The Mountain (Montagnards)

Name and origins

The Mountain (La Montagne), its members called Montagnards, was the radical left political faction active in the National Convention during the French Revolution. The name was first used during a session of the Legislative Assembly and came into general use in 1793. Korean and French sources record that the left-wing deputies of the 1791 Legislative Assembly were called the Mountain while moderates were called the Plain (la Plaine) or the Marsh (le Marais).

The most widely offered explanation of the name is that the deputies sat on the highest benches on the left of the assembly, and this etymology is disputed among historians. A classical text known to revolutionaries, Plutarch's Life of Solon, linked mountain dwellers with democracy and plain dwellers with oligarchy; an homage to Rousseau's Lettres ecrites de la montagne cannot be excluded; and M. Belissa and Y. Bosc argue 'mountain' signified liberty as obedience to a law one has given oneself. No single origin can be stated as fact.

The group was not a unified party. Its early lines were nebulous and its conception is difficult to pinpoint. It relied on leaders such as Robespierre, Danton, Hebert, Marat, Saint-Just, Billaud-Varenne, Carnot and Barras, who came to represent different factions, and the Jacobin Club's nightly sessions can be considered a kind of caucus for it. The club, the parliamentary Mountain and the sans-culotte movement overlapped without constituting a single organization.

Ascendancy and the Terror

Conflict with the Girondins intensified from September 1792. In December 1792 and January 1793 the Montagnards defeated the Girondin and Plain delaying manoeuvres aimed at saving the king (the appeal to the people, the reprieve) and secured Louis XVI's condemnation to death. Only after the December 1792 trial united them on regicide did their ideals and power fully consolidate. In spring 1793 they reached their apogee with about 300 deputies in the Convention, mostly elected from the Seine and the big cities.

With the assistance of radical sans-culottes, on 31 May - 2 June 1793 the Mountain ousted the Girondin members from the National Convention and had them banned from the Jacobin Club, then dominated the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety and imposed the policy of the Terror. The Montagnards were also distinguished by strategically spreading false information to popularize their ideas and weaken the Girondins.

Institutions and actual enforcement

The institutions did not match their enforcement. After the coup the Mountain, led by Herault de Sechelles, quickly drafted a new constitution, reported by the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June and adopted on 24 June 1793; it was never actually enacted and was abandoned during the war and the Thermidorian reaction. Robespierre announced on 10 June that the 'Constitution will be the reply of patriotic deputies'.

Economic control showed the same gap. An embargo on the export of French goods and an October 1793 law barring foreign vessels from trading along the French coast isolated France from Europe. Price controls ran from the Law of the Maximum of 4 May 1793, extended through the Law of Suspects of 17 September into the Law of the General Maximum (loi du Maximum general) of 29 September 1793, which set uniform price ceilings on grain, flour, meat, oil, onions, soap, firewood, leather and paper and obliged merchants to post rates. Enforcement belied the aims: price-setting led producers to cut or halt output and others to withhold inventories, producing continued shortages and recurring famines; the Committee of Public Safety sent soldiers into the countryside to arrest farmers and seize crops, temporarily relieving Paris while intensifying shortages elsewhere. In practice the law targeted local shopkeepers, butchers, bakers and farmers, and its harsh punishments became a symbol of the Terror.

A law against the hoarding of daily necessities, making grain hoarding punishable by death and requiring merchants to sell at publicly fixed prices, was voted on 26 July 1793 on the report of Collot d'Herbois alone; implementation difficulties led to it being reworked and to a new law proposed on 19 September 1793. By contrast, agricultural-reform legislation drafted by Cambaceres in August 1793, urging relief from rent following harvest loss, compensation for improvements and fixity of tenure, never became law, showing both awareness of the rural and urban poor base and the limits of enforcement.

Internal splits and repression

The Mountain split into currents: Robespierrist partisans of an alliance with the people and social measures, Dantonist tenants of a punctual Terror, and deputies close to the Enrages of Jacques Roux or the Hebertists led by Jacques-Rene Hebert. The Enrages were a distinct movement to the left of the Montagnards, led notably by the constitutional priest Jacques Roux, demanding civic, political and social equality, taxation of commodities, requisition of grain and taxes on the rich; they were active between February and October 1793 and were fought by Robespierre, Danton, Marat and the Hebertists. Roux was arrested in August 1793, imprisoned again on 5 September 1793, informed on 14 January 1794 that his case would go to the Revolutionary Tribunal, and on 10 February 1794 killed himself in prison at Bicetre.

The revolutionary government arrested Hebert and the leading figures of the Cordeliers Club on the night of 13-14 March 1794 (23-24 Ventose an II); they were executed ten days later on 24 March 1794. The Enrages were not arrested with them but were suppressed separately in 1793. The Indulgents followed: they campaigned to overturn the government, end the Terror and negotiate a rapid peace with the coalitions, and were condemned to death and guillotined, including Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Their date is recorded inconsistently across sources: April 1794 in the English source, 24 March 1794 (4 Germinal an II) in the French source.

Abolition of colonial slavery was also enacted under this ascendancy. In February 1794 the Montagnards voted the abolition of colonial slavery, bringing three new deputies from Saint-Domingue onto the benches of the Mountain: the White Louis-Pierre Dufay, the Metis Jean-Baptiste Mills and the Black Jean-Baptiste Belley.

Fall and aftermath

The Montagnards' exclusion from the Convention began with the collapse of the Revolution's radical phase and Robespierre's death on 10 Thermidor (28 July 1794). After the purge they devolved into the powerless Cretois at the end of 1794; survivors were arrested, executed or deported, and the shrinking 'montagnards de l'an III' were largely eliminated after the germinal and prairial insurrections of 1795.

After Thermidor the Mountain was effectively destroyed, though some members formed radical republican organizations across France. Karl Marx criticized its revolutionary character as limited by bourgeois premises but regarded it positively for its direct influence on European social progress. This is reception and assessment, not the group's own programme.

Nineteenth-century French republicans reused the name. In the atmosphere of 1830 the Montagnard figure was glorified as the enemy of the Girondin; under the Second Republic left-wing republican deputies (Armand Barbes, Alexandre-Auguste Ledru-Rollin) took the name Montagne for their group, while ultra-legitimist royalists adopted 'Montagne blanche'. The separate 1849 group 'The Mountain', collectively called Democratic Socialists, was led by Ledru-Rollin and drew its name from the Revolutionary-era Mountain; it was a reuse, not the same body. The unrelated 1975 US evangelical Seven Mountains Mandate shares only the word and must likewise be distinguished.

Source questions

This entry takes 1793, when the name came into general use, as the start year. Start dates conflict across sources: the English infobox and the Korean source give Founded 1792, while the French infobox gives 'Fondation 21 septembre 1792' yet files the article under Category 'Fondation en 1793'. One English source states the Mountain was born in 1792 with the merger of the Jacobins and Cordeliers, whereas other sources describe an assembly grouping whose lines were nebulous early on. On the end, the English and Korean sources give Dissolved 1799, while the English and French bodies record effective marginalization by 1795. This entry records the conflicting accounts rather than forcing one.