A Place of Greater Safety

A Place of Greater Safety covers the events of the French Revolution in Paris from 1789 to the execution of Camille Desmoulins and Georges Danton in 1794. The French Revolution continued until Napoleon’s coup in 1799, but these later events are not covered in the text.

Prior to the French Revolution, France was governed by a baroque monarchical system that, after the revolution, came to be called the Ancien Regime (ancient regime). Under this regime, power was concentrated in the hands of the king, whose hereditary authority was seen as divinely ordained. In 1789, King Louis XVI and his wife, the Austrian Hapsburg Marie Antoinette, were in power. In the years leading up to the Revolution, the country was suffering under a series of crises driven in large part by the mounting national debt resulting from a complex and inefficient system of taxation, whereby the nobles and clergy paid few taxes, and from profligate spending by the royals. Louis XVI was an ineffective ruler who was unable to manage these mounting crises as masses of people suffered extreme poverty.

During his reign, new ideas and a new media environment contributed to the growing discontent with the regime and the desire for revolutionary change. Members of the petty nobility and bourgeois classes were increasingly influenced by Enlightenment ideas propagated by writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire about the rights of people to have a say in their own government. Further, the innovation of more efficient printing-presses gave rise to newspapers, pamphlets, and caricatures read by the masses that criticized the Ancien Regime. In 1776, the American Revolutionaries, supported by French generals like the Marquis de Lafayette, revolted against the British monarchy and established the American republic. This provided a model and a source of inspiration for revolutionary movements in France.

In 1789, rising tensions led to an armed mass movement against the monarchy. Although King Louis XVI attempted to manage these tensions through a national forum called the Estates General, he ultimately refused to cede to the peoples’ demands for greater representation in government. This fracturing ultimately led to a coup in 1792, the deposition of the monarchy, and the formation of the first French republic. Following the creation of the French republic, the European monarchical empires worried about the destabilizing precedent this would create on the continent. They attacked the nascent republic in the hopes of bringing down the revolution and preventing similar movements in their own empires.

A Place of Greater Safety focuses on three key leaders in this revolutionary movement: Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. All three were lawyers whose close, and sometimes tense, relationships influenced the course of events. They used their legal training to give bombastic, enthusiastic speeches to control public opinion, foment dissent, and advocate for their preferred form of government: a unified republic with power concentrated in a series of committees located in Paris. They had to balance between competing powers, including working-class people, represented in People’s Sections populated by the sans-culottes; those advocating for federalized government or a constitutional monarchy, such as the Girondins; and monarchists collaborating with British or Austrian powers. 

As the revolution gained steam, fractures formed between this trio and other members of revolutionary leadership. A key source of tension was paranoia about a counter-revolutionary movement, or people within the revolutionary government who wished to return the nation to a monarchical regime. There was also growing popular discontent at the severity and extent of violence by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety. This growing paranoia and the fall of Danton, Desmoulins, and Robespierre’s factions would eventually lead to their executions by guillotine in 1794.