banalités: the exclusive rights of a seigneur to maintain a mill, an oven or a winepress, often exacted by a fermier. They were renounced on the famous night of 4 August 1789 and declared subject to redemption.
barrières: customs posts surrounding Paris.
biens nationaux: ‘national lands’, the former properties of the Church.
bourgeoisie: generally used to define the fairly well-to-do urban middle class, the families of both professional and businessmen.
Brissotins: the name by which the Girondins were at first more usually known.
Brumaire: the second month of the Revolutionary Calendar which corresponded with the days from 22 October to 20 November, from brume, mist.
cahiers de doléances: lists of grievances drawn up by each of the three orders before the meeting of the Estates General in 1789. The clergy and nobility drew up their lists in assemblies in the towns which were the centres of their electoral districts. The more numerous Third Estate usually met in parish churches where preliminary cahiers were prepared and written down by some respected lawyer, schoolmaster or coq du village. Delegates were then selected; and the preliminary cahiers were absorbed into general cahiers at electoral assemblies. Model cahiers were circulated to suggest lists of grievances and how to frame them.
ça ira!: Revolutionary song sung to the tune of a country dance by Bécourt, Le carillon national. First heard in Paris during the preparations for the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790. The refrain, which was said to have been written by a street-singer named Ladre, originally ran:
Ah! Ça ira, ça, ira, ça ira!
Le peuple, en ce jour, sans cesse répète:
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Malgré les mutins, tout réussira
The words were altered during the Terror to:
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Bonaparte prohibited the song when he became First Consul.
capitation: a kind of poll-tax levied in rough correspondence to income. Established in 1701, it was originally intended to be levied on all Frenchmen who were divided into twenty-two classes, the Dauphin, at at the top of the first class, being assessed at 2,000 livres, soldiers and day-labourers, at the bottom of the last class, at only one livre. The clergy bought themselves out in 1710 for 24,000,000 livres. The nobility had also become exempt by the time of the Revolution when the capitation, levied only on commoners, had become a supplement of the taille.
carmagnole: originally, perhaps, a short jacket with metal buttons introduced into France by workers from Carmagnola in Piedmont. It became popular in Marseilles and was brought to Paris by the Marseillais fédérés. Worn with black woollen trousers, red or tricolour waistcoats and red caps it was taken up by the Jacobins. It was also the name of a dance and of a popular Revolutionary song – the words of which were constantly being altered – that accompanied it. Like the Ça ira, it was banned by Bonaparte when he became First Consul.
certificats de civisme: documents issued during the Terror as proof of political orthodoxy by the vigilance committees of the sections. Passports could not be obtained without them.
Chouans: royalist insurgents who took their name from four brothers named Cottereau, known more often as Chouan, a corruption of chat-huant, screech-owl, because they imitated that bird’s cry in order to recognize each other in the woods at night. Three of the four brothers were killed in battle. Chouans were active in La Vendée, Brittany and Normandy.
comités de surveillance: watch-committees formed in each commune in March 1793 to assist the police, keep an eye on officialdom and supervise public security and order. They were usually controlled by extreme Jacobins and often took the place of local government. They later became known as comités revolutionnaires and after Thermidor as comités d’arrondisements.
Commune: the revolutionary local government authority of Paris. It was formed in July 1789 and disbanded after Thermidor. The official Commune was displaced by an Insurrectionary Commune on 9 August 1792, the day before the attack on the Tuileries.
Cordeliers: the Parisian district that today includes the Odéon and the Hôtel de la Monnaie. It was inhabited by many actors and playwrights (Fabre d’Églantine and Collot d’Herbois both lived here) and by many booksellers, publishers, printers and journalists, Marat and Camille Desmoulins among them. Danton also lived here and became a powerful figure in the area. So did Fréron, Billaud-Varenne, Chaumette, Momoro and Loustalot.
Cordeliers’ Club (Society of the Friends of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen): Formed when the Commune redivided Paris and the Cordeliers’ District was absorbed into the section Théâtre François. It took as its model the Jacobin Club and styled itself the ‘elixir of Jacobinism’. Its emblem was an open eye, representative of its aim to keep a close watch on the government. Its members met first in the church of the monastery of the Cordeliers (Franciscan Observantists), then in a hall in the Rue Dauphine. After 10 August 1792 the more moderate members such as Danton and Desmoulins stopped attending, and the Enragés began to dominate it.
corvées royales: direct taxes paid in service rather than money. They consisted of corvées royales, by which peasants were called upon to lend carts for the transportation of troops and military supplies, and corvées des routes, by which peasants who lived within ten miles of main roads were required to supply not only carts but labour and animals to keep these roads in repair.
décade: the ten-day week of the Revolutionary Calendar introduced in October 1793.
décadi: the tenth day of a decade.
département: territorial and administrative sub-division of France. By a decree of 15 January 1790, the Assembly created eighty-three of them. They were named after their geographical features.
droits de colombier: feudal rights which enabled the seigneur’s pigeons to be fed at the peasants’ expense.
Encyclopédie: one of the great masterpieces of the eighteenth century, a dictionary of the arts, sciences and trades. It was conceived when two publishers approached Denis Diderot for a translation of Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopaedia of 1728. Diderot persuaded them to bring out a more ambitious work. Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates appeared between 1751 and 1772. Seven additional volumes were published 1776–80.