Massacre at the Champ de Mars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in the French Revolution

The massacre exposed the widely differing ways in which post-Revolutionary Parisians construed the word "patriotism", and why the great Revolutionary goal of political unanimity was so elusive.

On 17 July 1791 the revolutionary National Guard of Paris opened fire on a crowd of protesters: citizens believing themselves patriots trying to save France from the reinstatement of a traitor king. To the National Guard and theirpolitical superiors the protesters were the dregs of the people, brigand...