FRANCE IN BETWEEN OF WAR (THE JACOBIN TERROR)

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The Commune served as the 2nd revolution's medium, with Paris serving as its center. Local and municipal groups served a variety of functions, mostly army and administrative. The four hundred and seven representatives from various Parisian areas who had been chosen as deputies to the Estates general assembled at the Hotel de Ville in June of 1789 to establish an unofficial municipal administration. Similar municipal bodies were formed in different & other towns as a result of local uprisings. Local communal councils had been established in all cities and villages by December of 1789. Committees for local revolutionary monitoring frequently emerged. Established upon the collapse of the Bastille, the National Guard was mostly composed of middle-class recruits and was further divided into local units under regional federations. Mainly in Paris the capital city of France, this mass of local bodies had a tendency to merge into small insurrectional formations.

Recruits were pouring into Paris the capital city of France in August of 1792, as the city's working-class neighborhoods were rife with unrest, and the people launched a full-scale uprising against the Legislative Assembly. They overran the Tuileries, put the King and the royal family in jail, and demanded that a new National Convention be chosen by universal male vote. In Paris, they also established the Commune, a revolutionary form of local administration. August 11, Robespierre was voted to it and attended its meetings for a period of 2 weeks. This body, backed by the radical Jacobins, continued to be the national representative assembly's opposing authority in the capital and consistently put pressure on it to take ever-more drastic and violent actions. This was the 2nd major Robespierre medium, which was resurrected in 1871 in an even more brutal version.

The National Convention's 1 chamber assembly was the third. In answer to the demands of the Commune and the Jacobins, it was elected in the fall of 1792 using single male suffrage. The Convention's committees gained executive authority once the monarchy was removed. This configuration was perfect for the Jacobins' schemes and Robespierre's unique abilities. The Committee of General Security and the Committee of Public Safety, which was established in April of 1793, were the 2 most significant committees. The former held broad discretionary powers of governance and was up for Re-election every month by the Convention. The latter was particularly focused on law enforcement duties, and starting in September of 1793, the Committee of Public Safety selected its members. In July, Robespierre became a member of the Committee of Public Safety following Danton's removal, as it was obvious that Danton's valiant attempts to stop the French defeats had not succeeded. Together with his two closest collaborators, Louis de Saint-Just and Georges Couthon, Robespierre had nearly unlimited access to the tremendous powers of both committees. There had additionally been a special court in Paris known as the Revolutionary Tribunal since August of 1792. Originally intended to try political offenders, it was later used as a handy way for the government to avoid using the regular courts.

This served as the constitutional underpinning for Robespierre's "revolutionary dictatorship," which sought to destroy all opposition through violent terrorism while citing France's dire internal and external circumstances as justification. During the panic of the era, any form of opposition may be executed by guillotine after being labeled as treasonous or counterrevolutionary. Robespierre, who had a mystical belief in the necessity of a "Republic of Virtue," also found this circumstance to be very fitting with his mentality. The term virtue bore similarities to the ideas of both Montesquieu and Machiavelli, who defined it as a civic virtue characterized by selflessness and obligatory self-sacrifice and Rousseau, who imbued it with a more romantic connotation of individual innocence and rectitude. Robespierre considered it his personal mission to establish a new democratic religion, and his dream was a democracy of honest men and devoted citizens. Having signed an edict establishing the religion one month earlier, he presided over the religion of the Supreme Being's inaugural festival in June of 1794. Most importantly, the decree's second and third articles acknowledged that the proper worship of the Supreme being consists in the practice of human duties with the most crucial duties being to hate treachery and tyranny to punish tyrants and traitors to succor the unfortunate to respect the weak and to defend the oppressed to do all the good one can to one's neighbor and to treat no one unfairly. A delayed but essential follow-up to the declaration of rights, it was a revolutionary declaration of the Duties of Man and of the Citizen. It was an indication that the primary revolutionary wave had peaked a month later Robespierre himself was executed by guillotine his own repressive dictatorship having finally reached unacceptable proportions. His coworkers Saint-Just and Couthon also passed along with him.

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