Jacobin (politics)
- This page describes the political term "Jacobin." For discussion of the political organization of the French Revolution era, see Jacobin. Jacobinism is unrelated to Jacobitism or the English Jacobean period.
A Jacobin (French pronunciation: [ʒakɔbɛ̃]) is someone who supports a centralized Republic, with power concentrated at the federal level in contemporary usage. At its inception during the French Revolution, the term was popularly applied to all supporters of revolutionary opinions. Specifically, it was used to describe members of the Jacobin Club, a revolutionary, far-left political movement that had been the most famous political club of the French Revolution.[1] So called from the Dominican convent where they originally met, in the Rue Saint-Jacques (Latin: Jacobus) in Paris.
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[edit] United Kingdom
In England, the word was popularized in George Canning's paper, The Anti-Jacobin, which criticized the English Radicals, of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The English who supported the French Revolution during its early stages (or even throughout) were early known as Jacobins. These included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and others prior to their disillusionment with the outbreak of the Reign of Terror. Others, such as William Hazlitt and Thomas Paine, remained idealistic about the Revolution. Much detail on English Jacobinism can be found in E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. Welsh Jacobins include William Jones, a radical patriot who was a keen disciple of Voltaire. Rather than preaching revolution, Jones believed that an exodus from Wales was required and that a new Welsh colony should be founded in the United States.[2]
The Anti-Jacobin was planned by Canning when he was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He secured the collaboration of George Ellis, John Hookham Frere, William Gifford, and some others. William Gifford was appointed working editor. The first number appeared on 20 November 1797, with a notice that "the publication would be continued every Monday during the sitting of Parliament". A volume of the best pieces, entitled The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, was published in 1800. It is almost impossible to apportion accurately the various pieces to their respective authors, though more than one attempt has been made to do so. When it finished in 1798, John Gifford began The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political and Literary Censor, which ran until 1821.
[edit] Austria
In the correspondence of Metternich and other leaders of the repressive policies that followed the second fall of Napoleon in 1815, Jacobin is the term commonly applied to anyone with liberal tendencies, such as the emperor Alexander I of Russia.
[edit] United States
Early Federalist-leaning American newspapers during the French Revolution referred to the Democratic-Republican party as the "Jacobin Party". The most notable examples are the Gazette of the United States, published in Philadelphia, and the Delaware and Eastern Shore Advertiser, published in Wilmington, during the elections of 1798.
In modern American politics, the term Jacobin is often used to describe extremists of any party who demand ideological purity. For instance, in the lead-up to the 1964 Republican National Convention, the press referred to supporters of the insurgent Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater as "Cactus Jacobins" in their effort to unseat the moderate East Coast branch of the party (see Rockefeller Republican).[3] Goldwater had written in his seminal The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) that "Throughout history, true Conservatism has been at war equally with autocrats and with 'democratic' Jacobins."[4]
[edit] Tea Party
The term was employed in 2009-2010, in reference to the advent of the Tea Party movement. For example, Eve Fairbanks described right-wing opponents of moderate Republican Congressman Wayne Gilchrest as "Jacobin conservatives" in The New Republic.[5] In the May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books, Columbia professor Mark Lilla analyzed five recent books dealing with American political party discontent in a review titled, "The Tea Party Jacobins".[6] In 2010 a radical American publication, Jacobin (magazine), was founded.
[edit] Allegorical usage
The conventionalized scrawny, French revolutionary sans-culottes Jacobin, was developed from about 1790 by British satirical artists James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank. It was commonly contrasted with the stolid stocky conservative and well-meaning John Bull, dressed like an English country squire. C. L. R. James also used the term to refer to revolutionaries during the Haitian Revolution in his book The Black Jacobins.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Tony Judt. Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981. New York, New York, USA; London, England, UK: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. 108.
- ^ Davies, John; Jenkins, Nigel; Menna, Baines et al., eds. (2008). The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. p. 434. ISBN 978-0-7083-1953-6.
- ^ Donaldson, Gary (2003). Liberalism's Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. pp. 174. ISBN 07656111.
- ^ Goldwater, Barry M. (1960). The Conscience of a Conservative. Shepherdsville, KY: Victor Publishing Company. p. 12.
- ^ Fairbanks, Eve (5 November 2008). "Unsafe At Any District". The New Republic (Canwest). http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=56a3ea96-037a-45a3-9885-4558580577f9. Retrieved 24 October 2008.
- ^ "The Tea Party Jacobins", Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010, p.53
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
