But equality was in some ways even more problematic than liberty to apply as a principle. Jacobin morality took as one of its most significant starting-points the absolute difference between men and women that had allegedly been dangerously blurred in the effete society of the Court and the salons. Women were thus actively purged from the body-politic, most dramatically in late autumn 1793, when a series of executions of leading female figures accompanied measures to prohibit even the most informal female political participation. When the urban population resorted to riot in pursuit of provisions, this was clear evidence, to Jacobin eyes, of aristocratic influence. The rural population suffered even more harshly from Jacobin incomprehension.
Fraternity is the last, and most problematic, of the triad.
In aspiring to fraternity, the revolutionaries were looking away from the question of how people should behave or what they should possess, and veering towards essential questions of what they should be. Thus fraternity, because it demanded a change in being, a basic change in the relation between self and society, was the Revolution's fatal flaw. Rousseau's dream of remaking citizens was deeply buried at the heart of the Revolution, and the fundamental impracticality of that aim was to unleash a terror that threatened, and indeed brought down, much of the edifice its architects sought to build. In addressing the agenda of Jacobin republicanism under these three headings, we have, however, only begun to scratch the surface of its historical specificity. The evolution of Jacobin republicanism was the consequence of multiple, overlapping and often contradictory political, social and cultural processes.