Week 10: From Thermidor to Brumaire

Textbook Reading: Censer & Hunt, Chapter 4.

Exporting Revolution

I. The Wars of the Revolution
A. Counter-Revolution in the Provinces
B. The First War of the Coalition (1792-1797)
C. A New Kind of War

Map: The Revolution under Foreign Attack, 1792-1794
Image: Jacques Pierre Brissot (1754-1793)
Image: Joseph Fouché (1759-1820)
Image: Insignia of Royalist Insurgents during the Vendée Insurrection (1793)
Map: Counter-Revolution in the Départements

Image: Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet, The Battle of Valmy, 1792 (1826)
Map: Republican France and its ‘Sister Republics,’ 1799
Map: The Helvetic Republic, ca. 1798
Map: The Expansion of France, 1791-1811
Image: Raising the Vrijheidsboom in Groningen, ca. 1795

II. The Revolution beyond France
A. Exporting Revolution: New Départements and ‘Sister Republics’
B. A Case in Point: The ‘Helvetic Republic’ (1798-1803)
C. Revolution in the Colonies: Saint-Domingue and the Politics of Race

Map: Colonial Saint-Domingue
Image: A pre-Revolutionary Indigo Manufacture
Image: Antoine Barnave (1761-1793), Revolution and Opponent of Slave Emancipation
Image: Nicolas-André Monsiau, L’abolition de l'esclavage par la Convention, le 16 pluviôse an II (1794).
Image: François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803)

Image right: Léon Cogniet, La Garde nationale de Paris part pour l'armée, Septembre 1792 (1836) [Detail]. Oil on canvas. 189 x 76 cm. Musée national du Château de Versailles. Image source: L'Histoire par l'Image. On 11 July 1792 the Legislative Assembly, reeling from military defeat and facing the threat of invasion by the armies of Prussia, declares a state of emergency and calls for 50,000 volunteers to join the National Guard. By the end of that summer, the situation had worsened dramatically: the town of Longwy had capitulated to the Prussians, and Verdun was threatened; in late August, the Assembly approved another levy, of an additional 30,000 men. A year later, in August 1793, the National Convention would decree the levée en masse, the general mobilization of able-bodied males. This painting by Léon Cogniet commemorated a conscription of these new soldiers at the Pont-Neuf in Paris. Notice the pedestal in the background: before the Revolution, an equestrian statue of King Henry IV had stood there; its place is now taken by the tricolor banner of the Republic. In general, the atmosphere is one of enthusiasm for the volunteers who would soon defeat the invading armies.