Reign of Terror

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This article is about of the French Revolution. For other uses, see Reign of Terror (disambiguation).
For other uses of terror, see Terror; Great Fear .

The Reign of Terror (5 September 1793 – 28 July 1794) or simply The Terror (French: la Terreur) is a period fifteen months after the onset of the French Revolution when struggles between rival factions led to mutual radicalization. This led to violence and mass executions of enemies of the revolution.

The Reign of Terror started on 5 September 1793. The repression accelerated in June and July 1794, a period called la Grande Terreur (The Great Terror), which ended in the coup of 9 Thermidor Year II (27 July 1794), in which several key leaders of the Reign of Terror were executed, including Saint-Just and Robespierre. The Terror took the lives of about 40,000 French men and women.

In the Summer of 1794, France was threatened by internal enemies, conspirators and by foreign European monarchies fearing that the terror 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 respective regimes' stability. Their armies were pressing on the border of France, leading the new Republic into a series of wars against its monarchist neighbors.

Foreign powers 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 infuriated Paris. Louis XVI 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 required 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.

Members of the Catholic clergy and the former nobility entered into conspiracies, often invoking foreign military intervention. In the western region known as the Vendée, priests and former nobles led an insurrection, which began in spring 1793 and was supported by Great Britain. The pacification of the region was so brutal that some historians claim the actions of the revolutionaries constitute genocide[1] and crimes against humanity.[2] 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.

Contents

[edit] The Terror

1819 Caricature by Briton 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.
1819 Caricature by Briton 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.

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.[3] 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.[4]

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 and foreign invasions 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. ("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.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] The enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 made all suspected priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight.[7] 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.[8] 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.

[edit] The End

The execution of Robespierre.
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 had been 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.

The reign of the standing Committee of Public Safety was ended. New members were appointed the day after Robespierre's death, 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, although he had been more extreme than Robespierre. But politicians united in opposing the Jacobins, and the period has become known as the Thermidorian Reaction.[9]

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

[edit] 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 (August 2005). "The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration: Review Article". Past and Present (188): 195-224. 
  • Scott, Otto (1974). Robespierre, The Fool as Revolutionary – Inside the French Revolution. Windsor, New York: The Reformer Library. ISBN 9-781887-690058. 
  • Hibbert, Christopher (1981). The Days of the French Revolution. New York: Quill-William Morrow. ISBN 9-780688-169787. 

[edit] Treatment in fiction

[edit] Treatment in film

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

[edit] Treatment in television

[edit] Treatment in music

[edit] References

  1. ^ Secher, Reynald. A French Genocide: The Vendee. University of Notre Dame Press, (2003). ISBN 0268028656
  2. ^ Scurr, Ruth (2006). Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. Metropolitan Books. p. 282 ISBN 0805079874
  3. ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-07-15). Bastille Day and the French Revolution, Part I:The Ancien Régime and the Storming of the Bastille. La Nueva Cuba. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  4. ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-07-14). Bastille Day and the French Revolution, Part II: Maximilien Robespierre --- The Incorruptible. La Nueva Cuba. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  5. ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-11-21). Reinventing Radicals: Girondins vs. Jacobins in the French Revolution (A Book Review) Part II. La Nueva Cuba. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  6. ^ French Revolution. History.com. The History Channel. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  7. ^ a b Latreille, A. "French Revolution". New Catholic Encyclopedia (Second Ed. 2003) 5. Thomson-Gale. 972–973. ISBN 0-7876-4004-2. 
  8. ^ Faria, Miguel (2004-11-18). Reinventing Radicals – Girondins vs. Jacobins in the French Revolution (A Book Review) Part I. La Nueva Cuba. Retrieved on 2007-10-24.
  9. ^ Palmer, ch. XV

[edit] External links