The adoption of the policy of “terror” by the Convention in 1793-1794 emerged in large part from a position of relative weakness in the context of external war and internal unrest. While Jacobin deputies were prominent in revolutionary leadership, the policy was endorsed by deputies in the Convention. The “terror” policy was seen by those who perpetrated it as a temporary form of justice, albeit harsh justice, necessitated by war and revolutionary crisis. The Revolutionary Tribunal and the guillotine were designed as examples of spectacular violence, to show the strength of the revolutionary government, and intimidate counter-revolutionary opponents. The actual application of these laws was very uneven, and fell most heavily in frontier departments, and in those regions where there were armed uprisings against revolutionary government. By far the greatest number of deaths occurred in the context of the civil war in the Vendée.

This chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of the eighteenth-century financial system and how that system came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a political category. The 1780s witnessed a series of financial scandals and speculative bubbles, many of them organized by Clavière. These scandals delegitimized the last attempts to reform the old financial system, precipitating the outbreak of the French Revolution. Ensuing changes to the legal category of property rights, the issuing of the assignats in 1791, and the sequester of foreigners and foreign property under the Terror of 1793 broke the mechanisms of financial capitalism. The Terror, and especially the suspension of the Constitution of 1793 in favor of rule by penal code, marked the emergence of a new kind of purely political groups who existed outside the law, including various forms of financial criminals. The existence of a central bank in England meant that economic impunity became subordinated as a tool of political necessity; in France, economic impunity was coded as an enemy of political virtue. The Revolution was precipitated by financial scandals, tried to eliminate them, and ended up producing new ones.

The French Jacobins rose to power amid the tumultuous circumstances of the early First Republic, having to combat both legions of exterior enemies and dissidents who had long attended their own clubs. The Jacobins pushed their club network further than their contemporaries – establishing more than three thousand locals across France – but also proved unwilling to tolerate dissent amid wartime dangers. The moderates who led the Thermidorian coup soon turned against Jacobin Clubs, suppressing them in stages across 1795.

The French Jacobins were founded in November 1789 after an inspiring letter arrived from the London Revolution Society, a minor British reform organization made up mostly of leading Protestant Dissenters. Thereafter, they mobilized a network of affiliated societies explicitly along Anglo-American lines, creating a powerful pressure-group capable of spreading revolutionary principles and influencing the National Assembly. Though barely surviving division and attempted suppression in 1791, as the Revolution radicalized they became poised to be an unparalleled force in French politics.

This chapter describes the role of private individuals who aimed to collect the traces of the French Revolution amidst the tumultuous events. It is centred on the figure of Jean-Louis Soulavie, and his unique collection of prints and drawings, now split between the Louvre and regional archives. It discusses how Soulavie acquired and interpreted this corpus of images, drawing connections with his changing political convictions, and the different functions ascribed to the image, including the commemorative (especially for victims of the Terror), the explanatory (seeking to understand the cause-and-effect of revolutionary processes) and the predictive (echoing Soulavie’s belief in the occult power of images). It connects Soulavie’s engagement with visual culture with other aspects of his collecting and considers the dispersal of many cabinets assembled by this first generation of collector-historians during the Restoration.