The Red Flag: A History of Communism Read Online Free PDF

aristocratic officers who had the right skills and brought back some of the old-style discipline of the
Ancien Régime
army. It was no longer enough that officers wereenthusiastic republicans; they had to be literate and have some knowledge of military science.
    This technocratic approach was also applied to the economy. Carnot’s ally, Claude-Antoine Prieur de la Côte-d’Or, was put in charge of the Manufacture of Paris, a huge (for the time) collection of arms workshops built up by the state in an extraordinarily short space of time. By the spring of 1794, about 5,000 workers were labouring in workshops of 200–300 men, many of them housed in old monasteries or the houses of expelled aristocrats, and they were producing most of France’s munitions. They were organized by Prieur and a small group of engineers and technicians – the ‘techno-Jacobins’ as they have been called. 24
    Even so, the Jacobins still tried to combine this technocratic approach with popular enthusiasm, and there is some evidence it had an effect. Soldiers were aware that they were fighting in an army that was much more democratic than any other in Europe; as one song of the period went:
    No coldness, no haughtiness,
    Good nature makes for happiness;
    Yes, without fraternity.
    There is no gaiety.
    Let us eat together in the mess. 25
    The Jacobins’ mass army brought success abroad, at least for a time. The French defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 had demonstrated the power of citizen armies and the disadvantages of the old aristocratic way of war. As Goethe, present at Valmy, famously declared, ‘From this place, and from this day forth begins a new era in the history of the world, and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’ 26 By the end of 1793, the Jacobins’ reforms had strengthened the army further, and brought new victories. The regime was now supplying an army of almost one million soldiers with food and weapons, whilst inspiring its soldiers with its egalitarian principles. Pierre Cohin, fighting in the Armée du Nord, sent letters back to his family which were full of the Jacobins’ messianic message of revolutionary internationalism:
    The war which we are fighting is not a war between king and king or nation and nation. It is a war of liberty against despotism. There can beno doubt that we shall be victorious. A nation that is just and free is invincible. 27
    By May 1794 the French were no longer fighting a defensive war, but were spreading the revolution to their neighbours. Europe was riven by a new type of ideological struggle – an earlier, hotter version of the Cold War.

IV
     
    Success abroad, however, was not matched by stability at home. In France itself the Jacobins found it much more difficult to reconcile revolutionary enthusiasm with discipline. The Revolutionary Armies, charged with collecting taxes and suppressing the Revolution’s opponents in the provinces, were a particular source of disorder. 28 Collaborating with radical representatives of the National Convention they often used violence against the rich and the peasantry, and brought chaos to the regions. In many places the wealthy were arrested, their wealth confiscated and chateaux demolished, to the severe detriment of the local economy.
    Robespierre and the Jacobins, anxious that the ‘
ultra
’ radicals were alienating vast swathes of the population, especially in the countryside, soon decided to restore order and rein in the
sans-culottes
. In December 1793 the governing Convention abolished the Revolutionary Armies, and established more centralized control over the regions. However, Robespierre also remained apprehensive that without the ‘
ultra
’ left, the revolution would lose momentum. He mistrusted the technocrat Carnot and his ally Danton, convinced that they were not real revolutionaries, but were planning to return to some form of the old order.
    In March 1794, caught between the desire to keep