The Federalist revolts were uprisings that broke out in various parts of France in the summer of 1793, during the French Revolution. They were prompted by resentments in France's provincial cities about increasing centralisation of power in Paris, and increasing radicalisation of political authority in the hands of the Jacobins. In most of the country, the trigger for uprising was the exclusion of the Girondins from the National Convention after the Insurrection of 31 May – 2 June 1793. Although they shared common origins and political objectives, the revolts were not centrally organised or well-coordinated. The revolts were put down by the armies of the Convention over the following months. The Reign of Terror was then imposed across France to punish those associated with them and to enforce Jacobin ideology.
Origins
In 1793, facing repeated threats from the radical Paris Commune, the Girondins (sometimes referred to as "federalists" because of their ideas about decentralising power) began preparing a resistance movement outside Paris in the regions where they had significant support. In many parts of the country, local and departmental governments were still dominated by the same notable families who had run them before the Revolution, and they often held Girondist, or even royalist, political views. At the same time, the Girondins' political opponents in Paris, the Jacobins, also sought to mobilise the population outside the capital to resist this local establishment and mobilise the people for a radical egalitarian Republic.This led to violent confrontations, exacerbated by underlying social conflicts, in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes and Rouen, towns where each faction had a strong social basepart of the middle classes and the urban poor supported the Jacobins, while Girondin support was strong among the more prosperous bourgeoisie and those elements of the urban poor affected by unemployment or hostile to the anticlerical measures of the Convention.Roger Dupuy, La République jacobine: Terreur, guerre et gouvernement révolutionnaire, 1792-1794, vol 2 of Nouvelle histoire de la France contemporaine, Le Seuil, coll. Points Histoire, 2005, .
In most affected cities, the crisis broke after 29 Girondin députés were arrested on 2 June 1793. On 5 June, another 17 députés, including Nicolas de Condorcet, protested against their arrest. The same day, the départemental administrations of Somme, Haute-Vienne and Hautes-Alpes did likewise.Marcel Dorigny, « Fédéralisme », dans Albert Soboul (dir.), Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, Paris, PUF, 1989 (rééd. Quadrige, 2005, ). On 7 June, 75 députés from the right of the Convention denounced the actions of the Paris Commune and urged the départements across the country to support them. Meanwhile, several of the Girondin députés escaped house arrest and fled to join the armed groups which most Norman and Breton départements had begun to assemble in order to raise a revolt against the Convention. For example, députés François Buzot and Antoine Joseph Gorsas went to Eure, while Jérôme Pétion and many others reached Caen, which was to become their headquarters. Meanwhile, Jacques Pierre Brissot went to Moulins, Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne to Nîmes, François Trophime Rebecqui to Marseille, and Jean-Baptiste Birotteau and to Lyon.
In these large towns, the local notables and large merchants, strong Girondin supporters, could muster sufficient influence and support to prevent the Jacobins in the towns from taking over. However, they lacked the numbers in the smaller towns to break to hegemony of the radical political clubs that wanted to remain loyal to the Convention, heeding appeals for the unity of patriots against counter-revolution and invasion, and welcoming the popular new Constitution of Year I.
The insurrection had three main regional centres: the West (Normandy and Brittany, principally in the towns of Rennes and Caen), the South East (Lyon, Marseille and Toulon) and the South West (Bordeaux).
Normandy and Brittany
On 9 June, the two représantants en mission from the Convention in Normandy, Gilbert Romme and Prieur de la Côte d'Or, were arrested in Caen by Federalists and held hostage for the duration of the rebellion against the safety of the proscribed Girondin leaders. On 13 June, led by Buzot and Gorsas, Eure gave the signal for insurrection, declaring that the Convention was no longer a free body, calling for the muster of 4,000 men to march on Paris and sending commissioners out to neighbouring départements to encourage them to rise, too.
In Ille-et-Vilaine, the département and the town government of Rennes, formed a central committee to coordinate protests. It was soon joined by delegates from Finistère and Morbihan. Côtes-du-Nord decided it was more important to send volunteers to defend Nantes, threatened by the Vendéan rebels, than to send men to Normandy. It was only after the Battle of Nantes that the authorities in Côtes-du-Nord decided to send just forty volunteers, while Nantes itself sent 64. Overall, the Bretons sent just 1,700 men into Normandy.
In Maine-et-Loire, the quartering of Convention troops in Laval as well as the presence of two loyal members of the Convention, and , prevented a gathering of citizens on 7 June who wanted to sign up to join a Federalist departmental battalion formed by Mayenne. However, this force eventually left for Caen on 4 July to join other Federalist units and volunteers coming from the Breton départements.
In Caen, now the headquarters of the Federalist revolt in the West, Buzot, Guadet, Pétion, Barbaroux, Louvet, Salle and other Girondins formed a central assembly for resistance to oppression, swearing hatred of anarchists and promising to maintain equality, unity, and the indivisibility of the Republic. They appointed General Georges Félix de Wimpffen, who had successfully defended Thionville against the Duke of Brunswick the year before, as commander of their départemental militias.
Wimpffen gathered a Federalist army of 5,000 men and, placing Puisaye in command of the vanguard, marched off towards Évreux. Against them, the Convention sent a small force of just 1,500 men, which engaged them on the evening of 13 July near Pacy-sur-Eure. The Federalist column, taken by surprise, broke and fled at the first sound of cannonthere were neither deaths nor injuries on either side. This encounter became known as the Battle of Brécourt. Wimpffen was unable to rally his troops, who began deserting or defecting to the Convention. The Bretons decided to go home, taking with them the Girondin leaders from Caen. After this, the Federalist revolt quickly dissipated in Normandy. On 29 July, Gilbert Romme and Prieur de la Côte d'Or were freed unharmed, and Caen opened its gates to the Convention army on 2 August, effectively bringing the revolt to an end there.
The same day as the Battle of Brécourt, Charlotte Corday, inspired by the Federalists in Caen, assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in Paris. Despite the intensity of the feeling stirred up by his death and Corday's execution soon after, the Convention did not impose punishments on Normandy as it later did on Lyon and Marseille. Romme and Prieur de la Côte d'Or ensured that the local clubs were not suppressedindeed, during the Reign of Terror, there were no executions at all in Caen. The loss of the Jacobin hero was, however, commemorated in Normandy on 19 November, when the city of Le Havre-de-Grâce changed its name to Le Havre-de-Marat (later, Le Havre-Marat).The French Revolution, David E. A. Coles, Friesen Press, 2014, p. 134.
In Brittany, the fleeing Girondin leaders arrived at Quimper on 8 August but found little support for their insurrection, even among a peasantry with strong monarchist tendencies and a hatred of the levée en masse. Saint-Malo prepared to defect to the British as Toulon had done, but Convention forces were able to take control quickly and prevent this. On 21 September, Petion, Barbaroux and the others abandoned Brittany, sailing from the port of Lanvéoc to Bordeaux, where they intended to continue their struggle.
The Convention sent Jean-Baptiste Carrier to Rennes to re-establish order. He arrived on 1 September and remained until 5 or 6 October, when he left for Nantes. In the intervening five weeks, he rallied the local Jacobins and comprehensively purged Federalists, Girondins and monarchists from every public office. There were no executions under his command, although counter-revolutionaries were locked up in various local prisonsthe most "dangerous" being confined to Mont Saint Michel for maximum securityand others sent to Paris for trial. He waged a particularly intense campaign against the local clergy and had plans for a "noyade" (mass drowning), as he was later to undertake at Nantes, but he could not put his plan into effect because any vessel leaving Saint-Malo would have been easily captured by the British fleet which was standing out to sea, imposing a blockade. After Carrier's departure, his replacement, released most of the people he had imprisoned.
Early in 1794, a new revolt, the Chouannerie, broke out in Brittany and nearby départements.
Lyon
Lyon was the second-largest city in France after Paris, where factional tension ran very high in the first half of 1793. As in Marseilles, most of the sections supported the Girondins, but a small and determined group of Jacobins was intent on taking power in the city under their charismatic but divisive leader, Joseph Chalier. On 9 March the Jacobins effectively gained control of the city.
On 29 May a meeting of the sections decided to replace the Jacobin Council government. :fr:Jean-Pierre Gauthier and :fr:Pierre-Claude Nioche, représentants en mission from the national government, arrived and were placed under guard. During the night Chalier's partisans were arrested and the following day a man named Coindre became mayor. Chalier and his friends were put on trial.Jean-René Suratteau, « Lyon », in Albert Soboul, Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, 2005, p. 689.
In the days following the arrest of the Girondin deputés in Paris, the Convention saw developments in Lyon as part of a more widespread revolt threatening the authority of central government. Indeed, within the month the municipal leaders in Lyon were linking up both with neighbouring departments and with other "insurgent cities" in the French south, Marseille, Nîmes and Bordeaux. Lyon now called for a meeting among the potentially separatist municipalities and departments to be convened at Bourges, as an alternative to the Convention. Unlike the Federalist towns in Normandy and Brittany which had barely managed to raise a few hundred men, Lyon had a substantial force of some 10,000 men under arms, commanded by royalists led by the Count of Précy.
The Convention sent Robert Lindet to negotiate with the leaders in Lyon, but he found the local representatives in an uncompromising mood: intransigence was stiffened by the presence at Lyon of Jean Bonaventure Birotteau, one of the recently expelled Girondist deputés. On 30 June 1793, 207 delegates representing nearby cantons, the department and the urban districts appointed a "Popular Republican Commission for the Public Safety of Rhône-et-Loire", which published an "Address from the authorities duly constituted at Lyon to the armies, the citizens and all the departments in the republic". The National Convention responded with a series of decrees on 12 and 14 July 1793. They declared Birotteau an outlaw, dismissed the Lyon leaders, confiscating their assets; and they ordered the Army of the Alps to re-establish order in Lyon.