Representations of the Republic at War

Although historians have tended to focus upon the battles of Valmy (20 September 1792) and Wattignies, (15-16 October 1793) as the decisive moments in the defence of republican France, contemporary politicians, journalists, poets, playwrights, and artists instead celebrated the sieges of Lille (29 September - 8 October 1792) and Toulon (27 August - 19 December 1793). Their representations of these two sieges provide a valuable insight into the way the war was perceived in the revolutionary imagination and into the links between war and terror in revolutionary discourse. Both sieges, despite their differences, gave revolutionary publicists the opportunity to celebrate the myth of the nation-in-arms. While the realities of incompetent leadership and ill-disciplined, poorly equipped troops could not be denied, the myth of republican invincibility could be sustained by dramatizing the exploits of the volunteers and civilians who, regardless of age and gender, rallied to the defence of the Republic. Such heroism was contrasted with the brutality and cowardice of an enemy who depended upon French treason for his success. By insisting that the enemy had put himself beyond the pale of humanity, revolutionary propaganda justified a ruthless conduct of the war and a merciless repression of the foreign enemy's internal collaborators. Recent scholarship has undermined the interpretation of the Terror as a practical necessity of patriotic defence; it has been shown that even the revolutionaries’ own justifications of terrorist measures placed little emphasis upon the demands of the war. Nevertheless, in their interpretations of the sieges of Lille and Toulon, revolutionary publicists sanctioned the use of terror as an essential instrument in compelling citizens to choose the path of heroism over that of treason, thereby depriving the enemy of his only hope of victory. The sieges of Lille and Toulon figured so prominently in the revolutionary imagination because they illustrated so well the idea that no citizen was exempt from making that choice

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