The Survival of the Revolution in France

This chapter details events in 1973, when the issue for France and the world was whether revolution or counter-revolution should prevail. In every country where the government was at war with the French Republic in 1793—in Britain and Ireland, in the United Provinces and in Belgium restored to the Emperor, in the Austrian Monarchy, the small German states and the Prussian kingdom, in the Italian kingdom of Sardinia—there were groups of people whose sympathies lay in varying degree with the declared enemy. Wherever the French Revolution had been heard of there were men who wished it not to fail. Their concern was not only for France but for the future of some kind of democratization in their own countries. For those, on the other hand, who hoped to see the whole revolution undone, these first months of 1793 saw a revival of the exciting expectations of a year before. The Republic seemed a sinking ship, crazed, in addition, by mutiny in its own crew.