Jacobins definition of Jacobins in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Jacobins (jăk`əbĭnz), political club of the French Revolution French Revolution, political upheaval of world importance in France that began in 1789.

Origins of the Revolution

Historians disagree in evaluating the factors that brought about the Revolution.
..... Click the link for more information. . Formed in 1789 by the Breton deputies to the States-General, it was reconstituted as the Society of Friends of the Constitution after the revolutionary National Assembly moved (Oct., 1789) to Paris. The club derived its popular name from the monastery of the Jacobins (Parisian name of Dominicans), where the members met. Their chief purpose was to concert their activity and to secure support for the group from elements outside the Assembly. Patriotic societies were formed in most French cities in affiliation with the Parisian club. The members were, for the most part, bourgeois and at first included such moderates as Honoré de Mirabeau Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti or Riqueti, comte de
..... Click the link for more information. . The Jacobins exercised through their journals considerable pressure on the Legislative Assembly, in which they and the Feuillants Feuillants (föyäN`), political club of the French Revolution.
..... Click the link for more information. were (1791–92) the chief factions. They sought to limit the powers of the king, and many of them had republican tendencies. The group split on the issue of war against Europe, which the majority, including the Brissotins (see under Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, Jacques Pierre (zhäk pyĕr brēsō` də värvēl`)
..... Click the link for more information. ) sought. A small minority opposed foreign war and insisted on reform. This group of Jacobins grew more radical, adopted republican ideas, and advocated universal manhood suffrage, popular education, and separation of church and state, although it adhered to orthodox economic principles. In the National Convention, which proclaimed the French republic, the Jacobins and other opponents of the Girondists sat in the raised seats and were called the Mountain Mountain, the, in French history, the label applied to deputies sitting on the raised left benches in the National Convention during the French Revolution. Members of the faction, known as Montagnards [Mountain Men] saw themselves as the embodiment of national unity.
..... Click the link for more information. . Their leaders—Maximilien Robespierre Robespierre, Maximilien Marie Isidore (mäksēmēlyăN` märē` ēzēdôr` rôbĕspyĕr`)
..... Click the link for more information. and Louis de Saint-Just Saint-Just, Louis de (lwē` də săN-zhüst`), 1767–94, French revolutionary.
..... Click the link for more information. , among others—relied mainly on the strength of the Paris commune and the Parisian sans-culottes. After the fall of the Girondists (June, 1793), for which the Jacobins were largely responsible, the Jacobin leaders instituted the Reign of Terror Reign of Terror, 1793–94, period of the French Revolution characterized by a wave of executions of presumed enemies of the state. Directed by the Committee of Public Safety, the Revolutionary government's Terror was essentially a war dictatorship, instituted to
..... Click the link for more information. . Under Robespierre, who came to dominate the government, the Terror was used not only against counterrevolutionaries, but also against former allies of the Jacobins, such as the Cordeliers and the Dantonists (followers of Georges Danton Danton, Georges Jacques (zhōrzh zhäk däNtôN`)
..... Click the link for more information. ). The fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794) meant the fall of the Jacobins, but their spirit lived on in revolutionary doctrine. The movement reappeared during the Directory Directory, group of five men who held the executive power in France according to the constitution of the year III (1795) of the French Revolution . They were chosen by the new legislature, by the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Ancients; each year one
..... Click the link for more information. and in altered form much later in the Revolution of 1848 and in the Paris Commune of 1871.

Bibliography

See I. Woloch, Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement under the Directory (1970); M. L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Club of Marseilles (1973); Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution (2 vol., 1982–88).

Jacobins

rabidly radical faction; principal perpetrators of Reign of Terror. [Fr. Hist.: EB, V: 494]

See : Extremism