It is curious that a revolutionary and republican political group took its name from some religious. In France, since the Middle Ages, Dominican friars were colloquially called Jacobins (Jacobins) after the convent of this Order founded in Paris at the beginning of the 13th century on Rue Saint-Jacques. When the Breton Club – a group of deputies from Brittany elected to participate in the Estates General of 1789 – began to use another Parisian Dominican convent, that of rue Saint-Honoré, as a meeting place, they were ironically given the name Jacobins or Club of the Jacobins, which they ended up officially adopting.
The Jacobins were republicans and advocates of universal suffrage, popular sovereignty, and the indivisibility of the nation. In the latter they were opposed by the so-called Girondins, a political group that defended a federalist conception of the State and whose name was due to the fact that its deputies came mainly from the Gironde department. For this reason, Jacobinism in France has remained rather synonymous with a territorially centralist ideology and, throughout the 19th century, it was the source of inspiration for the republican parties that promoted the Second and Third Republics.
But, more generically, the term is associated with revolutionary and radical leftism. This meaning derives from the political action of the most extreme wing of the Jacobins during the French Revolution and, in particular, in the years of the Terror. Robespierre was the leader of this faction, which also included Danton, Marat, Desmoulins and Saint-Just. However, it is a simplification of his ideology. The democracy advocated by the Jacobins was a direct heir to the model proposed in the eighteenth century by Rousseau: sovereignty resided in the people and not in a leader or governing body. He was the creator of the concept of “citizenship”.