GIACOBBI. - The club of the G. was, among the societies and political groups that arose during the French Revolution, one of the most important and exerted a decisive influence through its actions in Parliament and on public opinion in shaping the course of the Revolution itself. Even before 17 June 1789 (the establishment of the National Assembly in Versailles), among the Breton deputies of the clergy and the Third Estate in May, it initially took the name of the Breton club. This committee, originally regional in scope, soon became a center of attraction for other deputies as well, and after the Assembly's transfer to Paris in October, it rented the refectory of the Dominican convent, known as the Jacobins, in the rue St-Honoré, and became first the Société des Amis de la Constitution and then the Société des Jacobins. Once it lost its characteristic of being essentially a society composed of Assembly members, the G. club counted among its adherents not only politicians but also merchants, artists, journalists—all people eager to participate and influence, albeit indirectly, the implementation of the new revolutionary principles.
During the monarchy, the G. were loyal supporters of the Bourbons. They were not yet republicans but merely staunch supporters of the Constitution. Confident in the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under Louis XVI, they were not opposed to the king; but when in 1792 they realized that such a program was unfeasible, they abandoned the platform of the monarchical Constitution and, after decreeing the death of the sovereign on the guillotine, became advocates of the most intransigent revolutionary stance.
The influence of the G. club grew immeasurably: even the Convention, considered all-powerful, in essence did nothing but conform to the wishes of this society. The Terror and Robespierre’s dictatorship, marked by the violent persecution of the clergy loyal to Rome and of Catholics—characterizing the bloodiest period of the Revolution—were the consequence of the political action carried out by the G. in Paris and throughout France (there were nearly 2,500 Jacobin societies in the various French provinces) in favor of a vigorous repression of any activity or thought not deemed orthodoxly revolutionary.
After the arrest and execution of Robespierre, the G. club was dissolved, and an attempt at reconstitution made in 1799 was harshly suppressed by Fouché, the Minister of Police and a former G.