The wartime committee that ran revolutionary France and then devoured its own
Created in April 1793 to defend a young republic besieged by foreign armies and internal revolt, the Committee of Public Safety swelled into France's real government. It mobilised the nation for war and drove the Terror, then turned on rival revolutionaries before the tide turned against Maximilien Robespierre himself.
France in 1793 felt surrounded. The First Coalition of European monarchies was at war with the republic, royalist rebels had risen in the Vendée, and many believed foreign agents were plotting from inside. The Girondin Maximin Isnard proposed a nine-member committee, backed by Georges Danton, who wanted it to wield the Revolutionary Tribunal as a weapon. Following a motion by Bertrand Barère, the National Convention created it on 6 April 1793, and for a time it was nicknamed the Danton Committee.
Its composition changed on 10 July 1793, when Danton was left out, and Robespierre joined on 27 July. From then on, working with the Committee of General Security, it directed the war and chose generals, named judges and juries for the Revolutionary Tribunal, fed armies and civilians, and supervised the bureaucracy. It carried out the harshest measures of the period: the mass conscription of 23 August 1793, the Law of Suspects in September, and price controls under the General Maximum. The Law of 14 Frimaire, on 4 December 1793, wrote its sweeping authority into law, and the Convention formally handed it executive power that month. Robespierre was its most famous member but held no special rank within it.
The committee then moved against factions on both flanks. Camille Desmoulins launched his newspaper Le Vieux Cordelier in December 1793 with official blessing, aiming at the ultra-radical Hébertists, but soon compared the committees to tyrants of ancient Rome. The Hébertists were executed in March 1794; Danton, Desmoulins and their ally Hérault de Séchelles followed on 5 April.
Opinion in the Convention eventually swung against Robespierre, who was executed in July 1794. During the Thermidorian Reaction that followed, the committee's power faded, and it vanished on the same day as the Convention itself.
Source: Committee of Public Safety
