Christopher Hibbert - The Days of the French Revolution

certificats de civisme: documents issued during the Terror as proof of political orthodoxy by the vigilance committees of the sections. Passports could not be obtained without them.

Chouans: royalist insurgents who took their name from four brothers named Cottereau, known more often as Chouan, a corruption of chat-huant , screech-owl, because they imitated that bird’s cry in order to recognize each other in the woods at night. Three of the four brothers were killed in battle. Chouans were active in La Vendée, Brittany and Normandy.

comités de surveillance: watch-committees formed in each commune in March 1793 to assist the police, keep an eye on officialdom and supervise public security and order. They were usually controlled by extreme Jacobins and often took the place of local government. They later became known as comités revolutionnaires and after Thermidor as comités d’arrondisements .

Commune: the revolutionary local government authority of Paris. It was formed in July 1789 and disbanded after Thermidor . The official Commune was displaced by an Insurrectionary Commune on 9 August 1792, the day before the attack on the Tuileries.

Cordeliers: the Parisian district that today includes the Odéon and the Hôtel de la Monnaie. It was inhabited by many actors and playwrights (Fabre d’Églantine and Collot d’Herbois both lived here) and by many booksellers, publishers, printers and journalists, Marat and Camille Desmoulins among them. Danton also lived here and became a powerful figure in the area. So did Fréron, Billaud-Varenne, Chaumette, Momoro and Loustalot.

Cordeliers’ Club (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen): Formed when the Commune redivided Paris and the Cordeliers’ District was absorbed into the section Théâtre François. It took as its model the Jacobin Club and styled itself the ‘elixir of Jacobinism’. Its emblem was an open eye, representative of its aim to keep a close watch on the government. Its members met first in the church of the monastery of the Cordeliers (Franciscan Observantists), then in a hall in the Rue Dauphine. After 10 August 1792 the more moderate members such as Danton and Desmoulins stopped attending, and the Enragés began to dominate it.

corvées royales: direct taxes paid in service rather than money. They consisted of corvées royales , by which peasants were called upon to lend carts for the transportation of troops and military supplies, and corvées des routes , by which peasants who lived within ten miles of main roads were required to supply not only carts but labour and animals to keep these roads in repair.

décade: the ten-day week of the Revolutionary Calendar introduced in October 1793.

décadi: the tenth day of a decade .

département: territorial and administrative sub-division of France. By a decree of 15 January 1790, the Assembly created eighty-three of them. They were named after their geographical features.

droits de colombier: feudal rights which enabled the seigneur’s pigeons to be fed at the peasants’ expense.

Encyclopédie: one of the great masterpieces of the eighteenth century, a dictionary of the arts, sciences and trades. It was conceived when two publishers approached Denis Diderot for a translation of Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of 1728. Diderot persuaded them to bring out a more ambitious work. Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates appeared between 1751 and 1772. Seven additional volumes were published 1776–80.

Enragés: extremist revolutionaries, led by Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, who became a powerful force in Paris in 1793. They were particularly antagonistic to those whom they suspected of hoarding or speculating.

faubourgs: these former suburbs originally lay outside the walls of the old city but by the time of the Revolution they had all been enclosed within the city’s boundaries.

Fédéralisme: a movement, supported by the Girondins, which sought to grant provincial areas the running of their own affairs.

fédérés: the citizen soldiers who came to Paris from the provinces for the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1792. Prominent among them were units from Brest and the men from Marseilles who popularized the Marseillaise .

fermier: an agent contracted to collect dues. Fermiers généraux paid large sums for the right to collect various indirect taxes and made fortunes by exploiting them.

Feuillants: constitutional monarchists who resigned from the Jacobin Club in July 1791 in protest against moves by certain Jacobins to have the King deposed.

Floréal: the eighth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 20 April to 19 May, from the Latin florens , flowery.

Frimaire: the third month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 21 November to 20 December, from frimas , hoar-frost.

Fructidor: the twelfth month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 18 August to 16 September, from the Latin fructus , fruit, plus doron , Greek gift.

gabelle: the government salt monopoly by which people were made to buy specific amounts of salt at prices far higher than they would have fetched on an open market. Several rich noblemen bought shares in the Tax Concession which managed the monopoly and collected customs duties.

Garde Nationale: the citizens’ militia which was formed by the Paris districts in 1789. Originally a predominantly bourgeois institution, it gradually changed its character – as did so many other institutions and terminologies – as the Revolution progressed.

Gardes-françaises: royal troops stationed in the capital when the Revolution began. Most of them proved sympathetic towards the Vainqueurs de la Bastille . ‘While the rabble hacked, tore up, threw down and burnt the barriers of the Chausée d’Antin and the railings, offices and registers of the customs officers,’ wrote an eye-witness of an attack on a barrère in July 1789, ‘the Gardes-françaises came up to stand between the fire-raisers and the spectators, leaving the former free to act.’

générale: drum-beat; battre la générale , to beat to arms.

Germinal: the seventh month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 21 March to 19 April, from the Latin germen , bud.

Indulgents: those, mostly Dantonists, who advocated a policy of clemency during the height of the First Terror.

insoumis: men who evaded conscription.

intendants: local agents of the King during the ancien régime .

Jacobin Club: founded at Versailles in 1789 and then known as the Breton Club as most of its members came from Brittany. On the removal of the Assembly to Paris it became known as the Jacobin Club because it met in the convent of the Jacobin friars, Dominican friars who were called Jacobins since their first house in Paris was in the Rue Saint-Jacques. In 1791 the Club was named Société des amis de la constitution, séante aux Jacobins and, after the fall of the monarchy Société des Jacobins, amis de la liberté et de l’égalité . Fairly moderate at first, the Club became increasingly revolutionary. It was closed in November 1795.

jeunesse dorée: gangs of young anti-Jacobins, armed with whips and weighted sticks, who were encouraged by Fréron to attack left-wing agitators and recalcitrant workers. They were mostly drawn from that class of youth to whom the sans-culottes referred as muscadins .