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.



 

ThermidorThermidor, Brumaire, and the Revolutionary Legacy

I. The Politics of the Thermidorean Reaction
A. The Reassertion of Legislative Power
B. A Retreat from Radicalism: Rolling Back Franchise

Image right: Fulchran Jean Harriet (1776-1805), La Nuit du 9 au 10 thermidor an II, Arrestation de Robespierre (ca. 1795-1796). Musée Carnavalet, Paris. This image of the coup d'état of 9 Thermidor shows the gendarme Charles-André Merda firing the shot which, he claimed, broke Robespierre's jaw. Napoleon made elevated him to the status of baron; Merda was mortally wounded at the Battle of Borodino in 1812.

Image: The Execution of Robespierre & Saint-Just, 28 July 1794
Image: Charles Ronot, Les derniers montagnards (1888)
Image: Lazare Carnot (1753-1823), Directeur, 1795-1797
Image: Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836), Directeur, 1799
Image: Paul de Barras
(1755-1829), Directeur, 1795-1799

II. Enter Napoleon: From Thermidor to Brumaire

Image: François Bouchot (1800–1842), Napoleon Bonaparte in the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (1840)
Image: Louis-Charles-August Couder (1790-1873), Installation of the Council of State, 25 December 1799 (1856)
Image: Jacques-Louis David, The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon I (1805)
Image: Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867), Napoleon on his Imperial Throne (1806)

Image: Louis-Philippe Crépin, Allegory of the Return of the Bourbons on 24 April 1814: Louis XVIII Lifting France from its Ruins (1814)

III. Legacies of the French Revolution
A. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe
B. The Death of the Corpus Mysticum
C. New Lines of Confrontation
D. Triumph of the Middle Classes?
E. “Possibilism”

Map: The Confederation of the Rhine, 1812
Map: Europe in 1810

Image: Emperor Franz II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1792-1806; Emperor of Austria, 1806-1835)
Image: François Gérard (1770-1837), Portrait of Jérôme Bonaparte (1811), King of Westphalia (1807-1813)
Image: Execution of Andreas Hofer, 1810
Image: Tom Paine (1737-1809), British subject, American radical, member of the French National Convention (1792-1793)

Image left: Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835), Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole (1796). Oil on canvas, 73 x 59 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. The artist Gros was filled with enthusiasm for the events of the Napoleonic era, for he was just 18 when the Revolution broke out. This and Bonaparte's rise to imperial power were to be the formative influences on his work. In 1797, when Napoleon was still a general, he gave the young Gros his first commission. It was Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole: on 17 November 1796 Napoleon led his troops in the battle at Arcole and he won in three days. The battle itself was a Pyrrhic victory for the young general; nevertheless, it enabled him to drive Austrian forces from the northern Italian plain. Soon after, the Austrians sued for peace, thus bringing to an end the First War of the Coalition (1792-1797). Image source: Web Gallery of Art.


LaFrancesauvee

Image: Antoine-François Callet (1741-1823), Allegory on the 18th Brumaire, or: France saved (1801) [Detail]. Oil on canvas, 6.16 x 3.0 m, Palace of Versailles. Image source: Wikimedia Commons.


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