The war also helped the Jacobins gain enough influence to take power over France. Due to their huge sans-culottes support, the Jacobins were able to use force to gain ascendancy in the Convention that they rarely lost afterwards. The Jacobins used the fear of traitors and counter-revolutionaries in order to seize power, as they did with the Girondins in June 1793, portraying them as traitors to France due to their former cooperation with the King and many of their leaders deserting to the Austrians. The war was going so badly and was against such odds that the Jacobins knew that order must be laid out in the country. Because of this, the Jacobins set up the Terror. The Terror was a direct consequence of the war, and its aims were to defeat enemies, both internal and external and to restore order to France in order to achieve this. In order to crush resistance to the policies of Total War, levee en masse and requisitioning – introduced to prevent more economic crises, the Revolutionary Tribunals, Representatives-on-mission and surveillance committees were put in place to keep order and crush uprisings. This made the Revolution much more violent and dramatic, and it became extremely radical. Greater centralisation was put into place after the attempts made at decentralisation by the Assembly 1789-1791, and government authority was much stronger than ever before. The effective power in France was moved to Paris inside the CPS, and the power of Paris increased. The laissez-faire of the Assembly had been replaced with a planned economy. The war effectively led to a dictatorship by the CPS in 1793-1794, as France needed to be organised in order to win the war against such superior forces. The military defeats in 1792-1793 also led to rebellions in France, the most prominent of these the Vendee Rebellion. The basic causes of this uprising were the expansion of war and the introduction of conscription. This, amongst other federal revolts, led the Terror to become even more brutal, as representatives-on-mission and armees revolutionaries were sent to the areas to crush the insurrections and create order.
Once the war began to go better, people began to question the need for it to stay in force. By the end of September 1793 the French armies had driven the Spanish ones out of Roussillon and the Piedmontese out of Savoy. The British were defeated at Hondschoote in the same month and the Austrians at Wattignies in October. The Terror was a consequence of the war going badly, which had led to revolt and economic problems. Now that the federal revolts had been crushed, food supplies were moving into towns and cities due to requisitioning and the value of the assignat was rising along with the victories in the war, people wanted a relaxation of the Terror. This led to the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins, who continued to press for the Terror despite it being unnecessary and too dictatorial for the people of France, and the measures they took in order to preserve the Terror which lost them the support of the people of Paris, especially the sans-culottes who again lost influence and power and were left weakened from Robespierre shutting down their organisations, such as the Cordeliers Club. The Terror and its leaders were then overthrown in the coup of Thermidor due to its dictatorial, ruthless methods. The events of the coup of Thermidor effectively meant the rejection of government by Terror. The Terror was dead although its violence would continue, as peace had not been made with the First Coalition yet.
Further on, after the Thermadorian reaction had taken place and the Directory introduced as the Constitution of Year III, war led the Directory to seem to be successful and prestigious due to its huge successes in foreign policy. The battle of Fleurus in June 1794 was the first of a series of successes that continued until all the members of the First Coalition, excluding Britain, had been knocked out of the war. Due to Napoleon’s massively victorious campaign in Italy in 1796, the revolution was expanded into other countries, which had been an aim of the French Revolution since the Law of Fraternity, 1792. The conquests also sustained the economy of France, helping to finance the Treasury and ensured that the nation did not go bankrupt. These were huge successes of the Directory and accounted to one of the main factors as to why it was the longest standing revolutionary regime throughout the Revolution. However, the war caused the Revolution to change once again when the Directory was overthrown in the coup of Brumaire. Here, war was again one of the main factors for its failure, because enthusiasm for war had long since gone and most people wanted peace, and military defeats were beginning to surface once more, the most prominent of these the Battle of the Nile. The hefty reliance of the Directory on the army also created the possibility of there being a military coup, which became obvious with Brumaire as Napoleon used the war and fear of fighting the superior Second Coalition in order to come to power. His popularity soared when he made peace at Campo Formio. The new threats of revolts in French gains in Italy and the huge Second Coalition, featuring Austria, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Naples along with Britain; and the defeats in Egypt and in the sea left the Directory dependant on defeat, leading to its fall from power and the rise of Napoleon.
There is much evidence to state that war is one of the biggest, if not the biggest conditioner to the course of the French Revolution from 1792 onwards. Even before war broke out, the fear of foreign intervention and internal revolt was rife, evident in the King’s Flight to Varennes. When war did indeed break out against Austria and Prussia, the fear and discontent with defeat in Paris led the population of the city to turn to Republicanism and the sans-culottes, whose support of the Jacobins let them gain influence and eventually power. The sans-culottes attitude to war was demonstrated with the King’s execution in January 1793 – he was executed for favouring Austria rather than France. The Jacobin’s popular attitude to war and the fear of counter-revolution allowed them to portray the Girondins as traitors and counter-revolutionaries, eventually allowing them to stage a coup which let them gain power over France. Because of the defeats of the war and the economic problems war was leading to, the Jacobins introduced the Terror. This changed the course of the Revolution entirely. The Revolution became incredibly radical, with the bourgeois aims of decentralisation, laissez faire and decreased government authority changing completely into the sans-culottes dominated demands of the right to work, the right to insurrection, greater centralisation and effective power moved into the city of Paris, a more planned economy and measures introduced in order to win the war. These involved requisitioning to prevent further food shortages and conscription. These policies were met with huge federal resistance, a good example being the Vendee Rebellion. In order to crush this resistance, organisations such as the representatives-on-mission and the Revolutionary Tribunals were created to restore order in France. However, when order was restored and the war was going well in 1794, people began to question the necessity of the Terror. This led to the fall of the Jacobins in 1794, and the creation of the Directory in 1795. The Directory’s success relied mainly upon the war – when the foreign policy was hugely successful, like Napoleon’s campaign in Italy, the Directory did well; but when the wars began to go worse, like the Battle of the Nile, the Directory could not cope, due to its huge reliance upon the army and the financial benefits foreign conquests helped with. War was effectively a huge factor in the failure of the Directory in 1799. This demonstrates the huge part war had to play in the French Revolution. Almost everything that happened in France after 1792 was caused, or affected by the war. The war destroyed the consensus of 1789 and led directly to the fall of the monarchy, civil war and the Terror.
