It was early 1793 and the situation in France after the revolution had begun to spiral out of control.
The Jacobins had now divided into factions. The Girondins, initially at the revolutionary vanguard, were disturbed by the movement’s tendency to descend into violent radicalism. The previous year, mobs had massacred thousands of alleged counterrevolutionaries in their cells; in January, the deposed King Louis XVI had been guillotined as a tyrant. The Girondins blamed these excesses on their rivals, the Montagnards.
Now riots were breaking out again, spurred by rising food prices. So in March, in an attempt to calm the situation, “the Girondins set a precedent that was later used against them,” wrote Jeremy D. Popkin in A brief history of the French Revolution“undressing the Montagnard journalist deputy [Jean-Paul] Marat of his parliamentary immunity and of having him tried for inciting violence.”
They weren’t wrong about Marat. He was indeed a troublemaker, having declared at the start of the revolution that “five or six hundred severed heads” could stop the opposition. Yet it didn’t take long for the move to backfire. Marat was acquitted by a friendly tribunal in April, and the Girondins were expelled from the National Convention, France’s governing body, in June. According to the historian Isser Woloch in his preface to Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolutionthe Convention “was therefore free to begin implementing draconian emergency laws that amounted to a temporary revolutionary dictatorship.”
The Girondist leaders were not simply removed from their legislative roles. Labeled traitors, dozens of people were executed or forced to commit suicide before the end of the year. When a Girondin sympathizer stabbed Marat to death, he provided all the justification the remaining Jacobins needed to inaugurate, and then intensify, the Reign of Terror.
What seems noteworthy in this snapshot of events is that, at every step of the way, the participants felt they had every excuse and perhaps no choice but to ignore the rules of the game that might otherwise have reined in the excesses of day. Yet, at each stage, a rupture on one side provoked an even more extreme response on the other, and the crisis deepened further.
American politics today may follow a similar model. The far left calls on President Joe Biden to reunite the Supreme Court before it is too late and points to the intransigent policy of the Republicans in the Senate which led to the conservative majority of the High Court as a pretext. Republicans counter that they were simply mirroring the tactics of Democrats, who politicized the confirmation process during the Reagan administration and invoked the “nuclear option” for judicial nominations during the Obama administration.
Parties struggle to gain a temporary advantage, certain of the rightness of their respective crusades, while trust in the institutions that make peaceful coexistence possible crumbles.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “How political crises develop.”