Reign of Terror

"The Terror" redirects here. For other uses, see Terror (disambiguation).

This article is about the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. For other uses, see Reign of Terror (disambiguation).

Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre

File:Saint just.jpg

Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just

The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 27 July 1794), also known as the The Terror (French: la Terreur) was a period of violence that occurred fifty months after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of the revolution." Estimates vary widely as to how many were killed, with numbers ranging from 20,000 to 40,000; in many cases, records were not kept, or if they were, they are considered likely to be inaccurate. The guillotine ("National Razor") became the symbol of a string of executions: Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins Philippe Égalité and Madame Roland, as well as many others, such as "the father of modern chemistry" Antoine Lavoisier, lost their lives under its blade.

During 1794, the revolutionary government of France was threatened by internal enemies, conspirators, and foreign monarchies. Within France the revolution was opposed by the former French nobility, which had lost its inherited privileges. The Roman Catholic Church was generally against the Revolution, which had turned the clergy into employees of the state and required they take an oath of loyalty to the nation (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). In addition, the First French Republic was engaged in a series of French Revolutionary Wars with neighboring powers. European monarchies wanted to stifle the democratic and republican ideals that might threaten their own stability.

The extension of civil war and the advance of foreign armies on national territory produced a political crisis, and increased the rivalry between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins; the latter were eventually grouped in the parliamentary faction called the Mountain, and had the support of the Parisian population. The French government established the Committee of Public Safety, which took its final form on 6 September 1793 and was ultimately dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, in order to suppress internal counter-revolutionary activities and raise additional French military force. Through the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror's leaders exercised broad dictatorial powers and used them to instigate mass executions and political purges. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period called "la Grande Terreur" (The Great Terror), and ended in the "Thermidorian Reaction," or coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), in which several leaders of the Reign of Terror were executed, including Louis de Saint-Just and Robespierre.

The Terror

1819 Caricature by English caricaturist George Cruikshank. Titled "The Radical's Arms", it depicts the infamous guillotine. "No God! No Religion! No King! No Constitution!" is written in the republican banner.

The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

— Maximilien Robespierre, 1794

On 7 June 1793 Paris sections — encouraged by the enragés ("enraged ones") Jacques Roux and Jacques Hébert — took over the Convention, calling for administrative and political purges, a low fixed price for bread, and a limitation of the electoral franchise to sans-culottes alone. With the backing of the National Guard, they convinced the Convention to arrest 31 Girondin leaders, including Jacques Pierre Brissot. Following these arrests, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety on 10 June, installing the revolutionary dictatorship. On 13 July the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat — a Jacobin leader and journalist known for his bloodthirsty rhetoric — by Charlotte Corday, a Girondin, resulted in further increase of Jacobin political influence. Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July Maximillien Robespierre, self-styled as "the Incorruptible", made his entrance, quickly becoming the most influential member of the Committee as it moved to take radical measures against the Revolution's domestic and foreign enemies.

Meanwhile, on 24 June the Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France, the French Constitution of 1793. It was ratified by public referendum, but never put into force; like other laws, it was indefinitely suspended by the decree of October that the government of France would be "revolutionary until the peace". The eventual constitution under the Directory was quite different.

Facing local revolts, foreign invasions and riots in both the East and West of the country, the most urgent government business was the war. On 17 August the Convention voted for general conscription, the levée en masse, which mobilized all citizens to serve as soldiers or suppliers in the war effort. On 5 September the Convention institutionalized The Terror: systematic and lethal repression of perceived enemies within the country.

On 25 December 1793 Robespierre stated:

The goal of the constitutional government is to conserve the Republic; the aim of the revolutionary government is to found it... The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death... These notions would be enough to explain the origin and the nature of laws that we call revolutionary ... If the revolutionary government must be more active in its march and more free in his movements than an ordinary government, is it for that less fair and legitimate? No; it is supported by the most holy of all laws: the Salvation of the People.

On 5 February 1794 he stated, more succinctly:

La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible. ("The Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.")

The result was policy through which the state used violent repression to crush resistance to the government. Under control of the effectively dictatorial Committee, the Convention quickly enacted more legislation. On 9 September the Convention established sans-culottes paramilitary forces, the revolutionary armies, to force farmers to surrender grain demanded by the government. On 17 September the Law of Suspects was passed, which authorized the charging of counter-revolutionaries with vaguely defined crimes against liberty. On 29 September the Convention extended price-fixing from grain and bread to other essential goods, and also fixed wages. The guillotine became the symbol of a string of executions: Louis XVI had already been guillotined before the start of the terror; Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade. The Revolutionary Tribunal summarily condemned thousands of people to death by the guillotine, while mobs beat other victims to death. Sometimes people died for their political opinions or actions, but many for little reason beyond mere suspicion, or because some others had a stake in getting rid of them. Most of the victims received an unceremonious trip to the guillotine in an open wooden cart (the tumbrel). Loaded onto these carts, the victims would proceed through throngs of jeering men and women.

The victims of the Reign of Terror totaled approximately 50,000. Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 18 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 4 percent middle class, and 72 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported minimal crimes. Of these social groupings, the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church suffered proportionately the greatest loss.

Another anti-clerical uprising was made possible by the installment of the Revolutionary Calendar on 24 October. Against Robespierre's concepts of Deism and Virtue, Hébert's (and Chaumette's) atheist movement initiated a religious campaign in order to dechristianize society. The program of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included the deportation of clergy and the condemnation of many of them to death, the closing of churches, the institution of revolutionary and civic cults, the large scale destruction of religious monuments, the outlawing of public and private worship and religious education, forced marriages of the clergy and forced abjurement of their priesthood. The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight. The climax was reached with the celebration of the goddess "Reason" in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November. Because dissent was now regarded as counterrevolutionary, extremist enragés such as Hébert and moderate Montagnard indulgents such as Danton were guillotined in the Spring of 1794. On 7 June Robespierre, who had previously condemned the Cult of Reason, advocated a new state religion and recommended that the Convention acknowledge the existence of God. On the next day, the worship of the deistic Supreme Being was inaugurated as an official aspect of the Revolution. Compared with Hébert's somewhat popular festivals, this austere new religion of Virtue was received with signs of hostility by the Parisian public.

The end

The execution of Robespierre.

The repression brought thousands of suspects before the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, whose work was expedited by the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794). As a result of Robespierre's insistence on associating Terror with Virtue, his efforts to make the republic a morally united patriotic community became equated with the endless bloodshed. Finally, after 26 June's decisive military victory over Austria at the Battle of Fleurus, Robespierre was overthrown by a conspiracy of certain members of the Convention on 9 Thermidor (27 July).

The fall of Robespierre was brought about by a combination of those who wanted more power for the Committee of Public Safety, and a more radical policy than he was willing to allow, with the moderates who opposed the Revolutionary Government altogether. They had, between them, made the Law of 22 Prairial one of the charges against him, and after his fall, advocating Terror would mean adopting the policy of a convicted enemy of the Republic, endangering the advocate's own head. Before his execution, Robespierre tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide by shooting himself, but the bullet merely shattered his jaw, and Robespierre was gullotined the next day.

The reign of the standing Committee of Public Safety was ended. New members were appointed the day after Robespierre's execution, and term limits were imposed (a quarter of the committee retired every three months); its powers were reduced piece by piece. This was not an entirely or immediately conservative period; no government of the Republic envisaged a Restoration, and Marat was reburied in the Pantheon in September.

See also

• Bals des victimes

• Great Fear

Further reading

Secondary sources

• Andress, David (2006). The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-27341-3.
• Beik, William (2005). "The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration: Review Article". Past and Present (188): 195–224. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

• Kerr, Wilfred Brenton (1985). Reign of Terror, 1793-1794. London: Porcupine Press. ISBN 0-87991-631-1.

• Moore, Lucy (2006). Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0007206011.

• Steel, Mark (2003). Vive La Revolution. London: Scribner. ISBN 0743208064.
  • Reviewed by Adam Thorpe in The Guardian, 23 December 2006.

• Palmer, R. R. (2005). Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12187-7.

• Jordan, David P. (1985). The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York: Free Press. pp. 150–164. ISBN 0-02-916530-X.

• Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens – A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 678–847. ISBN 0-394-55948-7.

• Scott, Otto (1974). Robespierre, The Fool as Revolutionary – Inside the French Revolution. Windsor, New York: The Reformer Library. ISBN 9-781887-690058.

• Loomis, Stanley (1964). Paris in the Terror. New York: Dorset Press. ISBN 0-88029-401-9.

• Hibbert, Christopher (1981). The Days of the French Revolution. New York: Quill-William Morrow. ISBN 9-780688-169787.

Treatment in fiction

• Georg Büchner, Danton's Death
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• Victor Hugo, Quatrevingt-treize
• Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety
• Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel and sequels
• Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case and Thermidor
• David Weber, On Basilisk Station and other Honorverse novels
• G.A. Henty, "In the reign of terror"
• Alexandre Dumas, père, The Chevalier Of Maison Rouge
• Anatole France, "Les dieux ont soif" (The Gods are A-thirst)
• Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche, The Trampling of the Lilies, The Marquis of Carabas
• Honoré de Balzac, An Episode Under the Terror
• Tom Connery, "A Shred of Honor"
• Neil Gaiman, "Thermidor"
• Sandra Gulland, "Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B."

Treatment in film

• Andrzej Wajda, Danton (1983)
• Robert Enrico and Richard T. Heffron, La Révolution française, part 2 (1989)

skinner

Badass

Treatment in music

• Voltaire, "The Headless Waltz", from Almost Human
• Poulenc, Dialogues of the Carmelites

External links

• The Terror from In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)