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Despite the split between Brissotins (or ‘Girondins’) and Montagnards in the Convention, briefly discussed, divisions do not concern all policy: this chapter considers Roland's daily work as Interior minister, for the republic in autumn 1792. It takes two case studies in particular : subsistence and food supplies, and the reorganization of the Louvre and the National Library. Exploring the administration involved suggests that ministerial workload and implementation of decrees has been underestimated historically. In particular, the Interior ministry carries huge responsibility for dealings with the provinces on a range of issues.

This chapter examines the controversial role of the so-called bureau d’esprit public at the ministry. Did it really exist? If so, what did it do? Who was involved? What role did it play in the deepening conflict between the Gironde and the Mountain? Were ministry funds used for one-sided propaganda in the provinces, as some claimed at the time, and historians have assumed? Surviving documents and accounts are discussed, as is the increasing hostility in certain quarters to Roland. The Louvet-Robespierre confrontation in November is seen as a key turning-point, and the minister's clumsiness in the affair of the armoire de fer, the iron safe, although helping incriminate the king, as a further bone of contention.

The Rolands are among the few casualties of the unsuccessful journee of 31 May. With increasing conflict in the Convention, and growing Parisian militancy, calls are made for the proscription of the Girondin deputies. The 31 May events are coordinated by relative outsiders: a hostile crowd surrounds the Convention, but disperses. An arrest warrant from the ‘revolutionary committee’ is delivered to Roland. He refuses to recognise it and his wife embarks on a doomed mission to petition the Convention. In confused circumstances, Roland escapes while his wife returns home. In the early hours, she is arrested herself and taken to the Abbaye prison – imagining that this is a mistake and that she will be released shortly.

The forced proscription of the Girondin deputies, 2 June, drastically changes the situation. With provincial risings against the Convention, virtual civil war breaks out. Roland remains in hiding, Mme Roland in prison, and their doomed fortunes over the summer are described. The couple's sympathies are officially assumed for the Lyon and Normandy uprisings. Mme Roland's prison letters and memoirs are discussed, as is the role of the couple's allies and visitors. Mme Roland's incarceration at Saint Pélagie, after a false liberation, is described, as is her emotional estrangement from her husband, while defending his record. Summoned as a witness to the Girondins’ trial, she is not called, learns in prison of their execution on 31 October, and is taken to the Conciergerie herself the same day.

This chapter makes four arguments. First, between 1789 and 1793 revolutionaries followed pre-revolutionary habits of terror speech. Specifically, they repeatedly spoke or wrote in praise of the terror of the laws, frequently expressed the wish to impose terror on their military enemies (including domestic rebels), and praised generals as “the terror of [their] enemies.” Second, the military discourse of terror gained strength as France waged war on an increasingly formidable array of foes and left the idea of the terror of the laws in the background, though it was never fully discarded. Third, terror speech was not a monopoly of the Left. It was the common property of Montagnards, Girondins, and even monarchists. Indeed, its ecumenical character was a large part of its appeal. Fourth, terror speech was therapeutic. Revolutionaries imputed terror to their enemies as a means of reducing their own terror. The ecumenical character of terror speech and its therapeutic benefits, combined with longstanding positive emotional connotations associated with the word “terror,” help to explain why the Montagnards called their cherished political platform la terreur.

In this account of Colson and his neighborhood from the fall of 1791 through the early summer of 1793, the emphasis is on his slow, wavering evolution toward an increasingly radical position. Of particular importance as signs of Colson’s evolution were his changing attitudes toward, on the one hand, the Catholic Church and the clergy and, on the other, King Louis XVI. Though he had always practiced orthodox Catholicism before 1789, Colson came to support the Revolutionary reorganization of the church and the clergy embodied in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. And though under the Old Regime he had always supported the king, he gradually turned against him after Louis’s attempted flight in 1791 and, above all, after war broke out between France and Austria in April 1792. Though he readily agreed with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, he would have preferred the imprisonment or exile of the king rather than his execution. Nevertheless, in 1793 he came strongly to support Robespierre and his faction of the Mountain in their struggle against the Girondins.

As Danton’s secretary and an activist in Paris, Alexandre Rousselin was baptized in Revolutionary violence during the September Massacres. With the establishment of the Republic, the hopes and fears of militants increasingly saw violence as justified to protect the Revolution. Rousselin emerged as a spokesperson for the popular movement when it demanded the arrest of a political faction known as the Girondins on 31 May 1793. This action helped him become an influential journalist and bureaucrat as an ad hoc system of governmental Terror was created. As part of that process, Rousselin was sent eastward to Champagne by the Committee of Public Safety in the fall of 1793. First in Provins and then in Troyes, Rousselin deployed novel instruments of popular pressure so widespread in Paris against recalcitrant populations that did not feel the same urgency. He became a terrorist for what he thought were the best of reasons.

This chapter reveals how contests over commercial regulations ultimately prompted the National Convention to abolish women’s political clubs. At the outset of the Terror in 1793, the Convention passed a series of price controls called the Maximum. While legislating the controls, regulation-promoting Montagnards sparred with free market-defending Girondins over the political duties of buyers and sellers. Simultaneously, marketplace fights broke out between the Dames des Halles and the leading women’s club called the Société des Citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires. The Dames, whose retail profits the Maximum initially outlawed, repeatedly brawled with the Citoyennes républicaines, who supported price limits to advantage consumers and sans-culottes. The Montagnard deputies seized the violence among women to silence the Citoyennes républicaines who criticized their attempts to accommodate merchant interests. Screening their factional attack, the deputies argued that irrational women had no place in politics and banned all female political assemblies. This chapter argues that the ban, long seen as a verdict on gendered citizenship, primarily emerged from disagreements over defining economic citizenship via commercial roles.