The Foundation of the Jacobin Clubs and the Development of the Jacobin Club Network, 1789-1791

Abstract

On April 30, 1789, on the eve of the Estates-General, a caucus of deputies from Brittany took place at Versailles. During the momentous weeks that followed, the Bretons formed the habit of meeting nightly in a caf6 near the great Chateau. By June, their salon or had become a rallying point for reform-minded deputies such as Mirabeau, Barnave, Robespierre, Petion, Adrien Duport, Sieyes, Gregoire, and Alexandre and Charles de Lameth. It left no records, but the memoirs and letters of participants give tantalizing hints of its activities in the summer of 1789. We hear, for example, of the crafty Sieyes concocting a plan on June 8 for the Third Estate to declare itself the National Assembly, of a gathering to coordinate strategy prior to the Royal Session of June 23, and of the Duc d'Aiguillon reading his proposals for the abolition of feudal rights just before the famous night of August 4.1 The Breton club apparently did not survive the transfer of the King and National Assembly to Paris in October 1789. By November, however, about fifteen or twenty of its former members, including Barnave and Duport, had founded a Societe de la in the new capital. The infant organization was inspired, in part, by the Revolution Society of London, which had captured the hearts of patriotic Frenchmen by sending a letter of congratulations to the National Assembly on November 4. At first it consisted exclusively of deputies to the National Assembly, but nondeputies soon joined in large numbers. To accommodate the rapidly increasing enrollment, the club rented a hall at a Jacobin convent on the rue St.-Honore. In late January 1790, it changed its title to the Socie'te des amis de la Constitution. By then, however, royalist pamphleteers had already christened it the 'Jacobins, the name by which it lives in history. As early as December 18, the Societe' de la Revolution had received requests for association and correspondence from so-