Abstract
In late May, the military reverses on the frontier, threat of an enemy invasion, and fear of civil war prompted the Girondins to call for decisive action against all traitors, hoping thereby to revive their declining political fortunes. The very real dangers facing the revolutionary state led to a temporary truce between the Robespierrists and the Girondins, and the deputies quickly passed three defense decrees: one against the refractory clergy, a second disbanding the king’s Constitutional Guard, and a third creating an armed camp of national guardsmen near Paris.
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Notes
Bertrand de Moleville, Annals of the French Revolution, trans. R. C. Dallas (London, 1800–1802), 6:233.
A contemporary pamphlet on these debates is Georges-Victor Vasselin, Dénonciation du ministre de la guerre (Paris, 1792), 1–3.
See L. B. Pfeiffer, The Uprising of June 29, 1792 (Lincoln, 1913); Aulard, Jacobins, 4:11; E. Mellié, Les sections de Paris pendant la Révolution française (Paris, 1898), 104–8. An account of the uprising is given in a letter to Dumouriez from Chazellez, Dumouriez’s agent in Paris. Chazellez to Dumouriez, 23 June 1792, AN.
Georges Lefebvre, La Revolution française: La chute du Roi (Paris, 1942), 41; Mellié, Les Sections de Paris, 121.
This decree summoned all administrative bodies into daily session, militarized the National Guard for front-line service, and gave the Assembly the ability to negate the royal veto. See David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York, 2005), 80.
Guillaume Bonne-Carrère, Exposé de la conduite de Bonne-Carrère depuis le commencement de la Révolution (Paris, 1823), 10–11.
Mathieu Dumas, Souvenirs du Lieutenant Général Comte Mathieu Dumas (Paris, 1839), 2:380–81, 477.
Pierre-Louis Roederer, Chronique de cinquante jours (Paris, 1832); P. Sagnac, La chute de la royauté (Paris, 1909), 71.
On the Revolution of 10 August, see David Jordan, The King’s Trial (Berkeley, 1979), 35–36; Michael Howell, “Danton and the First Republic,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1982; Munro Price, The Fall of the French Monarchy (London, 2002), 296–303.
See Norman Hampson, Danton (London, 1978), 158; Howell, Danton and the First Republic, chapters 2–4. One letter from Dumouriez to Danton exists for this period, in which Dumouriez urged Danton to remain on the Executive Council. Dumouriez to Danton, 28 September 1792, BN.
Although Jacques Godechot states that “LeBrun, as minister of foreign affairs, took a decisive role in foreign policy decisionmaking, given the circumstances of war” (Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire [Paris, 1968], 274), most historians of French revolutionary foreign policy have claimed that it was Danton who directed foreign policy during the Interregnum (e.g., Sorel, L’Europe et la Revolution française; Chuquet, Les guerres de la Révolution; Soboul, Précis d’histoire de la Revolution française; Hampson, Danton; A. Mathiez, Danton et la paix (Paris, 1991), “Le lendemain de 10 août,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution française 11 (1934): 395–96). Yet there is no available archival evidence to support this argument, which has always been inferred from the writings of the Rolands, who were Danton’s enemies. Neither the records of the Executive Council; the correspondence of LeBrun, Dumouriez, and other major figures in the foreign ministry or Executive Council; nor the records of the Diplomatic and Military or War Committees of the Legislative or National Assembly substantiate Danton’s influence on foreign affairs.
A. Aulard, “Organisation du service des agents secrets dans la première république,” Révolution française 12 (January–June 1887), 117–28; Masson, Le department des affaires etrangeres, 275. LeBrun’s Mémoire sur l’organisation des agents secrets, AMAE; LeBrun Papers, AN.
Most who worked with LeBrun within the foreign ministry, government, and patriot groups had praise for his capabilities, character, and loyalty. The French ambassador to Switzerland, François Barthélémy, for instance, wrote that “The department of foreign affairs was entrusted to M. LeBrun, a man who seemed to me to lack neither talent nor wisdom. … Truly, I do not know how he managed to save me from a denunciation [from the National Convention]. I owed him a great debt in this matter, by reason of which I conceived a high opinion of his common sense and moderation.” Madame Roland described him as honest, intelligent, and hardworking but also as indecisive. Dumouriez briefly mentions LeBrun in his memoirs stating that: “LeBrun was very good, because he is hard-working and well-informed,” but adding that “he does not have enough dignity and strength to carry on by himself.” Mémoires de Barthélémy, ed. Jacques de Dampiere (Paris, 1914), 89–90; Mémoires de Madame Roland, 2:3–4; Dumouriez, Memoires, 3: 353–54.
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© 2008 Patricia Chastain Howe
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Howe, P.C. (2008). Consolidating Control of the Belgian Plan, May–August 1792. In: Foreign Policy and the French Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616882_6
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