Jacobin Cavalrymen

The Jacobin clubs contributed significantly to the war effort in the year of the Terror. One of their most ambitious, voluntary undertakings was to raise a force of Jacobin cavalrymen. The club of Saint-Denis, although not the first to suggest this, popularized the idea in a nationally circulated address of 23 October 1793. The Revolutionary Government in Paris, while refusing to sanction purely "Jacobin" squadrons as Saint-Denis requested, did encourage the clubs to furnish cavalrymen for regular units. The result was that many hundreds of clubs launched recruitment drives. This campaign demonstrated the limitations of volunteerism. The clubs encountered such enormous problems in collecting money and in finding horses, men, arms, and equipment that they provided nowhere near the seventeen thousand men envisioned by Saint-Denis. Nonetheless, many "Jacobin" cavalrymen were eventually integrated into the army, and the campaign itself was a testament to the patriotic spirit that helped turn the tide in 1793-94.