claims there were only 20–25 loosely associated deputies, and they exhibited little in the way of a common policy or political coherence.
Identity 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". They were never a formal organization or political party.Furet & Ozouf, p. 351. The name itself was bestowed not by any of its alleged members but by the Montagnards, "who claimed as early as April 1792 that a counterrevolutionary faction had coalesced around deputies of the department of the Gironde". 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. Other names were employed at the time too, but "Girondins" ultimately became the term favored by historians. The term became standard with Alphonse de Lamartine's History of the Girondins in 1847.Bosher, pp. 185–191.
History Rise
Twelve deputies represented the département of the Gironde and there were six who sat for this département in both the Legislative Assembly of 1791–1792 and the National Convention of 1792–1795. Five were lawyers: Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud, Marguerite-Élie Guadet, Armand Gensonné, Jean Antoine Laffargue de Grangeneuve and Jean Jay (who was also a Protestant pastor). The other, Jean François Ducos, was a tradesman. 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.
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.
Madame Roland, whose salon became their gathering place, had a powerful influence on the spirit and policy of the Girondins with her "romantic republicanism". 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, hence the name "Brissotins" for his followers. The group was identified by its enemies at the start of the National Convention (20 September 1792). "Brissotins" and "Girondins" were terms of opprobrium used by their enemies in a separate faction of the Jacobin Club, who freely denounced them as enemies of democracy.
Foreign policy In the Legislative Assembly of 1791 to 1792, the Girondins represented the principle of democratic revolution within France and patriotic defiance to the other European powers. Girondins supported an aggressive foreign policy and constituted the war party in the period 1792 to 1793, when revolutionary France initiated what became a long series of revolutionary wars against other European powers. Brissot proposed an ambitious military plan to spread the Revolution internationally, one that Napoleon Bonaparte later pursued aggressively.Thomas Lalevée, "National Pride and Republican grandezza: Brissot's New Language for International Politics in the French Revolution" , French History and Civilisation (Vol. 6), 2015, pp. 66–82. Brissot called on the National Convention to dominate Europe by conquering the Rhineland, Poland and the Netherlands, with the goal of forming a protective ring of satellite republics in Great Britain, Spain and Italy by 1795. The Girondins also called for war against Austria, arguing that such a conflict would rally French patriots around the Revolution, liberate oppressed peoples from despotism, and test the loyalty of King Louis XVI, who had married into Austria's ruling Habsburg family.
Montagnards versus Girondins
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, Étienne Clavière and Joseph Marie Servan de Gerbey; and they forced a declaration of war against Habsburg Austria the same year. Following the veto of key pieces of legislation proposed by the Girondins (primarily relating to the deportation of refractory priests and the stationing of 20,000 soldiers in Paris) by the King and a critical letter penned by Roland in response to these vetoes, Louis XVI dismissed the Girondin Ministers on 13 June 1792. This dismissal is one of the factors that led to the émeute (riot) of 20 June 1792 as one of the aims of the rioters was for the King to reinstate the Girondist ministers.
In all of this activity, there was no apparent line of cleavage between La Gironde and The Mountain. 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. Despite being accused of wanting to weaken the central government ("federalism"), the Girondins desired as little as the Montagnards to break up the unity of France.Bill Edmonds, "'Federalism' and Urban Revolt in France in 1793", Journal of Modern History (1983) 55#1 pp. 22–53, From the first, the leaders of the two parties stood in avowed opposition, in the Jacobin Club as in the Assembly.
Temperament largely accounts for the dividing line between the parties. The Girondins were doctrinaires and theorists rather than men of action. They initially encouraged armed petitions, but then were dismayed when this led to the émeute (riot) of 20 June 1792. 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. Girondins did not share the ferocious fanaticism or the ruthless opportunism of the future Montagnard organisers of the Reign of Terror. On 25 July, according to the Logographe, Carnot promoted the use of pikes (seven feet long) and provided to every citizen.Le Logographe, 27 juillet 1792; 1 aôut 1792; Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, 2 août 1792 (On this day the points of view between Robespierre and Brissot split.Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, 30 mai 1793, p. 3) On 29 July Robespierre called for the deposition of the King and the election of a Convention.N. Hampson (1988) Prelude to Terror. The Constituent Assembly and the Failure of Consensus, 1789–1791, p. 113–114 Early August Brissot urged the preservation of the constitution, advocating against both the dethronement of the king and the election of a new assembly. As the Revolution developed, the Girondins often found themselves opposing its results; the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the September Massacres of 1792 occurred while they still nominally controlled the government, but the Girondins tried to distance themselves from the results of the September Massacres. At the end of August Robespierre was no longer willing to cooperate with Brissot and Roland. 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. According to Charlotte Robespierre, her brother stopped talking to his former friend, mayor Pétion de Villeneuve. Pétion was accused of conspicuous consumption by Desmoulins,Linton, Marisa (2015) 'Come and dine': the dangers of conspicuous consumption in French revolutionary politics, 1789–95. European History Quarterly, 45(4), pp. 615–637. ISSN (print) 0265-6914 and finally rallied to Brissot.
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). Their numbers were increased by the return to national politics by former National Constituent Assembly deputies such as Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Pétion de Villeneuve and Kervélégan, as well as some newcomers as the writer Thomas Paine and popular journalist Jean-Louis Carra. The Girondins called on the local authorities to oppose the concentration and centralisation of power.
Decline and fall
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. Once the king was overthrown in 1792 and a republic was established, they were anxious to stop the revolutionary movement that they had helped to set in motion. Girondins and historian Pierre Claude François Daunou argues in his Mémoires that the Girondins were too cultivated and too polished to retain their popularity for long in times of disturbance, and so they were more inclined to work for the establishment of order, which would mean the guarantee of their own power. The Girondins, who had been the radicals of the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792), became the conservatives of the Convention (1792–1795).Alderson, p. 9.