Information about Reign Of Terror

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

The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) or simply The Terror (French: la Terreur) was a period of about 10 months during the French Revolution when struggles between rival factions led to mutual radicalization which took on a violent character with mass executions by the guillotine. It is generally associated with the figures of Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton and is popularly represented as an archetype of revolutionary violence.

The Terror itself started on 5 September 1793. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period named la Grande Terreur (The Great Terror) and lasted until the executions following the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), in which several key leaders of the Reign of Terror were themselves executed, including Saint-Just and Robespierre. The Terror took the lives of between 18,500 to 40,000 people (estimates vary widely, due to the difference between historical records and statistical estimates). In the single month before it ended, 1,900 executions took place.

While some consider modern tyrannies to be the legacy of the Reign of Terror ^[1], others argue that this view overlooks the French Revolution's influence in the ascendency of representative democracy and constitutionalism ^[2] and assert that totalitarianism is marked by a strong state whereas in the Terror the bloodshed was caused by various competing factions radicalizing each other.^[3]

Background

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In the Summer of 1793, the French Revolution was threatened by both internal enemies and conspirators, and by foreign European monarchies fearing that it would spread. Almost all European governments in that era were based on monarchy rather than the popular sovereignty asserted by the revolutionary French. Foreign powers wanted to stifle the democratic and republican ideas, which they feared would pose a threat to their own respective regimes’ stability. Their armies were pressing on the border of France, leading the new Republic into a series of wars against its monarchist neighbours. Foreign powers had already threatened the French population with retaliation if they did not free King Louis XVI and reinstate him as a monarch. The Prussian Duke of Brunswick threatened to "pilfer" Paris if the Parisians dared to touch the royal family, which only infuriated Paris. Louis XVI himself was suspected of conspiring with foreign powers who wished to invade France and restore absolute monarchy.

The former French nobility, having lost its inherited privileges, had a stake in the failure of the Revolution. The Roman Catholic Church as well was generally against the Revolution, which (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy) had turned the clergy into employees of the state and had required that they take an oath of loyalty to the nation. About half of the clergy, mainly in western France, refused the oath, making themselves known as refractory priests or non-jurors.

of the Catholic clergy and the former nobility entered into conspiracies, often invoking foreign military intervention. In the western region known as the ce 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 Terror

On 2 June 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.^[4] Georges Danton, the leader of the August 1792 uprising against the King, was removed from the Committee. On 27 July 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.^[5]

Meanwhile, on 24 June the Convention adopted the first republican constitution of France, variously referred to as the French Constitution of 1793 or Constitution of the Year I. It was ratified by public referendum, but normal legal processes were quickly suspended.

Facing local revolts and foreign invasions in both the East and West of the country, the most urgent government business was the war. On August 17, 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 September 5, 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: Martin Guerre!(Martin Guerre; "safety/welfare/or salvation of the people").^[6]

He would later state, more succinctly:

La terreur n'est autre chose que la justice prompte, sévère, inflexible. ("Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.") — Robespierre (17 pluviôse an II / 5 February 1794)

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; Queen Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Philippe Égalité despite his vote for the death of the King, Madame Roland and many others lost their lives under its blade.^[7] 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 40,000. Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 70 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported crimes.^[8] 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 dechristianisation 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.^[9] The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight.^[9] 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.[1] 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 repression also brought thousands of suspects before the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal, whose work was expedited by the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794) which had led to the Terror. 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 (July 27). The Robespierrists and most members of the Commune were guillotined on 28 July. This led to the Thermidorian Reaction, which was characterized by a much lesser known White Terror. This reaction killed hundreds of Jacobins. This continued intermittently for some years afterward in the form of unchecked violence by gangs of Muscadins as well as rigged trials by the authorities.

Legacy

The Terror has been often presented as a highly centralized government prefiguring 20th century totalitarian regimes, for example by Shelia Fitzpatrick.^[10] This interpretation has, however, been contested: French historian Jean-Clément Martin underscored the "absence of a strong state" from Spring 1793 to Summer 1794 and the fact that the state at the time was actually riven by factions ^[3] — while totalitarianism is, to the contrary, characterized by a very powerful state.

According to J.-C. Martin, the Committee of Public Safety, created in April 1793 and usually considered the executive power of the Terror, did not control much, at least until March 1794. It was opposed by rival state institutions, such as the Committee of General Security, which controlled the police, and the Paris Commune, which held military power after August 10, 1792 and was linked to the sans-culottes (the poorer working classes of Paris — literally "without knee-breeches", the fashionable trousers of the upper classes), who themselves controlled the Ministry of War. Rather than the implementation of a strong state's policies, the Terror was the result of the struggle between these various competing powers who radicalized each other.^[3]

Furthermore, some scholars assert that to present the Terror as a prefiguration of totalitarianism does not take into account the French Revolution's influence in the ascendency of representative democracy and constitutionalism.^[12]

German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky and other authors trace origin of the Communist tyranny to the "Reign of Terror" of the French Revolution ^{[13] [14]}.

Treatment in fiction

• Georg Büchner, Danton's Death
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
• Neil Gaiman, "Thermidor" (story in the Sandman comic book series)
• 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

Treatment in film

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

Treatment in television

• Doctor Who: "The Reign of Terror" (1964)
• BBC series 1999–2000 The Scarlet Pimpernel, based on novels and play by Baroness Orczy

Treatment in music

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

References

Further reading

• Andress, David The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0-374-27341-3; paperback, ISBN 0-374-53073-4)
• Beik, William. "The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration: Review Article", Past and Present, no. 188 (Aug. 2005), pp. 195–224.
• Kerr, Wilfred Brenton. Reign of Terror, 1793–1794. London: Porcupine Press, 1985 (hardcover, ISBN 0-87991-631-1).
• Moore, Lucy. Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. London: HarperCollins, 2006 (hardcover, ISBN 0007206011).
• Steel, Mark. "Vive La Revolution". London: Scribner, 2003 (paperback new edn., ISBN 0743208064).
• Reviewed by Adam Thorpe in The Guardian, December 23, 2006
• Palmer, R. R. Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005 (paperback, ISBN 0-691-12187-7)
• Jordan, David P. The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York, Free Press, 1985,(hardcover; ISBN 0-02-916530-X) pp. 150-164.
• Schama, Simon. Citizens - A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1989,(hardcover; ISBN 0-394-55948-7) pp. 714-716. See also pp. 678-847.
• Scott, Otto. Robespierre, The Fool as Revolutionary - Inside the French Revolution. Windsor, NY, The Reformer Library, 1974 (softcover; ISBN 9-781887-690058)
• Loomis, Stanley. Paris in the Terror. New York, NY, Dorset Press, 1964 (hardcover; ISBN 0-88029-401-9). The dramatic events surrounding the reign of terror and the fall of Robespierre are vividly described in this book.
• Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. New York, Quill-William Morrow, 1981 (softcover: ISBN 9-780688-169787) , pp. 271-304.

See Also

• Bals des victimes

External links

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