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The shoemaker shown here is president of his neighborhood revolutionary committee. Although this engraving does not portray a specific political activity, the character evokes hostility toward laborers and artisans who involved themselves in…

In late July and early August 1792, amid ongoing rancor over the King’s role in the government and fears that he would betray the nation to the invading Prussians, various Parisian sections began petitioning for Louis to be deposed. In the text…

Throughout the spring of 1793, radicals in the Convention, in the Paris Commune, and in the sections struggled for power against Jean–Pierre Brissot and his allies, known as the "Girondins." They differed over how the revolution should be affected by…

The regulations demonstrate that women wanted to be taken seriously as political participants; they wanted their club to be like the clubs set up by men.

A Jacobin club in Besançon in the Franche–Comté on the eastern borders of France sent this report to the Jacobin Club of Paris on 8 January 1792. The club sees the continuing presence of those who did not take the clerical oath to the new regime…

The Directory’s constitution had ensured the rights of assembly, free speech, and a limited suffrage; for former Jacobins now deprived of their clubs and of their power in the legislature, these constitutional liberties offered the potential to…

Despite the consolidation of power in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety and the creation of Revolutionary Tribunals across France to eliminate traitors to the Republic, the Convention continued to worry about conspiracies even among its…

At the demand of patriots in Paris and the provinces, the National Convention sent irregular units to the countryside and to cities where resistance to the Revolution had appeared. In this report from Toulouse, the Convention, through the medium of…

In this speech to the Convention, delivered on 5 February 1794, Robespierre offered a justification of the Terror. By this date, the Federalist revolt and Vendée uprisings had been by and large pacified and the threat of invasion by the Austrians,…

Jacques Brissot founded the Society of the Friends of Blacks in 1788 to agitate against the slave trade and slavery itself. Brissot modeled the Society on the London Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade established in 1787. He hoped that…