Was Jacobin France Totalitarian?

Some points to consider:
Robespierre was essentially an absolute ruler who had a severe messiah complex, but claimed (with some justification) to derive his power from the people.
The people and the nation were interchangeable, and the Levee en masse essentially made the service of the state the first duty of all citizens.
The state had absolute judicial power.
The state was run by a single party.
Propaganda played a huge role in mobilizing the populace.
So, AH.com, have at it. Did the French Revolution lead to the birth of a totalitarian state?
 
Robespierre did not have an absolute power. Such a narrative was propagated by the Thermidorians, as a way to absolve those who had been complicit or active participants in the Reign of Terror. Though Robespierre was the most prominent of the Montagnards, I don't believe he was their undisputed leader.

I'm also not sure if the French Republic during her most radical hour could be described as a single party state. The Jacobins were fraught by internal division, as can be seen by the mass execution of the Girondins, and later of Hébert and his supporters.

And let us not forget, of course, that the Reign of Terror was a direct concession to the Parisian people.
 
An ongoing debate but, in my opinion no.

Robespierre was never sole ruler. Throughout the period the Jacobins were in power, he relied heavily on the group around him that formed the Committee of Public safety. Of course you could liken this to the inner circle of Stalin/Hitler, but I think that's a bit too much. Men like Sant-Just, Carnot, and Billaud-Varenne were key figures who had considerable power.

The Levee en Masse did create large armies, but many of its provisions were impossible for an 18th century state to put into practice in reality. All horses to be owned by the army? All firearms to be handed over? The Republic never achieved that to any great extent. Yes, the populace was militarized, but at the height of Robespierre's rule sections of the country were in open revolt (esp in the Vendee).

Its a bit of a misconception that the Jacobins are a one party state and have total control. There is a huge body of representatives, known as "the marsh", who were the moderate faction in the wider government. Sometimes they supported Robespierre and sometimes they didn't. Yes, he sometimes cowed them into fear, but the Marsh also generated the opposition that eventually toppled him.

You are right on propaganda. But the Jacobins didn't create all of this - the co-opted most of it from the earlier revolutionary period and some of what they themselves created (Supreme Being for instance) didn't grab the populace in the same way and died with them.

Add to this the nature of Paris itself - the Jacobins rely on the Parisian sections, particularly the sans-culottes, but are also beholden to them. Its hard to think of a modern totalitarian regime that was so much at the mercy of the crowds of the capital. Remember at various points the crowds invade the chamber and demand things off the Deputies. At one point they even cut off the head of a Deputy on the floor of the Assembly and wave it around on a pike. Part of the reason Robespierre falls during Thermidor is that he can't get the sections to turn out to support him anymore.

Ultimately I think that, whilst the Jacobins would have liked total control, they were never able to achieve it to any meaningful degree.
 

Abhakhazia

Banned
If Robespierre had his way, France would have been totalitarian and essentially was (strictly speaking it wasn't, I suppose, but there was no real leader for France other than Robespierre during that time) for the brief period of time between the purge of the Indulgents and the Thermidorian Reaction (so between the death of Danton and the death of Robespierre, altogether about 4 months), but barring that brief period, Revolutionary France was never really totalitarian.
 
Isn't it irrelevant who the Jacobins rely on as long as they can rely on them? E Sans Culottes never really showed disloyalty to the Jacobins. They strike me as similar to the Nazi Brownshirts in that they were essentially thugs the Jacobins used to gain control.
 
Didn't propaganda play a huge role in mobilizing Britain, where there was also state control of judicial power?
 
Top