Politické kluby a společnosti ve Francii za Velké francouzské buržoazní revoluce

In the course of the French Revolution revolutionary clubs and societies were subjected to a complicated development during which their position, their goals and importance was modified. As unrestraintly built organisms they reflected in the first years of the Revolution – we may say – a certain political pluralism. On the whole they became an effective instrument of the Revolution and they helped revolutionary forces not only to conquer the king and to the formation of the Republic but even to further the development of the Revolution. Under the Girondists and Jacobins their position and goals changed. It is mainly so because they more or less integrated with administrative organs or they even took over their function and tasks. At this time, when the people’s societies and clubs cease to be spontaneous organisms and change into more or less directed organs and instruments of the revolutionary government, certain hidden negative factors start to work. They are the oppression of the political pluralism and its substitution by one movement or as we would say today by the rule of one party, the decline of the spontaneous people’s activity and independence, the gradual “sclerotization” of structures and methods, that are becoming more and more formal etc. These negative factors, together with the consequences of the fights among fractions in the Jacobin movement naturally lead to a significant narrowing and weakening of the social basis not only of the Jacobin movement and of the revolutionary people’s societies but of the Revolution as a whole, resulted in a crisis of the trust and of the weakening of the activity of the people’s societies. This all opened the way to the coup d’état of 9 Thermidor. After this upheaval the activity of the Jacobin club was forbidden, the people’s societies were gradually encroached and forbidden even if some of them after their prohibition worked illegally. The attitude of the Directory to clubs and societies was not explicit. To a certain extent it depended on the specific situation, whether the Directory was endangered from the right or from the left.