Girondin

Girondin, a label applied to a loose grouping of republican politicians, some of them originally from the département of the Gironde, who played a leading role in the Legislative Assembly from October 1791 to September 1792 during the French Revolution. Lawyers, intellectuals and journalists, the Girondins attracted a following of businessmen, merchants, industrialists, and financiers. Historians have disagreed about whether they truly constituted an organized group, and the term “Girondins” was rarely used prior to 1793. Their opponents often called them Brissotins, after their most prominent spokesman, Jacques-Pierre Brissot.

The Girondins first emerged as harsh critics of the court. Through the oratory of Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud and Brissot, the Girondins inspired the measures taken against the émigrés and anti-Revolutionary priests in October and November of 1791. From the end of 1791, under the leadership of Brissot, they supported foreign war as a means to unite the people behind the cause of the Revolution.

The Girondins reached the height of their power and popularity in the spring of 1792. On April 20, 1792, the war that they urged was declared against Austria. Earlier, on March 23, two of the group entered the government under King Louis XVI: Étienne Clavière as finance minister and Jean-Marie Roland as interior minister. Roland’s wife, Mme Jeanne-Marie Roland, held a salon that was an important meeting place for the Girondins. But throughout the summer they vacillated in their position toward the existing constitutional monarchy, which was coming under serious attack. The storming of the Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, which overthrew the monarchy, took place without their participation and marks the beginning of their decline, as more radical groups (the Paris Commune, the Parisian working class, and the Jacobins under Maximilien Robespierre) came to direct the course of the Revolution.

From the opening of the National Convention in September 1792, the Girondins united in opposition to the Montagnards (deputies of the left, mainly newly elected from Paris, who headed the Jacobin dictatorship of 1793–94). The antagonism between the two groups was partly caused by bitter personal hatreds but also by opposing social interests. The Girondins had strong support in provincial cities and among local government officials, while the Montagnards had the backing of the Paris sansculottes (extreme radical revolutionaries). In the ensuing struggles the Girondins were characterized by political views that stopped short of economic and social equality, by economic liberalism that rejected government control of trade or prices, and, most clearly, by their reliance on the départements as a counterbalance to Paris. Their efforts to reduce the influence of the capital led the Montagnards to brand them as advocates of “federalism” who sought to destroy the unity of the newly formed republic. The trial of Louis XVI (December 1792–January 1793) left the Girondins, some of whom opposed the king’s execution, open to the charge of royalism.

The Girondins were held responsible for defeats suffered by the army in the spring of 1793 and were made more unpopular by their refusal to respond to the economic demands of the Parisian workers. A popular rising against them in Paris, beginning on May 31, ended when the Convention, surrounded by armed insurgents, ordered the arrest of 29 Girondin deputies on June 2. The fall of the Girondins was caused by their reluctance to adopt emergency measures for the defense of the Revolution and to provide for the economic demands of the Parisian workers, policies that the Montagnards carried out.

Many of the Girondins escaped to the provinces in the summer of 1793 to organize “federalist” uprisings against the Convention. These failed largely for lack of popular support. When the ruling Montagnards instituted the Reign of Terror, 21 of the arrested Girondins were tried, beginning on October 24, 1793, and were guillotined on October 31. After the fall of the Montagnards in 1794, a number of deputies imprisoned for protesting the purge of the Girondins returned to the Convention and were rehabilitated.