(The term was taken from the Constitutional Convention which drew up the US Constitution in 1787.) The significance of this appeared two days later, when the Convention duly decreed the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of the French Republic with a new constitution. On 20 September 1792, under pressure from Robespierre and the Jacobins, the Legislative Assembly was replaced by a National Convention. ‘The French Revolution, anti-noble almost from the start, had also turned anti-clerical, anti-monarchical and (with the September massacres) terroristic’ (Doyle, 1999, p. Le Père DuchesneĮgged on the perpetrators, while the minister of justice, Georges Danton (1759–94), did nothing. In the ‘September massacre’, some 1,400 priests and suspected counter-revolutionaries were dragged from prison by rampaging sans-culottes, and together with common criminals and prostitutes were wantonly butchered. With a declaration by the Assembly in July 1792 of la patrie en danger (the fatherland in danger), Prussian troops on French soil in August, and the fall of the border fortress of Verdun in September, there was mass panic in Paris, with accusations of treachery against the king and queen, Lafayette (who fled abroad), ‘aristocrats’ and priests. 4.3 Birth of the republic: war, civil war and terrorĪfter the church and monarchy, ‘war was the third great polarizing issue of the Revolution’ (Doyle, 2001, p.
