프랑스혁명기 리옹반란과 혁명정부의 학살

Abstract

This article aims to reexamine the meanings of the French Revolution through the analysis of the Lyon Revolt and the cruel massacre by the revolutionary government in May 1793. Was it a reactionary and anti-revolutionary mouvement perpetrated by the bourgeois and the royalists of the French second city when the revolutionary dynamics were being transferred from the bourgeoisie to the sans-culottes? Was it a resistance for saving the liberty from the Parisian Jacobins’ tyranny? Or was it a mouvement for saving the parliamentary ‘law’ from the popular ‘justice’? Who were responsible for the Lyon Revolt and the massacre? Was the Terreur the inevitable measure to save the country from the external and internal wars? Or was it no more than the explosions of the furies and the vengeances? When the Revolution broke out in 1789, the lyonese bourgeois didn’t want to revolutionize Lyon though they accepted the Parisian revolutionary cause. But as the lyonese Jacobins led by Chalier took the power of the city in late 1792 and took the radical policy of the class antagonism, the lyonese bourgeois revolted and got rid of them in May 1793 with the help of the popular sections who were suffering from the infringement of their traditional autonomy by their former allies. For this reason, the Lyon Revolt can be considered to be an anti-Jacobin mouvement rather than a social class struggle. It was natural that the Nation Convention couldn’t approve the Lyon Revolt. After the military attack and capture of the city in October 1793, the National Convention ordered that Lyon shouldn’t be existent. While the People’s representative Couthon didn’t follow faithfully the order of the destruction and the massacre, Collot d’Herbois and Fouché, his successors, were faithful. They carried out the order to the letter, which resulted in the cruel execution of about 2,000 citizens. The Committee of Public Safety’s response was the “Terreur”. It was no other than the illegal violence wielded by the state. It is certain that the Terreur was the inevitable measure to win the internal and external wars. Nevertheless, it is also certain that the Lyon massacre was a frantic social vengeance exceeding a normal state punishment. Though the massacre was carried out by the People’s Representatives, the Committee of Public Safety cannot escape the final responsibility for the savage act. Those who participated in the revolt supported the French Revolution in 1789. The Lyon Revolt was not the royalist anti-Revolution eager to return to the Ancient Regime. To see it as the anti-Revolution is to follow naively the interpretation in justification of the policy of Terreur of the Jacobins. It cannot be denied that the Lyon Revolt was a civil resistance for saving the liberty, the law, the representative system and the property in opposition to the equality, the people’ justice and the people’s direct democracy dreamed of by the Jacobins and the Sans-culottes.