Expulsion of the Girondins
An armed crowd surrounded the Convention on 2 June 1793 and did not leave until twenty-nine deputies had been expelled. The Girondins were not a party in any organised sense — the name is a later convenience — but a loose grouping of deputies, provincial in outlook, who had pushed hardest for the war in 1792 and had then lost control of it. Their quarrel with the Montagnards ran through everything: they had wanted the king's fate put to a referendum, they had prosecuted Marat and seen him acquitted, they distrusted the Paris sections and said so, and they were held responsible for the defection of General Dumouriez to the Austrians in April 1793. The immediate crisis was food, war and the Vendée. The insurrection was organised by the Paris Commune and the sections rather than by the Convention's own left. Some 80,000 National Guards under François Hanriot surrounded the Tuileries with cannon, the deputies attempted to walk out in a body and were turned back at bayonet point, and the Convention then voted the arrest of the named members under house arrest. Some escaped to the provinces and raised the federalist revolts in Normandy, Bordeaux, Lyon and Marseille, which gave the Committee of Public Safety its justification for everything that followed. Twenty-one were tried in October and guillotined in thirty-eight minutes, singing. Charlotte Corday, who killed Marat in his bath in July, had come from Caen and gave the Girondins as her reason. The expulsion is the point at which the Revolution began consuming the people who had made it. Every faction that removed another was removed within eighteen months by the next, and the Convention's own members supplied most of the victims.
- Year: 1793 CE
- Category: Political
