Political clubs during the French Revolution [ Politics & Society / Clubs & Societies ]
… twenty-four livre membership fee while another charged only six livres. 8 Jacobins may have spoken the language of ‘equality’, but they did not abandon class in politically organising during the early years of the Revolution. 7 . … of being an ‘enemies of the people’. In a vain effort to prevent divisions and power struggles, the clubs called for equality, moral virtue and political unanimity – in short, a ‘general will’, as Jean- Jacques Rousseau had conceptualised it in his On the Social Contract of 1762. But this only made matters worse since any appearance of inequality, corruption or dissention was perceived as undermining the general will, prompting the search for culprits. …
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