THE JACOBIN RIGHT:

The dangers of normalizing political violence. France had no mechanism for either the peaceful transfer of power or the reform of power, so in retrospect some level of violence seems inevitable. But from the beginning, the Revolution was also marked by grisly brutality against perceived evildoers. The most dramatic example of this was the lynching of finance minister Joseph Foullon de Doué and his son-in-law, the intendant of Paris Louis Bertier de Sauvigny, on July 22, 1789; both men, named as culprits in paranoid rumors about a "famine plot" to starve the population of Paris, were hanged from lampposts and then beheaded, their severed heads carried on pikes through city streets. After some Assembly members voiced dismay at the killings, others rose to excuse them as a justifiable expression of popular anger; one, Antoine Barnave, rebuked his "tender-hearted" colleagues and suggested that the victims deserved little pity because the spilled blood was not "pure" but tainted by their offenses. Predictably, Barnave himself later joined the ranks of such "impure" victims.

When the Republic was established in September 1792 and the mass of (male) French citizens acquired the ability to change their government at the ballot box, the habit of political violence persisted. On May 31, 1793, a Paris mob invaded the hall of the national legislature--the Convention--and demanded the expulsion and arrest of the Girondin deputies. The mob, supported by Robespierre's radical Montagnard faction, prevailed. Long before the ascent of Napoleon, that was the end of France's first experiment in liberty.

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