Revolt of Lyon against the National Convention

The revolt of Lyon against the National Convention was a counter-revolutionary movement in the city of Lyon. It involved a revolt against the revolutionary government led primarily by the Jacobin party in the city against the upper class, breaking out in June 1793 and ending in December of the same year.

In 1789 Lyon was the only city in France other than Paris with a population above 100,000. The city was a regional focus for banking, commerce and manufacturing. In terms of employment its leading industry was silk weaving, which directly supported a third of the population. The silk industry in 1789 was in crisis, reflecting the wider economic crisis afflicting France at that time. The city was visited by the keen eyed English documentary writer Arthur Young in December of that year: he estimated that 20,000 people were living from charity and starving.

Tax riots broke out in June 1789 and again in July 1790. Citizens hoped that the Estates-General of 1789 would cancel the taxation privileges of the city's merchant oligarchs whereby the burden of taxation fell on those least able to pay, by means of the octroi, a tax on basic necessities. However, city elections returned a local government that retained the octroi, triggering a new riot in the city. Continuing mutual intransigence over the taxation issue led to fresh riots accompanied by the ransacking of several of the houses belonging to Lyon's richest citizens along with a continuation of the taxation on necessities.

These social conflicts bound together the interests of the old royalist elite under the leadership of with those of the revolutionary patriots surrounding the local industrialist turned politician Jean-Marie Roland. Lower down the social scale, small-scale employers were opposed to taxation that increased living costs of employees whose salaries could therefore not be further cut, and the affected employees thereby felt closer affinity with their bosses and with the manufacturing interest in the city than with the desperate plight of the large numbers of unemployed.

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